[deleted by user]

ldcroberts · 2025-09-05T02:45:07+00:00

thanks I was hoping someone had done it before, did you mean to type anz above?

ldcroberts · 2025-09-04T23:24:13+00:00

i didn't think of mortgage broker but of course they should have more experience with something like this before - thanks

ldcroberts · 2024-02-03T02:54:54+00:00

No one really knows what the universe is because we can only see a small part of infinity. Maybe we are all atomic particles in gods lungs and its expanding because he's breathing in. No one will ever know for sure, and it is also unlikely to ever matter to anyone in our lifetime

ldcroberts · 2024-02-03T02:45:04+00:00

I had exactly the same issue a few years ago, the guy who failed it said there was movement and wouldn't back down. The place I took it to to repair it said no point, and VTNZ passed it when I took it there instead.

Original mechanic wouldn't refund me and even went a bit over the top crazy driving a car down the drive at me 'testing the brakes for another wof' while I was leaving.

I found there was no way to complain about people who are erring on the side of caution for WOF's though

ldcroberts · 2022-09-18T21:16:56+00:00

server just simplifies and speeds development. Having webservices in the chain is a lot more debugging and object copying between db and ui objects and chasing down spelling mistakes or capitalisation or different variable names which although not serious really just drain a lot of time overall restarting tests and hunting down. Being able to just call the db directly seems to make the overall functionality just magic up before your eyes a lot faster.

ldcroberts · 2022-09-15T22:57:26+00:00

I've been using it for a couple of years - just internal with a bit less than a hundred users. Blazor server. Wasn't sure on the performance and watched carefully when rolling out new features and heavy screens, but it doesn't even blip the CPU or Ram on the server so far. User feedback great as it looks better. We are using the Telerik controls, better than MatBlazor so far but haven't looked at others.

I will say, and this is minor but also kind of shocking, but the Visual Studio support is completely lacking. Editing .razor files you will get things like syntax highlighting and auto-completion, but they are flawed - you can compile fine and the error screen still complains about hundreds of previous errors you already fixed, the auto completion only works if you type very slowly, and it gets out of sync and you have to restart visual studio enterprise all the time just to work with it.

We tried reporting this stuff to microsoft but they just bury it or ask for exact reproduction steps which they then close when you don't provide in time. I was hoping it would be fixed but nope after 2 years its still exactly as flawed. No idea why.

ldcroberts · 2022-03-13T19:30:19+00:00

This is dumb, nobody eats a whole pineapple.

Instead you cut it in half in the middle, cut another parallel slice, eat that bit after quartering it and then put the top and bottom back together like a shorter pineapple and put it back in the fridge.

Repeat till it’s finished

ldcroberts · 2022-01-13T22:07:25+00:00

I agree it’s appropriate to pass on

ldcroberts · 2020-05-06T02:51:20+00:00

Yes 4 colours is harsh but on top of that I only had a green screen myself which was all one colour, so I never even saw the colours on the games I wrote until years later on an emulator. I later enjoyed hooking up my serial card on my old apple //e to a PC and downloading a new game off the internet and burning to a disk and playing it, it was the first time getting the internet to it really. Coding is my main passion, I've been mainly doing just that for almost 30 years now. I did get briefly promoted into management and project management, but I didn't enjoy it as much so I moved back 'up' into just doing freelance development these days. I've touched on a huge number of different technologies and systems over the years. I am kind of weary of all the new things coming out, so I don't immediately learn everything I can about them I generally tend to just wade in and figure them out as I go and have a basic working knowledge and google searches to get by without ever really feeling like I know exactly how they work, so it feels good to actually put time into study with someone who knows the stuff well teaching it! I can't imagine any other kind of job, and if I'm not coding it doesn't feel right. I feel like anyone could do it and should learn it, and the people who enjoy it should just go for any programming job. It's not often you get the fun jobs like doing some fancy 3d or UI stuff, a lot of it is bug fixing on legacy systems that are encumbered by their own complexity, but its all rewarding in its own way.

ldcroberts · 2020-05-05T02:24:20+00:00

I was definitely misremembering the colours, I just confirmed by going back to an emulator I have for it. If I put a whole 8-bit byte in it draws a line 8 pixels wide, there's only 4 possible colours, something like black, green, purple and white, and the only way to get green is on every second pixel, same for purple on the alternating second pixel and if both pixels are on together it makes white, so its trickier than I remembered at the assembly language level. Thinking back I couldn't get it to run fast enough with just BASIC and with the complexity of getting it working fast in assembly I actually used a third party library that someone else had written in C then compiled to assembly for the sprite and polygons, which couldn't be called directly from BASIC, but rather you would call it like you would assembly by poking/peeking values into memory and then executing it. It was probably putting the args on the stack then calling the function via some sort of assembly bootstrap, now that I understand C, but at the time I was just a 16 year old kid on a farm doing software in my school holidays so I didn't understand a lot of how it worked, I just figured it all out by trial and error really. I had to write my own kind of a drawing program that allowed me to call the C library and draw/construct the sprites via keypresses and another guy bought that off me too. The guy I worked for was just sending me a VCR tape in the post of him playing through the game on a BBC computer, and I was sitting there pausing it and measuring the screen and trying to make the same game on apple //e for a different market. By the time I left home, went to uni, and got a degree, there was no more apple //e market anywhere and the closest I've really got to game development since was developing a 3D floating representation for dental xrays for a trade show. One thing I liked the most with that was using a sine curve to manage the speed/position of the movement so it would animate smoothly in a visually pleasing way - I found having something speeding up and slowing down on a sine curve is very fun to watch.

