Getting a Count of Occurrences of Items in a Ruby Array (and a Caveat for Rails)
I feel like I’m often wanting to count occurrences of items in an array (Rails has its own special case as well), and I’m always trying to do it the “long way.” I finally stumbled upon this answer on StackOverflow that details the version-by-version options: Ruby 2.7+ use .tally directly on the array: Ruby 2.4+ […]
8563 Chip: Plotting Characters to the Commodore 128’s 80-column Mode
Source Code for this 8563 Demonstration You can find the below source code at https://github.com/stringsn88keys/unnecessary-computer-things/blob/main/episodes/2021/001/commodore-128/CHASXYCOSINE.BAS and watch here for demonstration of the run time vs. the TRS-80 Model 16 emulator (a computer for which I never realized had a graphics mode when I had access to one). The BASIC and disassembly is also available on […]
Microphone Crackle and Distortion on Windows 10 with New ASUS Motherboard
I’ve had to remedy microphone crackle and distortion twice on two different builds/rebuilds of Windows 10 PCs, and somehow forgot from the last time how to remedy. In my case, the problem was the onboard sound for the ASUS Motherboard (ASUS ROG Strix B550-E and ASUS ROG Strix B550-A motherboards.) The solution is to get […]
Craftsman V60 Mower (Cordless Electric) – Disappointing Value 2 Years Later
We’ve had mixed results with our Craftsman V60 Mower (CMCMW270) after a little over two years of ownership. UPDATE: After a back and forth on a response to a review on their page, I appear to have gotten a check for the cost of the larger battery that’s still available (5.0Ah, though, not the original […]
kubectl and eks… You must be logged in to the server (Unauthorized)
Say you have a setup with EKS using IAM API keys with Admin permissions and are using an AWS profile that you’ve confirmed can retrieve the eks config with aws eks update-kubeconfig –name context-name –region appropriate-region-name-n. But then kubectl get pods –context context-name still fails, oddly with a “You must be logged in to the […]
Running a Commodore VICE emulator on a remote Ubuntu Linux machine with Xfvb
The Challenge I want to have a Commodore 128 VICE emulator start up, run some arbitrary BASIC code, and get a snapshot of the output. There are a few settings configurable from the command line to accomplish this: +sound (without this option you will get and error “pa_simple_new(): Connection refused” because you’re *probably* not going […]
Use find_each vs. select or each when needing to process each record via Ruby
The problem: This scenario is a much more practical case of a similar concept with Rails / ActiveRecord count, size, and length. In this case, you’re needing to run ruby code off of either every value from a where method result or a subset that is determined by ruby code. For example, assume that a […]
Rails / ActiveRecord count, size, and length
When trying to be sensitive to n+1 queries and memory usage, knowing the differences between count, size, and length in ActiveRecord is important. It had been a while since I reviewed the usage, and I wanted to ensure that I hadn’t made some bad assumptions along the way that somehow stuck. The reality is that […]
Getting a count of the rows in all of your ActiveRecord models
Warning: Going through ActiveRecord is likely not something you want to do in production unless you have a replica database that your script or your model can point at. See the second part for MySQL and PostgreSQL examples in SQL. How do you enumerate your models? For apps created under Rails 5 app or later, […]
Self-Modifying Code on a Commodore VIC-20
Note: All code listings are in lower case so that they are pastable into the VICE emulator. Otherwise, you will get graphics/uppercase PETSCII characters on paste. Examining the structure of how the BASIC code is stored User program RAM is in locations 4096 to 7680 (decimal) on a VIC 20. The storage format of the […]