n8   Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦 @n8@mastodon.social

I may be looking for part-time #employment leads the next few months.

If you're part of a FOSS project / org that is in need of some writing (documentation or otherwise) that's the clearest fit.

The complicating factor is I'm a full-time UK PhD student at present, which has conditions (biggest being a hard limit on hours allowed), which is why it's hard to wrangle. So that's why I'm putting out feelers well in advance.

But get in touch! Even if "now" proves tricky, there's also The Future!

Before I forget: starting in 2022, I'm referring to all people who can't design typefaces as "non-technical".

ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʟᴇꜱꜱ

So there's a software project that lives on the "Codeberg" forge/hosting site that I'm trying to read up on ....

Does Codeberg *not* support SEARCHING for WORDS?

Corollary: are we being punked?

This is a screenshot image I made just to show entitled software developers who look down their nose at regular people for "being part of the Google/Apple ecosystem" or similar privileged nonsense.

It's from the "Transportr" app web site; margins cropped in to reduce whitespace.

You can use it, too. Consider it donated by me, Nathan Willis, to the public domain, as of this post, August 9, 2022.

Who do I know that does signal-processing stuff? Frequency estimation and so on?

I have questions.

No answer to that rather important question, but we're back.

Great; more Internet outage. Did I leave the flux capacitor on overnight and accidentally go back to the dark ages?

Guess what: if your project's official communications say "we're aimed at non-technical people", then your project is crap.

Signed: all people.

Speaking of igraph, I presume real-world software engineers have a name for the following, but here's one of the major problems it poses as a tool:

The methods it provides for a BUNCH of operations require data types as input that are NOT the built-in core classes, NOR are they the types returned by other functions.

E.g., the "select nodes" function returns a vector of Vertex objects, but the "color these nodes in my plot $RGB" func only takes a list of IDs.

Is there a name for that problem?

17. Graphviz

And, probably, graph-tools. I really only started poking around with igraph BECAUSE it was what was used internally by Plotly. But it bites. If you're trying to do any serious graph theory stuff, it totally bites. Better to route your graphs in from GraphML or something (in other words, more items for the palette list....).

Ah, Fontconfig: no documentation for 20 years, and everybody in Enterprise Software is just fine with that.

Sure, pal; go ahead and park wherever — the lines are just for decoration.

Some people.

It's probably also worth noting that in some of the "office suites" (Google and LibreOffice included), sharing color palettes between, for example, a spreadsheet and a slide deck is just as difficult as sharing it between two unrelated programs.

And on some of the vague ones (like timelines), it's because I haven't found one that I genuinely like.

Here's a list of the projects that each have their own individual format for using color palettes, which, as a whole, complicates my life as I try to make illustrations:
1. R
2. Plotly
3. igraph
4. matplotlib
5. ggplot2
6. Inkscape
7. LibreOffice
8. Google Docs
9. Scribus
10. GIMP
11. Terminals
12. Every timeline editor (HTML5)
13. Every map visualizer (HTML5)
14. Bootstrap
15. Gtk
16. Qt

I'm sure there's more. Kinda makes me glad FontForge doesn't support colorfonts.

I'm kidding. This is actually a whole bunch of jerks.

"I'm gonna spend years developing a graph-plotting library, raise a bunch of funding and pour untold resources into promoting as a solution for data science, then also not support using subscripts & superscripts in any of the text labels."

— Some Jerk

I have this vague memory of somebody in the past few years who was implementing some sort of traditional German typesetting rule-set ...maybe for justification? with a nice write-up. But it doesn't seem to be in TeX or SILE, at least that I can find, and it's driving me nuts.

This is exacerbated by me not knowing enough German to know what to search for. Which might make it sound totally pointless, but it was the detailed write-up part that I really wanted to reference.

Well, sure enough, the "prefascicle" 7A is now up to 145 pages, indicating that Knuth is in writing mode again, and volume 4B of TAOCP (incorporating only fascicles 5 and 6) is now scheduled for publication in October.

Sadly I suspect that I will not be able to access a review copy this time since I'm no longer a tech reporter.

Your #DailyWikipediaTimewaste - All the Lands in all the lands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-land
#ÅToZee
#TheOnlyThingTheyDontMakeMoreOf

I think we should start celebrating milestone anniversaries for bugs. This will be huge for Mozilla, for example.
#pr

You call it "grinds getting into the coffee".

I call it "kafe boba".