Recent content by harborsparrow

Answers here might be restricted because this question raises issues of ethics. But I hope they will not be. This reminds me of telecom programmers on my team at AT&T 40 years ago who wanted to ignore the fact that an interrupt service routine architecture could miss critical data and lead to...

AI generated database code will prolly not be able to meet security requirements of some databases. Setting up security plans is quite tricky, especially where there is a legal requirement to be able to track and log who did every transaction and when. Also, when a database grows large and...

MS SQL uses TRY CATCH, but what to do if an error occurs depends on so many things. I would say Google it. You might also ask an AI chatbot for help coding that.

I will just say that in my experience the biggest hazard in translating numerical computations from one language to another may have to do with differences in how the two languages store and organize arrays internally. I don't know what Python does but there is a good chance it is different...

Because these are reals, depending on the relative size of input values, this computation might be subject to numerical overflow. So it might be helpful to insert some error handling in there.

When writing important things, I learned to use the European digit handwriting conventions: zeroes have a slash through them. ones consist of two lines (an upstroke and a downstroke, looks kind of like an inverted V). This makes the letter L distinguishable from digit 1, and the letter o...

I hope you will post here about what kind of thing you end up trying, and how it worked out. I too have a couple rooms that need more natural light, but because I've got neighbors living upstairs, it's impossible to install any kind of sun tunnel.

The 2.4 GHz band is used by all the smart home devices in the world (the so-called Internet of Things), so the congestion may be on the ISP end even if you don't even have a smart thermostat in your house.

On Windows, I always try to use an account which is an Administrator. Not having Admin access means you probably cannot install a new printer or new software. Most people I know would like the ability to add peripherals such as a scanner or printer to their computer; thus, most users should be...

The same thing happened to me once. I ended up having to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from scratch. It was Microsoft and Bitlocker. I don't think I ever consented to encrypt the drive but, apparently, it happened anyway. Thankfully, it only happened once and it was several years ago...

Has the wifi router hardware changed? I had the latest Verizon FIOS router, and certain bands of wifi (2.4 GHz, that is used by most smarthome devices) intermittently stopped working unless I rebooted the router. After trying to deal with Verizon, I finally turned the wifi off in Verizon's...

I think there ought to be a setting in Thunderbird whereby deleting a message locally also deletes it off the server. That should fix it.

The Content-Length header is mandatory for messages with entity bodies, unless the message is transported using chunked encoding. Some info on chunked encoding is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding

"Algorithms" might be too big a topic these days. Sorting? Bucket hashing? Machine learning? Database theory? Large language models? These are very, very different kinds of domains of knowledge, and I doubt one will find it all in any one book. Back in 1962, Donald Knuth wrote his...

Lol at the Google Bard performance joke. That said, as someone who worked in industry writing software for decades and also taught programmers in college for ten years, it is usually a mistake to ignore possible future performance constraints, because if you don't design for them out front...