Paul Daniels

81 git pushes since the main 5.3xxx. Hope I can get a day of rest before the next fire. Gemini helping, wouldn't have been able to do macOS deep signing & notarising without. Thanks to @ocornut too for ImGui, fantastic toolkit ( and SDL3 team ) pldaniels.com/flexbv5

@FUZxxl Just stick with C. I'm still 90% C but I willfully steal the STL helpers like std::string, vectors, maps, etc because honestly after 40 years of coding I'm sick to death of rewriting those fundamentals ( even when you have your own legacy 'special sauce' library ).

C++ is a terrible language and every time I have to work with C++ code I get sad. Would love to find a job doing performance programming in something else.

@_trish_xD With the way that pdfium is so easy to use and freely, I don't see too many other engines surviving long term other than for legacy reasons; though that's not the most ideal outcome, good to have a couple of choices, even muPDF is going to have to rethink some things.

it's honestly embarrassing that Chrome accidentally became the best PDF viewer while Adobe spent decades making Acrobat slower and more bloated

@GregorySchier You never know where it'll lead you or what XP's you'll pick up along the way.

Screw it, I'm building a Linux desktop environment from scratch. Everything feels like a taped-together pile of tools. I want a cohesive product experience. Am I crazy?

FlexBV 5.3xxx series is out. Whole new schematic viewer, deep signed & notarised macOS binaries, new licence management system. Done faster than I imagined because Gemini AI was like having all of StackOverflow and forums' knowledge without the egos.

I'm a convert. The time arrived for me to create a new schematic/pdf viewer and with Gemini I was able to get it done in about a day and a half complete with all my special requirements; additionally I've since refactored a lot of my build scripts and code to be cleaner/faster.

@ocornut Now I feel the urge to make use of this :)

Johan Goossens has rewritten Balázs Jákó's ImGuiColorTextEdit text editor widget (which has been unmaintained for years and had various forks) and made a newer version, with many fancy features: github.com/goossens/ImGui…

The pain of knowing that this gibberish rendering is due to the fault of someone who wrote an exporter without properly reading the spec (GenCAD 1.4) but you know users are going to blame *you* for the bad rendering. *Technically* I'm rendering it correct.

@TheGracia_here It’s zero because it’s an offset from the location of the memory block allocated for the data; always made more intrinsic sense to me rather than being for saving cpu cycles

@_trish_xD "Comprehensive C" by David Spuler. I realise in retrospect that it's not overly dissimilar to the classic "C Programming Language" but I found it more to my liking. Aside from that, APUE & UNP by Stevens

what's your favorite programming book and why?

@0x44_ @_trish_xD Indeed. A developer, yes, engineer, no

@_trish_xD "Software Engineer" is a meaningless title because there are literally no qualifications for it.

What's your unpopular opinion about software engineering?

Anyone got a high resolution flat scan/photo of the Macbook A3401 (M4 Pro 14") 820-03400 board so I can add the outline to the newly circulating CAD boardview? @ifixit @Taylor_iFixit ?

@joelteply @TheGracia_here There's a very broad grey zone where either option valid. C++ has nice things but C's relevance appears not meaninfully diminished because of C++'s presence or age. I imagine it's intentional that the ISO/IEC standard for C doesn't move much, being a bedrock for so much.

@pld73 @TheGracia_here C makes sense for a limited number of problems, such as drivers and university projects, whereas C++ is my go to for highly optimized and fast engines, larger architectures, and clean deterministic threading and memory. I don’t understand the advantages of C in this day and age

C/C++ tells me you learned both from the same tutorial page.

Unquestionably could be perfected more but for now I'm happy and it gets the job done (I already revised it after this state too :\ ). The biggest trick was the learning how to use the Part->Loft facility for the circle->rectangle transitions. #freecad

Done in FreeCAD, printed on an Ender3 v3 SE in PETG, using a HEPA filter and sits on top of an 8” extractor fan, does a great job with fumes. Exhausts through a carbon canister for extra gas absorption.

@_trish_xD And pointers themselves aren't that hard. I think what doesn't help is when some people post deliberately obfusicated compound statements that look like line noise just to seem like they're l33t; where's in reality with production code you'd likely have 5 statements.

C is NOT a hard language. Most people just don’t have the patience to learn pointers properly.

@valyala Of course, some of us willingly use elements of both languages mashed together to create the best of both worlds.

C and C++ are completely different programming languages. C has concise syntax. It can be learnt in one day, and a typical C code is easy to read. I like C. C++ has over-complicated syntax, which becomes more complex with every new C++ standard. I hate C++. Whenever I see "C/C++" phrase, I instantly understand that the author of this phrase doesn't know neither C nor C++.

Solid Sunday working effort doing "Retired manufacturing" as some people say. Microscope ring lights for Amscope stereoscopic/trinocular types. pldaniels.com/shop

Happy my account has been reinstated but as usual with these things there's no explanation of *why* it happened in the first place.

@Blizzard_Ent @battlenet @Blizzard_ANZ how does a 52yr old playing D2R 3~4 times with local chars end up getting their account blocked 3 days after their last game ( which they only played about 3 times )? Was it the playing via Lutris/Wine, the YTstreaming? So many questions.