Hi everyone! Per admin recommendation I'm posting this in comp.

I would like to switch Staining The Timbre from a blogspot domain to its own. I can handle the paperwork and whatnot associated with the url change, but I would like to hire a web designer to spruce up the joint a bit. Right now I'm using a default theme provided by Blogspot and, while it serves its purpose, it makes the page look like it's run by a high schooler.

It should be a relatively basic project. I don't need anything for commerce set up, or anything I think of as "crazy". Just a very basic blog layout that looks professional on both desktop and mobile (the latter is a little lacking in particular right now). Archive links, Tags, ability to comment on posts, Contact Info, and one that preferably preserves the large-picture format the site currently has; that's about it, aside from being able to create the posts themselves.

If anyone is interested please send me a private message. This is very much still in the quoting phase, but I appreciate any assistance you all can provide me in getting an idea on cost.

Thanks in advance!

What is the programming language you enjoy the most, or otherwise define as your favourite? Why is that particular language your favourite?

Bonus: add just a little bit of code in it that you think exposes its beauty.

This is of course the age old debate, which on other sites has been known to quickly devolve (one of the Internet ‘holy wars’ of yore). Nonetheless, I am curious.

I personally use vim. Part of the reason is surely that it is just the first one of the two that I happened to use, and thus by the time I tried emacs I was used to vim. But more broadly, I enjoy using vim because once you get over the hump of ‘weird’ commands and modes, I feel that vim most closely emulates the feelings and thought process that you have when building something with your hands. You can pick up different tools, yank pieces out and rearrange them, turn the object around in your hands to see different parts, etc etc. Once you internalize the movement and editing you really start flying around. At that point the interface seems less like a barrier between you and the text and more like a way to ‘hold’ it.

Of course, people have different preferences.

I was asked this question in an interview and I said the downsides would be extra disk space used to store it and more disk writes from the database to maintain the index on updates. I asked a friend and he said the downsides are space used in memory to store the index as well as the fact that an index could take days to build on a large dataset.

What does everyone here think about this question?

I have been listening to "Darknet Diaries" and it's a great podcast, but I am looking for more. Maybe more technical.

Does anyone have any good recommendations? Thanks!

Edit: if you are like me, and learning about this stuff, here is an interesting and hilarious episode of mini-stories from Darknet Diaries: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/22/

In an effort to make these weekly, I present a new programming challenge.

The challenge this week is to compress some text using a prefix code. Prefix codes associate each letter with a given bit string, such that no encoded bitstring is the prefix of any other. These bit strings are then concatenated into one long integer which is separated into bytes for ease of reading. These bytes can be represented as hex values as well. The provided prefix encoding is as follows:

Challenge

Your program should accept a lowercase string (including the ~ character), and should output the formatted compressed bit string in binary and hex. Your final byte should be 0 padded so that it has 8 bits as required. For your convenience, here is the above table in a text file for easy read-in.

Example

Here is an example:

$> tildes ~comp
10010100 10010010 01011010 10111001 00000010 11000100 00110000 10100000
94 92 5A B9 02 C4 30 A0

Bonuses

1. Print the data compression ratio for a given compression, assuming the original input was encoded in 8 bit ASCII (one byte per character).
   2. Output the ASCII string corresponding to the encoded byte string in addition to the above outputs.
2. @onyxleopard points out that many bytes won't actually be valid ASCII. Instead, do as they suggested and treat each byte as an ordinal value and print it as if encoded as UTF-8.
3. An input prefixed by 'D' should be interpreted as an already compressed string using this encoding, and should be decompressed (by inverting the above procedure).

Previous Challenges (I am aware of prior existing ones, but it is hard to collect them as they were irregular. Thus I list last week's challenge as 'Week 1')
Week 1

Those of you who keep hundreds of tabs open: I'm curious how and why you use them. I'd hoard tabs in the past, but in a sad incident a browser (Firefox) restart caused the loss of all my 10s of open tabs that was accumulated over weeks long research about a topic, I decided to never trust tabs again. Now I'm making use of my bookmars toolbar, Org mode and Instapaper for most of the stuff having many tabs open was the method before. So, for me, tabs were for keeping stuff handy during research, read-it-later lists, and temporary bookmarks. What are the use cases for you?

Its been a while since we did one of these, which is a shame.

Create a program that takes is an input of the type: "d6 + 3" or "2d20 - 5", and return a valid roll.
The result should display both the actual rolls as well as the final result. The program should accept any valid roll of the type 'xdx'
Bonuses:

• Multiplication "d6 * 3"
• Division "d12 / 6"
• Polish notation "4d6 * (5d4 - 3)"

As a side note, it would be really cool if weekly programming challenges became a thing

When Edge died, I got worried about loosing competition to the Blink engine and as such, I went exploring other alternatives to realize.. there's not a whole lot, there's blink, gecko and webkit.

So with that, I decided to try epiphany - Gnome's web browser. It uses Webkit which is what Blink was forked from so it's not terribly different in theory but the years apart has made that more apparent. It's fairly elegant in my opinion and it lacks some features, sure.

Anyways, to get to what I wanted to do this week, well, I'd like to challenge you all to use it for a week, mostly for bug hunting purposes and possibly to throw ideas at the project. Worth mentioning, I'm not affiliated with the project, just a user.

So to make sure we're all on the same page, we'll use the development Epiphany flatpak, this way we can be sure that the problem is in the current codebase. So, to install it :

Let's install the gnome-nightly repos as per instructions here :

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-apps-nightly --from https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps-nightly.flatpakrepo

Then, let's install the development version by doing so :

flatpak install org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel

Then just launch it and have fun with it!

if you run into any bugs, look at the contribution guide here and report the bugs in the repo after checking that the bug is not already present of course!

I saw back in January that a lot of you were on Linux, I guess I should've expected that considering it's ~comp but I'm curious how the trend is going. But to spice things up a little bit more, tell us about you favourite programs, any hidden gems?

I personally run a fairly standard Fedora 30 install running gnome and some flatpaks. I'd say my favourite programs are

Gnome Builder :

Well, I've been trying to fight the electron uprising while still using a modern and open source IDE and well, I think it works great and looks pretty good too.

Dino.im (Using the Flatpak PR) :

It's light, supports XMPP and looks relatively modern, what more could you ask?

Firefox gnome theme :

It's not really a program and just really a skin for Firefox but I really like it. It integrates pretty neatly with the rest of the desktop. Can't wait for the Gnome 3.32 changes to come in though since it kinda clashes with the new theme.