Going on a bug hunt
Here’s some disturbing output. “ Exception in thread “Thread-0” java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 2147483 646 at Figure.nextTurn(Figure.java:799) at Realm.cycle(Realm.java:83) at CyclerThread.run(CyclerThread.java:41) “
Ep 181: What did Jurassic dinosaurs taste like?
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What did Jurassic dinosaurs taste like? Today we cover the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, growing large and being in charge. One group began, during this period, to evolve toward becoming birds, and we talk a little bit about some early mammals.
On the practical application of artificial vision
My robo-eye is sitting in my desk at the moment. It’s a pair of smart glasses, with a camera built in. I put these things on and run the vOICe, an app that changes what the camera sees into sound. With practice, blind folk like me can use such a setup to help navigate the …
Their nurture has become their nature
In posts on this topic, I keep saying I’m about to get to the interesting part… posts, with optimistic titles like “Trembling on the verge.” Followed immediately thereafter by posts like, “How long has that been wrong?” Bugs and issues keep dancing out from between my lines of code, and they all demand their share …
That was scary!
There I sat, after longer than usual. I was waiting for the small population to stabilize. I’d just fixed a problem that had been there for weeks and months, a subtle bug I just hadn’t noticed. Fixing it meant that my little digital creatures, called “Figures,” would behave differently. Maybe the fix would break the …
How long has that been wrong?
I fear them. Not obvious bugs, but the sneaky ones—the ones where your code will compile and run just fine, where the program can pass all the tests you thought of; but there it sits—the bug you didn’t think of testing for.
Ep 180: “Ridge” not “Trench.” Correcting and expanding episode 179
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“Ridge” not “Trench.” Correcting and expanding episode 179 We blame the sickness. Both of your hosts managed to catch, and were suffering from, a rather nasty little chest cold. In episode 179, on the Triassic period, we mispronounced, misspoke and mistook. Since we were recording on a holiday and didn’t want to do that much …
Accidentally reading without sight
Once I had the vOICe installed on my smart glasses, I put them on and played with it. The vOICe is an app that takes images from a camera, and turns them into sound. If one is blind, which I am, it can provide a way to send visual information through the sense of hearing. …
Ep 179: The Triassic period
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The Triassic period Today, despite your hosts suffering from a nasty cold, we talk about the Triassic period. During this time, the first flying reptiles appear, along with several reptiles that returned to the water. We also get the very first dinosaurs, though they were still rather small, and the very first mammals, which were …
Ep 178: Phil joins the show
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Phil joins the show For the summer, “The Lab” has a co-host. My brother Phil hops onboard. We’ll be putting out a ten to twenty minute episode each Thursday night. In this episode, we attempt to cover the last 177 episodes in just one.