Ask General Programming Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread

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rjmccall: Sep 7, 2007; no worries friend; Fun Shoe

I have heard people pronounce lib with a long I, but it�s very uncommon.

# ? Apr 4, 2024 18:08

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 06:45

Bruegels Fuckbooks: Sep 14, 2004; Now, listen - I know the two of you are very different from each other in a lot of ways, but you have to understand that as far as Grandpa's concerned, you're both pieces of shit! Yeah. I can prove it mathematically.

VagueRant posted:

Trying to write a Cron schedule expression that triggers on the last Sunday of March (at 00:50).

If I do:
50 00 25-31 3 SUN
it apparently treats the date range as an OR and therefore covers EVERY Sunday in March.

The pre-existing system this plugs into will only take a raw cron expression, I can't do anything fancy and dynamic that you could do in a terminal. Am I right in saying this is impossible?

yeah. usually you'd have access to the thing the cron job is running and have it do the check inside the script or whatever to see if it's really the last sunday.

# ? Apr 4, 2024 22:23

RPATDO_LAMD: Mar 22, 2013; 🐘🪠🍆

mystes posted:

For linux at least, I don't think I've ever heard anyone pronounce it any other way than rhyming with nib

If you go on youtube and search for libc, all the videos I opened before I got bored pronounced it like nib

I wouldn't be totally surprised if there are places or groups where people pronounce it differently though

one of my professors (a native Russian speaker) pronounced it as the first syllable of Library.

# ? Apr 4, 2024 23:14

DoctorTristan: Mar 11, 2006; I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave, like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?

It�s pronounced like the �i� in �linux�

# ? Apr 5, 2024 08:19

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

I'm case you're joking, that does have one officially correct pronunciation, using i as in Linus as pronounced by a Swedish-speaking Finn. He owns the trademark, and while he didn't name it, it is based on his name; he gets to dictate how it should sound.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 11:58

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

Computer viking posted:

I'm case you're joking, that does have one officially correct pronunciation, using i as in Linus as pronounced by a Swedish-speaking Finn. He owns the trademark, and while he didn't name it, it is based on his name; he gets to dictate how it should sound.

while I am sympathetic to that idea, the preceding discussion demonstrates that even though the common prefix "lib" is based on the word "library", most people take the view that it isn't pronounced as that relationship between words might suggest. So this isn't a dependable principle in general

# ? Apr 5, 2024 14:23

VagueRant: May 24, 2012

ShoulderDaemon posted:

This is the stupidest aspect of cron.

Per the manpage:

code:

Note: The day of a command's execution can be specified by two fields
� day of month, and day of week. If both fields are restricted (i.e.,
aren't *), the command will be run when either field matches the current
time. For example, �30 4 1,15 * 5� would cause a command to be run at
4:30 am on the 1st and 15th of each month, plus every Friday. One can,
however, achieve the desired result by adding a test to the command
(see the last example in EXAMPLE CRON FILE below).

EXAMPLE CRON FILE

#Execute early the next morning following the first
#Thursday of each month
57 2 * * 5 case $(date +d) in 0[2-8]) echo "After 1st Thursday"; esac

I have no idea why it works that way instead of being a logical and like every other field in a crontab. Everyone gets caught by this, it's never what people expect or want.

Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:

yeah. usually you'd have access to the thing the cron job is running and have it do the check inside the script or whatever to see if it's really the last sunday.

Thanks peeps. Kinda sucks, but at least I can confidently say no!

# ? Apr 5, 2024 16:10

Boris Galerkin: Dec 17, 2011; I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

Thanks for the anecdote on how y'all pronounce lib. I'll keep saying lib like gib in my head.

For the people who pronounce lib like the first syllable of library, how do you say "bin" as in /bin? I've always called it bin as in trash bin but now I'm thinking some people call it bin like the first syllable of binary? For the German speaker upthread I guess this would be "bein" as in bone.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 16:04

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Boris Galerkin posted:

Thanks for the anecdote on how y'all pronounce lib. I'll keep saying lib like gib in my head.

For the people who pronounce lib like the first syllable of library, how do you say "bin" as in /bin? I've always called it bin as in trash bin but now I'm thinking some people call it bin like the first syllable of binary? For the German speaker upthread I guess this would be "bein" as in bone.

no one calls it "bein". its "bin" as in garbage [ie, what you find in it]

# ? Apr 6, 2024 16:30

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Boris Galerkin posted:

Thanks for the anecdote on how y'all pronounce lib. I'll keep saying lib like gib in my head.

For the people who pronounce lib like the first syllable of library, how do you say "bin" as in /bin? I've always called it bin as in trash bin but now I'm thinking some people call it bin like the first syllable of binary? For the German speaker upthread I guess this would be "bein" as in bone.

Same kind of pronunciation as GIF.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 16:53

DoctorTristan: Mar 11, 2006; I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave, like this. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?

