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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • Surely they have to use stuff like mathcad or equivalent to be an engineer? I’ve never really used it but it can’t be that far off just doing the calculations in python. I think there’s “sagemath” too availabe for linux - i’m sure that’s not as good as mathcad - but aimed at the same thing i think - and i’m sure it will interoperate with python libraries and R and stuff like that.

    I know there are people who claim to be “good at excel” well i only used it for about 15-20 years but then i guess never got “good” at it - i just learned moreabout how bad it is. . Those that were genuinely good at it , as far as I think, did a lot of extra work to mitigate the limitations or create crutches for it. I just got pissed off by it, so i was quite desperate to stop using it as much as possible - it’s just only recently i’ve been allowed to use what i think are more appropriate tools- and i;m grateful for this small, but likely closing “window” f opportunity.

    If they’re happy with it though, who am I to judge. But if I was doing gemoetry and engineering calculations and ultimately cad, I know i’d not want excel anywhere near my data or my calculation methods.

    I wonder if age is really their issue, or if they just DGAF - again if that’s the case, good for them.

    I on the other hand will probably be walking out when they force us on windows 11 however good or bad it is. /management has already fucked us with sharepoint and dynamics - so maybe i’m just as bad as them when it comes to new fangled shit like: clouds, data-lakes, fabrics and other MS shite. I just want our data on a proper fucking filesystem, that we own. And our data somewhere I can SQL it.




  • Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn’t rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s

    TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.

    For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here’s my advice; as someone who does this stuff - “badly I might add” - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can’t decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle’s barrel:

    • use R (via R-studio if you need an “environment”) for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.

    • Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using ‘jupyter notebooks’ - I don’t get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.

    • Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for “hobbying” ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.

    These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they’re harder than excel; ( are they tho’? array formlae!?). They’re sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho’ - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it’s not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).

    You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.

    Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can’t let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.

    Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I’d happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don’t fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.









  • It’s student accomodation - short term , probably ok for youths for whom sharing with strangers as part of the “experience”.

    That’s no place for putting down roots, or for a full time worker. It’s not a bad idea in principle - i agree. But each unit should be 2-3 times the size and include a private shower room, toilet. and at least a small kitchenette. And the conversion should be nominally permanent - i.e. require a plaanning application to reverse.

    That plan doesnt even have a washbasin/water supply. My guess is they want to cheap out on plumbing - hence the communal bathroom and kitchen. So that it is reversible back to office space - they’re not building a home if they want it reversible - it’s temporary “accomodation”. No good for a lasting comunity. I’d want this type of accomodation to be no more than a few percent of the homes in an area.

    To me the fact they scaled down the plan of the “traditional studio” to make their plan look bigger betrays the fact that these are disingenuous salespeople not actually interested in making viable homes for people.

    edit: It’s also fine for housing the homeless - no argument there, but I’d hope for them a pathway to adequate long term accomodation.


  • For me, at work it’s more MS sharepoint and MS dynamic (+oracle clod shit of course) that fk me over on a daily basis - that’s possibly due to the way our IT people don’t seem to know how to use them or set them up - and won’t let us query(just SELECT) the dynamics tables directly using SQL for whatever reason. (i suspect we have to pay MS to acces our own data). And of course things like MS excel being used to mangle data by default all the time - yeah i know always use power query import . . . just everything takes six extra steps and the easy way is always the worst way.

    W10 is mostly okay. I mean it’s slow and hard to use, blasts the cpu fan all the time, is still annoying with updates, and I have to “right click open with” to open anything in the application that i want (even when there is only one native appllication for the file format). You get used to working around that shit.

    That is just not true for sharepoint and other MS apps, it gets worse, and as soon as you think you get used to a workaround for one thing, something else changes or an old thing resurfaces. and dynamic has just “upgraded” the colour scheme of the status colum so that there is no contrast between the background and the text. black text on white background, good enough for every other column, but no upgrade that one to black on dark blue, thanks bill you’re a F-ing-C. how do they screw up things like that as a bajillion dollar company.

    So I was going to say that W10 is more or less stable and it is other MS stuff that I hate more. that is probably true. but actually sitting down and writing out the above, W10 is still pretty horrible to . . . whether it’s our IT or MS itself, it’s shit.

    I much prefer my home linuxes, it is just as stable (for me) - and just so much easier to use - and most of all it is quieter on the fan. So much more relaxing.

    W11 had better be “not worse” or i’ll probably have to quit.





  • On debian i just comment out all except the main official repos that I want. As long as you have the main deb and security and updates ones i think you’ll be fine.

    I tend to go for flatpak or appimage for anything not in those. I’d avoid any testing, unstable , backport sources unless you know what you’re getting into.

    I guess you’re maybe using aptitude to avoid cli, but i’d recommend at least looking at the /etc/apt/soures.list file, and any stuff in the subfolder /etc/apt/soures.list.d

    This is the list of where it looks for software. If it can’t connect to any of those, It’ll probably warn you about an unavailable source.

    https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList