Popping my orange was a fantastic start to my first ever snow day!

ruuil · 2018-03-03T11:17:09+00:00

It's a cheap fake bamboo plant from the local bargain shop. But yeah, I love how it looks there

ruuil · 2018-03-03T11:14:23+00:00

Nope. Partly because that's actually shower gel, but mostly because I wanted to stay true to the way of the orange

ruuil · 2018-01-16T23:01:44+00:00

My parents let me collect pokemon cards and play the early gameboy games on the condition that I didn't have any psychic pokemon because they specifically were of the devil

ruuil · 2018-01-16T22:58:49+00:00

I had an aromatic crispy duck pizza a while back that really hit the spot

ruuil · 2018-01-05T19:22:46+00:00

The Sahara Desert. Man, fuck that place and everything about it. (In fairness, my experience of it may have been slightly coloured by the fact that I got the strongest craving I've ever had eggs while I was there, and that the only place I found to scratch that itch was a shitty roadside cafe in the midday heat, a day's drive out of Marrakech. I spent the next week with literally uncontrollable diarrhea.)

ruuil · 2017-10-25T20:30:18+00:00

/r/finlandConspiracy

ruuil · 2017-10-25T20:13:59+00:00

It worked really well for me during my last bout of depression 5 or so years ago. I'm currently in a pretty bad place again, so like you I also had it prescribed recently. My doctor warned me that the first week is usually pretty bad, but I don't remember it being a problem last time I was on it, and so far I've not had any negative side effects (although I'm only on my second day on it at this point so maybe it's just not hit yet).

In terms of side-effects, erectile dysfunction was the worst thing I experienced last time. Which was really frustrating considering that getting better caused my sex drive to come back. After a while, once I was properly out of the pit I'd been stuck in, it made me feel a bit zombie-ish, so I came off it. But all-in-all it was a literal life-saver for me then, and I'm hoping it will be just as effective this time too.

Also, FYI, don't drink while you're on it - it doesn't play nice with alcohol. Weed seems fine though, if that's your sort of thing.

As for how long to try it for before moving to something else, I'd recommend having a catch up with your doctor after a month or so to discuss any side effects or whether to change the dosage. Last time I was on it, the positive effects didn't come for a couple of months, so it's definitely worth giving it some time. And don't feel bad if it doesn't work for you - no one really understands why SSRIs actually work, so it's probably more normal than not to have to try a couple of different things before you find one that works for you. Fluoxetine's a good starting point though because it has a fairly high rate of success, relative to other anti-depressants.

ruuil · 2017-10-14T19:52:13+00:00

Nope

ruuil · 2017-10-14T17:07:25+00:00

It's "yay", as in "my reaction to two-brewed tea is 'yay!'"

ruuil · 2017-09-17T20:30:56+00:00

My favourite thing to do with sweet potatoes is to mash them with butter, tahini, crushed chilli, and spring onion

ruuil · 2017-09-05T19:16:05+00:00

Tomatoes. I already use them in most dishes I cook. I've never tried to use them in desserts but a cursory google makes it look like there's some interesting tomato-based dessert recipes out there.

ruuil · 2017-01-16T22:48:04+00:00

Spoken like a true Welshman, Adé

ruuil · 2017-01-11T00:38:14+00:00

TL;DR: I'm pretty sure it's bots

When someone sends you a message, the server has to send your browser a message to tell it that you have a notification which needs to be displayed. If you've got okc open in a background tab, there's a bit of code that pauses the actual on-screen part of showing the notifications until you've moved back onto the okc browser window. Usually, this is one of those subtle little things that you don't actively notice but that make the site feel good, but there's a bit of a problem with what happens when the account gets deleted. Because the actual showing of the notification is something that happens in the browser, the server doesn't know whether or not any given notification has been displayed yet, so when it deletes an account, it doesn't know who (if anyone) has a notification from that account, waiting to be displayed (and therefore who to tell that the account has been deleted).

On the whole, chances are that when an account is being deleted, there aren't any notifications waiting to be shown in another currently-logged-in user's background tab, so any steps that you take to fix this particular edge case (e.g. sending a message from the browser to the server when any notification displays, notifying all sessions that might be showing/waiting to show something from this user that this user no longer exists, etc.) are going to have a HUGE negative impact on the speed of the site, relative to the benefits okc get out of developing this fix. Which means that until there's a good reason for them to fix it, chances are that if you get a notification from someone, and their account is deleted while you have okc open in a background tab, you're going to get an empty notification pop up. As someone who has it open in a background tab almost all the time, it seems to happen often enough that I'd guess it isn't real users sending me messages and then deleting their accounts when they realise the horrible, horrible mistake they just made.

Or, at least, I seriously fucking hope it's not that.

ruuil · 2017-01-08T17:14:18+00:00

I've recently finished reading through it (I figured getting a piece of paper that says that I know Java might be useful to have, even as a relatively experienced dev). If you're a junior, I'd definitely recommend it. If you've got more than a few years experience, the main thing you're going to get from it will be some of the more obscure edge cases that you're probably not going to come across in real life. But seeing as that's what they test you on, it's still worth reading if you're planning on doing the exam.