Computer viking posted:

I'm case you're joking, that does have one officially correct pronunciation, using i as in Linus as pronounced by a Swedish-speaking Finn. He owns the trademark, and while he didn't name it, it is based on his name; he gets to dictate how it should sound.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 19:30

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Volmarias posted:

Same kind of pronunciation as GIF.

soft g per specification

# ? Apr 6, 2024 20:07

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

leper khan posted:

soft g per specification

Uh there's no g in specification

# ? Apr 6, 2024 20:49

PhantomOfTheCopier: Aug 13, 2008; Pikabooze!

Ah always the most fun teaching Linux courses or pair debugging with people who spend their lives clicking little buttons with a mouse who need to do something from a shell: "Go to /etc"

# ? Apr 7, 2024 02:12

Computer viking: May 30, 2011; Now with less breakage.

PhantomOfTheCopier posted:

Ah always the most fun teaching Linux courses or pair debugging with people who spend their lives clicking little buttons with a mouse who need to do something from a shell: "Go to /etc"

One of the joys of working where I do is that while I have to do this, the people involved are usually smart, curious and motivated. It's kind of fun teaching people who actively want to learn. Even if we have to start at "what is a command line"

# ? Apr 7, 2024 02:33

Tacos Al Pastor: Jun 20, 2003

More of a documentation question: What is the process for generating system req's for an app? (minimum). Does anyone have experience with writing these?

# ? Apr 10, 2024 18:35

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Tacos Al Pastor posted:

More of a documentation question: What is the process for generating system req's for an app? (minimum). Does anyone have experience with writing these?

what is the lowest spec thing youve tested it with? what is its worst case resource usage?

# ? Apr 10, 2024 18:44

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Ask your testers what their machine specs are, and what performance issues they faced. Derive minimum requirements accordingly. Everyone knows that system requirements are bullshit to some extent, so you shouldn't feel like you need to get them "correct".

# ? Apr 10, 2024 19:05

nielsm: Jun 1, 2009

Of course if you have some hard requirements, do list those. Like if you need some certain GPU features to do anything at all, or you need a significant amount of disk space for working storage.

# ? Apr 10, 2024 20:05

Tacos Al Pastor: Jun 20, 2003

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Everyone knows that system requirements are bullshit to some extent, so you shouldn't feel like you need to get them "correct".

This is kind of how I feel about it too. Even a processor from 15 years ago can run a lot of applications.

leper khan posted:

what is the lowest spec thing youve tested it with? what is its worst case resource usage?

So yeah thats the thing. Having the lowest benchmarked item to test with. Im not even sure how to deduce that without having it in hand

# ? Apr 10, 2024 21:18

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Tacos Al Pastor posted:

This is kind of how I feel about it too. Even a processor from 15 years ago can run a lot of applications.

So yeah thats the thing. Having the lowest benchmarked item to test with. Im not even sure how to deduce that without having it in hand

the question isnt what is the lowest benchmark item that could run it. its what is the lowest benchmarked item _that has_

# ? Apr 10, 2024 21:24

TooMuchAbstraction: Oct 14, 2012; I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.; Fun Shoe

Basically, ask around for someone who has a really old, lovely laptop, and ask them to play your game and see what happens.

# ? Apr 10, 2024 21:49

Dr. Stab: Sep 12, 2010; 👨🏻‍⚕️🩺🔪🙀😱🙀

I play games below min spec all the time. Nobody gets it "correct." Even companies with tons of resources won't tell you what the lower bound for being capable of running the game is. They more go for the lowest spec at which they can guarantee a certain experience. And that can include things like "I can't support that hardware because I don't have access to it to test on it."

# ? Apr 10, 2024 22:06

RPATDO_LAMD: Mar 22, 2013; 🐘🪠🍆

games seem pretty dependent on specific hardware features from the GPU so they're hard to test for but for regular software couldn't you just run it in VMs with restricted cpu/ram to see how it goes?

# ? Apr 10, 2024 22:13

Dr. Fraiser Chain: May 18, 2004; Redlining my shit posting machine

Probably not the right place for this question, but I had a data set from possibly the early 90s. Does anyone recognize some of these extensions? How would you recommend opening these?

# ? Apr 11, 2024 02:54

TacoHavoc: Dec 31, 2007; It's taco-y and havoc-y...at the same time!

Dr. Fraiser Chain posted:

Probably not the right place for this question, but I had a data set from possibly the early 90s. Does anyone recognize some of these extensions? How would you recommend opening these?

I have seen .dta used for stata, depending what your data set is that may or may not make sense. .bak is usually a backup of some kind but I've seen it used by many different programs.

# ? Apr 11, 2024 03:02

Volguus: Mar 3, 2009

BAK used to (still does) stand for "backup". And from the screenshot they seem to be a backup of the other file with the same name, but different extension. DTA most likely stands for "data". What does it contain ... is application dependent. NDX most likely the same thing. You most likely need the application that created these (or a reader) to be able to see what's inside them.

For now I'd just open them up in a hex editor or just plain notepad to see if there are any strings in there that may make any sense.

# ? Apr 11, 2024 03:02

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

Dr. Fraiser Chain posted:

Probably not the right place for this question, but I had a data set from possibly the early 90s. Does anyone recognize some of these extensions? How would you recommend opening these?

