Fighting with computers

Some days ago, while listening to an exam exercise, I learned about an old story that happened in the early nineties. It seems it stirred quite a controversy at the time. It was about a TV show where a contestant was offered to chose one door out of three to win a car. The setup was that only behind one of the doors a car was present while the two others contained a goat. Apparently, most people value the car as the good prize but could not care less about the goat, that was the losing item. The host would open a door different than the one the contestant chose to reveal, invariably a goat. And later the host will offer the contestant to switch to the other remaining door. The controversy was about what was the best choice the contestant could do: to switch or to keep the original choice. We all agree that, initially, the contestant has one of out of three chances to win the car. However, when the host opens one of the remaining (non chosen) doors showing a goat it is not so c...

Polygon clipping and polygon offsetting are operations that due to the multitud of cases possible are quite a difficult beast to tame. That is why I have used an external library when I have needed such a feature in a program. A few days ago, researching for a student's assignment, I learned that " clipper " library had been migrated to Java  by Tobias Mahlmann.  I had a minor trouble with one file not using UTF-8 encoding but other than that it compiled and run beautifully (not in my large display though as I am using an scale factor larger than one that messes the Java GUI layout). Another interesting detail is that the code will need Java 1.8 to compile as it uses a Lambda function in one of the Comparators used. However, I wanted to use it with some older code that was using 1.6 and the compiler was not happy with my version request, so I needed to do a small change to get rid of the Lamba function code in favor of an inner class.  Once the code was worki...

After the upgrade of my computer's graphics card for a new AMD RX 460 I noticed OpenSCAD program was crashing all the time with a segmentation fault (every time I pressed F5 or F6). But the problem would only happen if I was using AMD native driver (amdgpu-pro). I saw no references online to this specific problem which was weird. I decided to buy the RX 460 as it apparently had good Linux support, so it was odd to have this kind of problem but no matter what version of the driver I was using or what version of OpenSCAD nightly build I could not use the application. I managed to get an AppImage version that worked without a problem in my system and that is what I have been using for a while. Today, I have decided to check if somehow problem could he related to my locale, so I invoked the application like this:  LC_ALL=C openscad-nightly And lo and behold, OpenSCAD is working as it should, no problem whatsoever. So it is clear that my Spanish locale was what caused the probl...

From time to time there is some software I need to use that is only available for Windows. For that I kept an old virtual machine I created ten years ago that was running Windows XP and served me well over the years. But the last instance of software in point was the latest Netfabb  Standard 2017, that is only available as a 64bit Windows version. So I grabbed a Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft Imagine shop and fed it to my virtual machine. After some time I got a new virtual machine running Windows 10, or almost. I could see networking was not working nor was audio. I could see many people reporting different problems with various virtualisation tools and Windows 10 but it was not clear what my problem was, so after following several wrong paths I realized the system was complaining about not having a driver for the hardware found. I checked on the configuration file and I could see the network device was "vlance" and I replaced it for "e1000" and the latter was e...