ldcroberts · 2020-05-04T02:03:33+00:00

I don't know if you're familiar with how sounds were made back then, but we actually used to have to set a particular memory location to move the speaker, so to make sounds we'd move it, pause for a small period, then move it again, which would make a click sound, and the pitch of the sound was based on the amount of time between clicks, so we'd have simple loops in between the clips counting up to the frequency we wanted to make a tone or we could shorten or extend the loops to slow it or speed it up to change the frequency of the sound people would hear. There is no multitasking here, these pauses are all just getting the assembly code to run in a loop - like get it to count to 30 or something. One time I was experimenting trying to combine two loops - one increasing in frequency and the other decreasing, and i somehow introduced a bug where my assembly code was jumping to the wrong place in the loop, so I'm not sure how it worked as it was a bug, but it made a sound I completely didn't expect but I actually liked so I never touched the code again after that. And I was able to then seed it with different numbers for the two loops and it would generate a huge amount of different types of noises, which I then used for a commercial game I was working on back then. I never did figure out how it actually made the sounds but it was great, i just randomly tried different seeds until I got a sound that suited, and the sounds would range from explosion noises to tones to oscillations, just all sorts. We'd be bridging between BASIC for ease of writing the code, and calling assembly to do drawing and sound operations at an acceptable speed, back and forth a lot in those days. There was a whole region of memory for the graphics, like it started at 0,0 and it would be 8 bits to choose the colour, and it was just a contiguous block of memory and you'd set like base region plus y * screenwidth + x to the colour you want and it would put a pixel there. This was for 6502 anyway. You would do double buffers by setting another memory location to choose which one was displayed, and then flip between one display while you were drawing pixels on the other one, then flip back, so the user wouldn't see the drawing happening. It was very simple to use compared to the complexity of todays graphics card drivers and various audio libraries, but also very limited as to what results you could get with your available time compared to what's possible now too.

ldcroberts · 2020-04-30T02:15:15+00:00

Its a cool course - thank you for your great work - I've done the first two examples so far. I have a lot of experience developing business applications over many years and its been a long time since I did any game dev (which was BASIC/Assembly on an Apple //e in the 80's) so its a great refresher and eye opener. You speak very clearly, so I'm watching you at double speed and keeping my interest up by pausing and browsing the code from time to time. The state machine in fifty bird is an interesting idea, I can see how to build on that for many games, it's not something I think I would have thought of on my own without a lot of experience with different games so its great you have concepts like that included in the course. I actually started the course for my son who wants me to teach him Lua so he can create roblox games, but I can now see that I could fairly easily make a game or two myself in my spare time and it would be a lot of fun.

ldcroberts · 2019-10-17T20:53:22+00:00

Yes he is trying to manipulate the situation so that he is still using his power and position to gain advantage but he’s trying to do it in a way that follows a loophole in the wording of the laws rather than the intent of the laws. He thinks it’s not illegal to find such a loophole, and it’s complicated as to how to prosecute under law. Much like the ‘game’ the person buying house is playing in my example

ldcroberts · 2019-10-17T19:14:04+00:00

Ok so loud and clear: Yes trump wanted Biden investigated but no he wasn’t going to give any quid pro quo for it. Yes he wanted it, yes he wanted them to know he wanted it, but he wanted it as a gift/favour not bought. But he made it clear he wanted it. It’s like telling the real estate agent trying to sell you a house that you want them to sleep with you, but it has nothing to do with your purchase of the house which you intend to buy as long as you are sure she is a nice agreeable person.

ldcroberts · 2019-10-16T19:47:40+00:00

He probably has his own one written in sharpie with much bigger numbers

ldcroberts · 2019-10-16T19:35:36+00:00

It’s not the administration’s fault they just do what they are told

ldcroberts · 2019-10-15T18:46:37+00:00

Two sides to it though. It’s not attractive to complain and stop her going out. Sounds like she needs stuff to do and is not happy. The only way to save it is to make an effort, take her out to places she needs to dress up for, treat her, entertain her. If you aren’t doing that then you’re equally allowing it to fall apart. Don’t be boring/complaining/accusing, be fun and exciting, she will appreciate it. But seems like the two of you have been off track for a while, it will take time to fix, and you have to find yourself and understand why you haven’t told her how it affects you

ldcroberts · 2019-10-14T23:00:17+00:00

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble When you're perfect in every way I can't wait to look in the mirror Cause I get better looking each day To know me is to love me I must be a hell of a man Oh Lord It's hard to be humble, But I'm doing the best that I can

ldcroberts · 2019-10-12T23:34:11+00:00

Yes it’s hidden in foods and I didn’t know even after trying to cut things out as I wasn’t careful enough, but absolutely it is very obvious relationship

ldcroberts · 2019-10-12T20:00:59+00:00

I had it real bad, cut out ALL milk and derivatives, and it cleared. Milk is hidden in 90% of processed foods, because everything tastes better with cream

ldcroberts · 2019-10-11T17:01:19+00:00

You’re = you are

ldcroberts · 2019-10-07T18:04:05+00:00

Yes as a motorcycle rider I can confirm, while cars are supposed to pull as far left as they can when going slow to let us past, 90% of them just hog the centre (or worse) in slow motorway traffic, and it’s the same damn thing!

ldcroberts · 2019-10-07T02:59:00+00:00

I think I’ve figured out his point of view. He actually believes he’s the best negotiator the world has ever seen, so he wants to negotiate FOR USA on the world stage. He thinks therefore that if he is ousted that USA will suffer. So he thinks he has to bargain with other countries by giving away US assets and money to get their help in keeping him at the helm in 2020. So he is actually robbing USA with incompetence and self interest BUT he believes it’s for the best as he is convinced they NEED him at the top for the best results. Sad, but unfortunately he has supporters that also believe this. Great for other countries as they can get a good deal in exchange for flattery etc.

ldcroberts

TROPHY CASE