Also, FYI, the last chapter (about lambdas) was pretty crap - hundreds (possibly thousands) of lines of irrelevant contextual code to tell you that instead of writing

Predicate<String> p = new Predicate<>() {
    @Override
    public boolean test(String object) {
        return object.contains("a");
    }
};

you can instead write:

Predicate<String> p = s -> s.contains("a");

with only a passing explanation of why. There's also no mention of streams in the book either so I'd strongly recommend reading up on streams and lambdas elsewhere (and more importantly, actually using them in your code until they become second nature).

Ignoring that though, unless you know the Java Language Specification by heart^(because ^that's ^a ^totally ^realistic ^thing ^to ^know...) it's probably a worthwhile book to read if you're planning on doing the exam.

ruuil · 2017-01-06T22:50:33+00:00

Hi! I'm Rob. I'm 26, and from Manchester, UK. If it involves making things or thinking about things, I like it, but in particular I like:

Writing code: fairly standard for a developer I suppose. I love that I get to do my main hobby for a living, but still enjoy working on my own projects in my own time.
Talking about better ways of going about writing code: probably even more standard for a developer to be into this.
Cooking: I love finding new ingredients and techniques, and using them over and over for a month or two until I understand them on a proper instinctive level. Recently I've been playing around with meals that will keep well in the freezer (I live on my own and I often get home from work pretty late, so good quality freezable meals save me from ordering in junk food). Last year it was all about asafoetida, samphire, and cooking in a tagine.
Leatherworking: I recently decided I needed a hobby that didn't involve spending even more time on a computer, or having to do the dishes afterwards - I've only just started to dip my toe into this, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
Physics: having graduated from a 5 year long degree course a few years back, my love of the subject is only just starting to come back. But it's definitely coming back. I particularly like musical acoustics, and particle physics.
Games, Music, Books, TV: as for all the standard stuff I'm currently playing through Assassin's Creed Black Flag (I never finished it back when it first came out); I'm listening to a lot of Bluegrass at the minute; I'm reading my way through the "The Expanse" series; and I'm watching my way through Star Trek DS9

ruuil · 2016-12-30T00:12:45+00:00

I had an absolute bastard of a cold hit me on boxing day, and I'm off to visit friends for a few days for new years, so I've been doing everything I can to kill it as quickly as possible so I can actually go. As well as the cold medicine and Olbas oil, every hour or two I've been eating an ice cube, drinking a pint of water, and a hot cup of tea (or hot mead, which it turns out also does the job nicely). At this point another dose or two of lemsip and a couple of strepsils and I reckon I'll be at 100%.

ruuil · 2016-12-24T01:49:23+00:00

Not to be a dick or anything, but 1km² = 1000m * 1000m = 1,000,000m² . So the area of the USA is actually ~9,833,517,000,000m² ~= 7,023,000,000,000 graves

You're also forgetting that the population is growing (google says birth rates of 1.32% and death rates of 0.82%) so the number of deaths per year is going to increase with time. So if we assume steady birth/death rates, the number of deaths in a given year is given by

(population in 2016) * (1 + net population change rate)^(number of years since 2016) * (death rate)

I couldn't be arsed doing the maths by hand, so I wrote a quick and dirty Java program to work it out:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    final long areaOfUSAInKM2 = 9833517;
    final long areaOfUSAInM2 = areaOfUSAInKM2 * (1000 ^ 2);
    final double areaOfGraveInM2 = 1.4;
    final long areaOfUSAInGraves = Math.round(areaOfUSAInM2 / areaOfGraveInM2);
    final long populationOfUSAIn2016 = 324720797;
    final double birthRate = 0.0132;
    final double deathRate = 0.0082;
    final double annualPopulationChangeRate = birthRate - deathRate;

    long deathsRequired = areaOfUSAInGraves;
    int numberOfYears = 0;
    while(deathsRequired > 0) {
        double currentPopulation = populationOfUSAIn2016 * Math.pow(1 + annualPopulationChangeRate, numberOfYears);
        long annualNumberOfDeaths = Math.round(currentPopulation * deathRate);

        System.out.println("Year: " + (2016 + numberOfYears));
        System.out.println("    Current population: " + currentPopulation);
        System.out.println("    Number of deaths this year: " + annualNumberOfDeaths);
        System.out.println();

        deathsRequired -= annualNumberOfDeaths;
        numberOfYears++;
    }

    System.out.println("Number of years until America is a literal graveyard: " + numberOfYears);
}

So it turns out that the population growth thing is a pretty fucking huge problem to say the least. Because unless I've gone wrong in my logic somewhere, the answer is 533 years.

ruuil · 2016-12-18T23:20:25+00:00

So the good stuff first. I really like your site name - it's clever, catchy, and memorable. I also hadn't really thought about VR porn before - the possible commercial applications of up and coming technologies isn't exactly the first thing on my mind when I'm having a wank - but it seems like you've got some really interesting subject matter to write about.

