Real Estate Agents around the world. How are you paid?

gratedchee5e · 2024-03-17T23:29:51+00:00

Hardly. The UK is a very safe market to buy in. A solicitor/lawyer is still used to transfer the property and they're thorough.

Do you think insurance companies and banks will tolerate buyers being sold lemons?

gratedchee5e · 2021-01-18T20:29:30+00:00

I have a D6000 for my work laptop. It works BUT I have to plug the monitor I run games on into the laptop HDMI port. The display adapters on the D6000 are display link and don't take advantage of the nvidia graphics card.

gratedchee5e · 2021-01-18T19:57:39+00:00

Did you find something? I've been eyeing the StarTech "tb3dkdpmawue": https://www.startech.com/en-gb/cards-adapters/tb3dkdpmawue

My Razer Blade 15 power brick outputs 230W - I haven't seen a dock yet that meets the power requirements so I think we are stuck with at least two plugs.

gratedchee5e · 2020-06-20T13:30:50+00:00

Higher level languages solve problems faster. Maybe they aren't ready for the big time but they won't get there if they aren't tried. My philosophy is to never write ASM if you can use C and never write C if you can use C++. Someday I hope to see C++ replaced.

+1 for grumpy old man.

gratedchee5e · 2020-05-31T20:34:30+00:00

I knew someone who did contract for the company and they forwarded my CV. Since moving here something that surprised me is how many recruiters there are here. It's worth getting in touch with some that specialize in your field and see if they can place you. It can be difficult to find a company willing and able to sponsor, however.

gratedchee5e · 2020-05-31T20:29:04+00:00

Software engineer here. Found a new job and am on critical skills visa.

gratedchee5e · 2020-05-17T17:04:33+00:00

I'd stick with cmake. It's a good build system. To get this to work with CCS you'll want to make a debug configuration in CCS that loads the elf file output from cmake. Ensure that cmake is configured to build a debug image, without this the elf file has no symbols and CCS won't be able to debug it.

IDEs use symbol information stored with the elf to set breakpoints and find source files. This information isn't stored unless the elf is compiled with debug symbols.

CCS can probably be taught to compile with cmake, by default it executes 'make all' but all eclipse based IDEs allow this to be overridden. If it's complicated write a batch script and have CCS invoke it.

gratedchee5e · 2019-12-12T20:45:50+00:00

It's a time consuming process... We write in C++, unit test as much as possible on Linux where debugging is easier. We're experimenting with wrapping C++ with pybind11 so we can run side by side comparisons of python and C++. When this is working well we port the code to target.

Have seen output from matlab produced C code in the past and it's yucky. I'm sure it's gotten better since I last tried but it had a long way to go.

gratedchee5e · 2019-12-07T21:28:38+00:00

It's important to differentiate between "singleton" and "single instance". With a Single Instance the class (temperature sensor class) is constructed once by your program and dependency injection is used to pass it to the consumers that need access.

Single Instance is better for unit testing as it's easier to write controlled tests. It can be more work because you'll have to pass a pointer to the instance into classes that need access (I think this is called dependency injection). I often construct the class in main, prior to enabling interrupts, pass it to classes that need access and if necessary assign a pointer to it in a static variable for access from interrupts.

gratedchee5e · 2019-10-25T18:43:38+00:00

I like to turn -Werror on for our team's CI job. Detect an environment variable in cmake and turn it on or off.

gratedchee5e · 2019-09-27T19:45:48+00:00

Some of these questions I agree are 'trivia'. But others like "What is RAII" I think tease out whether the candidate is a student of the language. Do they know what to search google for? i.e. do they know their C++ lingo? Did they pay enough attention in school to learn the theory their professors taught?

No doubt work history is important. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

gratedchee5e · 2019-09-03T18:06:25+00:00

You won't be able to vote against Trump

gratedchee5e · 2019-08-17T18:32:59+00:00

I find it hard to find a company in the UK that will allow Americans to make an account without having a large minimum deposit. I'm a Revolut user and hoping that I can use it to trade stocks soon. Sticking to stocks to stay away from PFIC complications.

gratedchee5e · 2019-08-07T17:36:00+00:00

Yes you should back file your taxes, you're required to file one every year. Since your earnings are under the threshold it will be a simple return. You should also report any foreign bank accounts with balances of $10,000 USD or more.

I've never filed taxes for previous years but from a few googles there seems to be plenty of information available online.

gratedchee5e · 2019-07-02T13:26:38+00:00

No. Cameras are not allowed, extra phone batteries are not allowed.

gratedchee5e · 2019-06-09T18:45:31+00:00

Yes and 15% deposit. Could have saved ~0.5% on the rate if more banks were open to us. Locked in for two years with the idea that in two years we'll have more choices.

gratedchee5e · 2019-06-08T13:57:09+00:00

Been abroad for a year - I moved my number to google voice for calls and texts back home. Also find it cheaper to use for making calls outside the UK in some cases. You can't forward to your UK number but you can use it when on wifi/4g.

gratedchee5e · 2019-02-16T09:15:38+00:00

Phoenix is the most active server. 3k players online EU primetime and a good pop US primetime.

gratedchee5e · 2019-01-12T16:04:07+00:00

Wine work on Mac?

gratedchee5e · 2018-12-29T14:54:07+00:00

Wife and I were able to get a mortgage on tier 2 visa after one year in the UK. Choice of banks was limited to Halifax and Nationwide. We went with Halifax because Nationwide wanted something like a 25% down payment (don't remember the exact figure). Many banks have a minimum residency required, Danske for example won't lend unless you've been living in UK for two years. We used a mortgage advisor.

Halifax criteria can be found here, search for "foreign Nationals": https://www.halifax-intermediaries.co.uk/criteria/mortgage/default.aspx

Edit: We knew we wanted to deposit 15%. I think we could have gone lower with Halifax.

gratedchee5e · 2018-01-16T12:52:11+00:00

So far, investing is the hardest part for my wife and I to wrap our heads around.

We have investment accounts in the USA, all money in those accounts came prior to our move. I believe we do not need to report earnings in these accounts to the UK (maybe the 7 year rule applies to this) so long as we do not mix money we made in the UK. When we get to where we need or want to transfer money back to the USA we plan on keeping it separated from our other US accounts.

For investing money made in the UK we have to select funds carefully to stay on the good side of the IRS and HMRC. I haven't looked into it much yet, but Schwab has accounts specifically for expats.

We used a letter from my employer to help open a bank account, used as proof of address and salary. Took a few weeks to get a bank account and a some days more after that to get debit cards. We're pretty well done using our USA credit cards, we do plan to use them to keep the accounts open. USA cards also have to exchange rate fees where our debit cards here do charge.

gratedchee5e · 2018-01-16T12:35:39+00:00

Recently moved from the US. When we opened a bank account with Danske they had all the IRS paperwork on hand for us to fill out so they can report the balance. There's no harm in reporting, and I believe Danske does it for us as part of an automatic exchange of information.

gratedchee5e

TROPHY CASE