Borland DataBase Toolbox (based on https://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1369943)

edit: looking at https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandturseToolbox1985_5104586/mode/2up, this seems like a Berkeley DB style key-value store, so you'd have to use or reverse-engineer the original program to interpret the data.

pseudorandom name fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Apr 11, 2024

# ? Apr 11, 2024 04:14

PhantomOfTheCopier: Aug 13, 2008; Pikabooze!

Seems like ndx would be the index associated with the data. https://fileinfo.com/extension/ndx

This matches with the lbl being a dbase file, though the .cal may still be readable with existing calendar tools. The ovr was likely Windows proprietary, maybe an SVG like label/drawing format.

Fortunately they are unlikely to be encrypted, possibly some minor compression, probably fairly easy to reverse engineer.

# ? Apr 12, 2024 00:03

Hammerite: Mar 9, 2007; And you don't remember what I said here, either, but it was pompous and stupid.; Jade Ear Joe

This is a picture from a blog post in which text that is italicized is adjacent to non-italicized text. Because of a flaw in how the text is rendered (I don't know whether it's the fault of software, web standards, the blog author, or whether the fault lies elsewhere) the ascender on the letter "d" at the end of the word "should" isn't visible; the word looks like "shoula". Is there a name for this phenomenon?

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# ? Apr 12, 2024 10:34

leper khan: Dec 28, 2010; Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Hammerite posted:

This is a picture from a blog post in which text that is italicized is adjacent to non-italicized text. Because of a flaw in how the text is rendered (I don't know whether it's the fault of software, web standards, the blog author, or whether the fault lies elsewhere) the ascender on the letter "d" at the end of the word "should" isn't visible; the word looks like "shoula". Is there a name for this phenomenon?

clipping?

# ? Apr 12, 2024 11:59

Volmarias: Dec 31, 2002; EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Yeah, this sounds like a pretty strange clipping error. Why is the entire italicized segment being rendered separately, rather than onto the canvas everything else would be using? I don't know if there's a term for this because it's a baffling decision, and one that should have been handled already.

# ? Apr 12, 2024 23:05

Jabor: Jul 16, 2010; #1 Loser at SpaceChem

Volmarias posted:

Yeah, this sounds like a pretty strange clipping error. Why is the entire italicized segment being rendered separately, rather than onto the canvas everything else would be using? I don't know if there's a term for this because it's a baffling decision, and one that should have been handled already.

Looks like the italics tag is overflow:hide, so anything inside it that goes outside the bounding box is getting clipped.

You can do very stupid things with CSS if you want to, and the browser will faithfully render that even when it's dumb.

# ? Apr 13, 2024 02:09

PhantomOfTheCopier: Aug 13, 2008; Pikabooze!

Typographically, "insufficient leading" (that being pronounced "led", as in Pb) or "excess kerning". Graphically it would translate to an improper/insufficient bounding box, because the (likely vector) ascender position has been miscomputed when the italics/slant variant is in use. Without additional data it's hard to say if it's clipping or overwriting by the subsequent character (though I'd tend to agree with the others that it's being clipped to its bounding box).

# ? Apr 13, 2024 06:18

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

This may be more appropriate for the data engineering thread, but what is the best solution to extract tables from pdf files using python? I'm looking at these reports, the tables in them are pretty simple and don't seem like they should be that hard to extract. It's not an image, it's text with formatting

https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/dfast-archive.htm

I've tried using pypdf, the built in linux pdftotext, tabula, camelot, none of them do it properly out of the box. Is there anything that does, or is this not really a solved problem? Obviously just copy pasting it would be easy, but I'm doing this out of curiosity

# ? Apr 17, 2024 19:53

KillHour: Oct 28, 2007

It's definitely not a solved problem in general because a lot of PDF tables are badly formed. Nested column headers like you have there can be particularly nasty, especially if every document is different. I've had the best luck with Parsr, but there's no magic easy button.

https://github.com/axa-group/Parsr

# ? Apr 17, 2024 19:59

mystes: May 31, 2006

icantfindaname posted:

This may be more appropriate for the data engineering thread, but what is the best solution to extract tables from pdf files using python? I'm looking at these reports, the tables in them are pretty simple and don't seem like they should be that hard to extract. It's not an image, it's text with formatting

https://www.federalreserve.gov/supervisionreg/dfast-archive.htm

I've tried using pypdf, the built in linux pdftotext, tabula, camelot, none of them do it properly out of the box. Is there anything that does, or is this not really a solved problem? Obviously just copy pasting it would be easy, but I'm doing this out of curiosity

Is that table not in the csv files also linked there?

# ? Apr 17, 2024 20:07

icantfindaname: Jul 1, 2008

mystes posted:

Is that table not in the csv files also linked there?

It is, but I�m trying to get it from the pdf directly as a challenge

# ? Apr 17, 2024 20:08

KillHour: Oct 28, 2007

icantfindaname posted:

It is, but I�m trying to get it from the pdf directly as a challenge

I do this for a living and PDFs are literally the worst. Every document will be different and it will always be a finicky pain in the rear end.

# ? Apr 17, 2024 20:11

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 06:45

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Feed it to ChatGPT-4-vision and have it OCR the content and render as a CSV?

# ? Apr 17, 2024 21:33

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