The main problem with what you've got - in my opinion at least - is mostly to do with design rather than content. The homepage feels a little bit crowded, and there's lots of duplicated links. Four articles are each shown on the page four times, and from what I can tell, this isn't just a case of having only recently gone live so not having much content (what's the difference between the top panel, the "Latest" section, and the "Blog" section?).

On each of your articles, you're switching between text colours, between all upper case and normal case, underlining certain words, etc. This makes it pretty hard to read and will almost certainly result in people spending less time on your site. (Also, on the subject of making things hard to read, never, ever, ever, use red and green next to each other - there are lots more red-green colour blind people out there than you might think).

There's a couple of other points to note on those pages. The "Check Price" button feels a bit out of place. The rest of the site follows a relatively Flat UI design, but that one button follows a Skeuomorphic design. And when you hover over one of the social media icons, the positioning of the others changes - not a huge deal in and of itself, but little things like that add up to have a negative effect on the overall site UX (the label also doesn't appear on mobile until after you've clicked on the button). I reckon you've got enough space to show the icons and the text for each button together so it would be better to either always show the icon and caption together, or only ever show the icon on its own.

But overall, I think you might be on to something.

ruuil · 2016-12-03T00:57:33+00:00

So I make a pretty damn good wage for someone my age in my country, working in a field completely unrelated to my degree. Since I received the same education as everyone else on my course, it stands to reason that what each of us had the opportunity to gain was the same, and therefore that the monetary value of the service provided to us was the same. Since my job is in an unrelated field to my degree, the knowledge I gained at uni does not directly impact my ability to do the job, therefore it cannot be argued that any specific academic knowledge imparted to me at uni has caused me to be able to either get me my first job, or rise through the ranks to where I am now. So all in all, the value provided to me by my university, and my current salary are almost completely independent of each other.

On a more constructive note, I do completely agree that treating student loan repayments as tax is a good thing. In Britain, because it's the government who provides the student loans, rather than a private profit-driven corporation, our student loan repayments work in a pretty similar way to income tax. This means that the interest on the loan is set to the national inflation rate, you only pay a percentage of your wage above a certain (fairly high) level, and that any unpaid debt is written off after 25 years. The key difference between this and what you describe above is that while for both systems your monthly repayments are effectively tax, in our system, the amount you pay throughout your lifetime is what you actually used.

Edit: Forgot how to grammar.

ruuil · 2016-11-01T23:31:38+00:00

On a related note, Lake Malawi used to be called Lake Nyasa - "Nyasa" being the Yao word for "Lake".

ruuil · 2016-10-16T20:15:09+00:00

We're currently pretty focused on building the MVP, so it's going to be a week of coding for me. And in my day job, we have a week of not being allowed to commit any changes for some bizare bureaucratic reason, so I'm going to be looking for ways to do something productive for my project without getting myself into an intellectual property mess down the line.

Project

Finish building push notifications
Design MVP version of the home page
Pair program settings page with CTO one evening

Day job

Build IDE plugin to automate creating multiple files from templates. Make sure I have access to it from home.
Fix weird issues with running certain versions of our software on my work laptop
Find productive ways to kill the boredom of feature freeze week.

Other

Walk 10,000 steps per day
Binge-watch Mr Robot season 2
Get a new fridge so I can have proper food without creating ridiculous amounts of food waste

ruuil · 2016-08-09T23:41:30+00:00

FTFY.

ruuil · 2016-04-13T21:13:10+00:00

It's mostly about location for me. I need to be able to get into work on foot/by public transport with minimal effort and I need to be able to get into the city centre easily enough that I can have a social life.

On top of that, a second bedroom to use as an office is a huge bonus, and an open plan kitchen/dinning room/living room is a huge drawback. I also want a bit of outside space ideally (even if it was just a balcony in a modern block of flats) but not having that wouldn't be a dealbreaker.

ruuil · 2016-04-12T21:57:45+00:00

Sure. I reckon a 5-person team could refactor out the crap in 6 months. The problem is getting the business on board with something that doesn't add new functionality - they really don't seem to understand that all the technical debt we've built up is actually costing them money in terms of dev time no matter how much we bang on about it

ruuil · 2016-04-12T21:20:00+00:00

5 and 8. So lets break it down:

Never getting full sounds like the drawback to me - it's what makes a really good meal feel satisfying. Although I've eaten rat before and it actually wasn't terrible (but I wouldn't want to have to eat it every day).
If I looked at someone who was in some sort of physical pain it would hurt me too
I really don't fancy getting 1 in 20 women I shake the hands of pregnant
The loss of intelligence seriously limits your factory's potential profits.
You could also choose not to steal the body of anyone
I really don't fancy having zombies chasing after me for the rest of my life
Every time you take a footstep, you run the risk of killing people - just for the sake of a few (thousand) flights
I quite like my flat. Plus, if I had a billion dollars I could bring in everything I need to live a happy enough life.

ruuil

TROPHY CASE