Today I learned that Vinyl de Paris has shipped the 500 vinyl LPs I ordered of my First World War concept record. 👍

I started working on ten years ago, and ordered the vinyl pressing in August. It's been a long time coming.

I hope it's ok to link it here? If not, please forgive.

9 days later

TIL....
...that the United States (via NIST) has finally (from the start of this year) retired the "U.S. Survey Foot" as a unit of length, and will use the "international foot" instead for surveying, the way it already uses the "international foot" for everything else (defined as 0.3048 of a metre).

a month later

On 27 March I learned not to trust the C-Level types to have goodwill, or any understanding of IT....

You'd have thought at my age that was already quite obvious...

6 days later
12 days later

Life's throw a few variations of this lesson at me before. This one was a total surprise. Political firing.

    Elizabeth just wanted to see how you were all doing 😊

    Still maintaining an app that I believe is now the only thing still using PHP where I work (and trying to figure out if I'm going to retire this year 🤔).

      6 days later

      Unfortunately, not sure it's in the cards for me yet (you did just remind me my investment advisor called last week and I need to return her call).

      I do have a "someday" project that the recent life lesson might allow me some time to work on, though.

      Good to see you, @Elizabeth ! 😄

      dalecosp Sometimes the universe whispers in our ear and if we don't listen, it gives us a little shove. Looks like it's time to get on that pet project! Those are the most fun to work on anyway 😄 Great to see you all! 💖

        4 months later

        TIL (or forgot I knew?) that PHP will let you use array index notation with a function that returns an array, e.g.:

        $test = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]];
echo end($test)[1];
// outputs "6"

        NogDog $test = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]];
        echo end($test)[1];
        // outputs "6"

        You can do the same thing with a function that returns a function.

        function shorten_to(int $maxlength)
{
	return fn(string $str) => substr($str, 0, $maxlength);
}

echo shorten_to(14)("Remove the cap after engaging the safety latch.");

        And for that matter, an array element that contains a function: $ops['delete']($id).

        YIL that the destructuring operator ... can be used on Traversables, not just arrays (basically anything foreach can use, i.e. for which is_iterable returns true).

        function shuffles(int $length, array $elements)
{
    for($i = 0; $i < $length; ++$i) {
        shuffle($elements);
        yield $elements;
    }
}
$flattened = array_merge(...shuffles(5, ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']));

echo join($flattened);

            Elizabeth Believe it or not, I am working on that project (24 hours/week) ... the other 16 I'm sitting at a desk and earning some wages. So, a PT contract isn't a bad thing compared to $0/hour until next year; it will keep Mrs. Dale from feeling like I'm being worthless while she's at work 4 days/week.

            The pet project is pretty fun. Recently selected a domain name for it, and I have started the process of content production and enlisted a friend from LONG AGO to help with that in his "spare" time....

            It bears a question: given a ton of responsibilities, (e.g. you're the CEO, the programmer, the media producer, the marketing agent, and the janitor), does your preferred work style do each in turn for a few hours or a day, then on to the next task for a similar time period, or do you do one for a week or a month and then switch, for productivity's sake? Anyone have that kind of experience?

                13 days later

                NogDog - Nope... I'm hoping the old theory is correct.... AND that bots will gather that address and SPAM it.

                It's from a SPAMMER.

                  @Weedpacket I never moved the spam filter into production , but I'm happy to share my findings -- if I can just remember where I put everything. IIRC, I tested two versions. One implemented a Support Vector Machine, the other an Artificial Neural Network. They mostly achieved the same results. NOTE that the filter works solely by checking the presence of absence (0 or 1 )of certain words. Intuitively, I suspect this would make the filter vulnerable to gaming somehow. It might be worthwhile to add additional signals (e.g., a 0 or 1 if the post has a link to a remote website, or if the post links to certain top level domains). The key is to have a large corpus of ham/spam examples to train the filter. The challenge is that training a filter requires a lot of number crunching and it's tricky to get PHP to do fast matrix multiplication.