I think it has promise. The main problems will be the ones I mentioned, which are that light is going to vary over time. If you always vacuumed in a very dark room, then I think it would work great, I suspect that each location will have different enough visual patterns to make it work.

Throw in varying daylight, lamps, overhead lights that are sometimes off, sometimes on, and it can get harder. Using a light frequency that is very unique and filtering heavily on that may help. IME it is easy to get somethat that almost works and sometimes incredibly hard to get something that really works.

I made a visual system that would look at paper targets, even ones that were swaying/moving, and detect bullet hits on them. It could keep track of hits and keep score. However, when deployed in the field, I found it fidgety. Clouds blowing across the sky would make patterns of light and shadow. Bugs would land on the target, or dirt would blow onto it, etc. If *I* was there I could usually make it work, but it was not ready to be a product.

So I'm planning on testing with a regular flashlight, not a colored LED, but I don't think the color filtering is necessary. I think change detection - both of the Roomba itself in LOS and of the light position & intensity when blocked - should handle the vast majority of my issues. Combined with a tracking algorithm and some a prior motion model information and I have high hopes.

I'd like to follow along, I like this kind of stuff a lot. I especially love hacky low tech solutions, esp if they work. Feel free to send me stuff you gather, just for my curiosity, if you don't mind. me@rustybrooks.com (or, you know, start a blog on this forum about it...)

This was one of my recent experiments:
http://bike-home.rustybrooks.com:800.../test1_cut.avi

A friend of mine wanted to set up sort of a carnival game type thing where you shoot at a drone with nerf darts. Cameras would track the darts and move the drone out of the way. As the game operator he would "demonstrate" it by shooting behind his head and hitting it (by switching the mode to make the drone move itself *into* the path)

Anyway, I did some real basic demos and decided that with hardware I had on hand, even in ideal lighting conditions, darts moved too fast. This video is me throwing a little paper ball or something. It's slowed way down so you can even see what's happening.

Big layoffs coming at my company. I got an email asking if I'm interested in taking a severance and leaving. I heard last day would be Dec 15th - which could work out perfect for my trip anyway. Big question is do we still get a prorated bonus (which is like 20% of my salary) for 2017.

One of the things I like best about my current job is: no bonus. I am paid a salary. I know exactly how much money I will have any any given time. My salary is higher to compensate for what my bonus "should" be.

They do have stock grants so I still get to gamble a little on a nice payoff any given year.

A couple jobs ago I worked at a high frequency trading place and they did "bonus days." Once a year you drew a business day out of a hat and on that day you got a bonus proportional to that day's profit. It was a fun gambly thing, and it kind of kept people's attention on the coming and going of profit in the company. Traditionally whoever's bonus day it was would bring in breakfast for the company - breakfast tacos or donuts or pastries or whatever. There were 100ish employees so we usually got a free breakfast out of it a day or 2 a week.

There was a minimum payout, which I got once, but no maximum. Our best day ever was someone's bonus day and I guess that guy probably got enough bonus from that one day to buy a very nice new car.

No bonus >>>>> bonus. Unless of course the bonus is an actual unexpected bonus.

Looks like I get 24% of my salary for 6 years service as severance. I've been told by an ex-boss that we'll also get our bonus - which is 20%-ish. And I vest $9k in stock on Dec. 1.

So it seems like all part of God's plan that I cash out and drive to South America!

Edit: lol corporate speak:

LOL surplus employees. Guys we accidentally ordered too many employees. Put these in the discount bin by the cash registers on the way out and see if we can get anyone to impulse buy them.

P.S. take the deal

Job I'm currently contract to hire on:

Me: I'll make it easy for you, I need $x to be hired on here.

Them: great! We'll put you in at $x *.9 and there's a bonus of *.1 we get every year.

Me: uh no that doesn't work.

(next day) them: we'll give you $x.

Duh.

Lol goldbugs. Brandon Eich not doing the obtuse programmer libertarian bro stereotype any favors on twitter.

Bonus is nice but it gets taxed to hell. It is fun watching the monthly tracking and rooting for good numbers. We get a percentage of profits and there's a decent spread.

Another unfortunate side effect is that my severance is based on base pay - not pay + bonus. So I get 24% of 80% of my real salary.

All of my contracts are in limbo right now. Perfect time to move to Los Angeles, IMO.

I get out here and start working an e-commerce contract the day after my plane lands. Already lost that one, but I didn't understand what they wanted from me. I thought I was supposed to do A + B and they asked me to do C. I was clear beforehand that I wasn't that knowledgeable on C.

Add the fact that the plane was 2 1/2 hours late, I couldn't find my guitar for another 2 hours, getting 5 feet from any LAX terminal takes another 2 hours, altitude sickness.. I don't know how people can work / travel all the time like that.

FWIW if anyone's interested - I just got an inquiry a 3-month node/angular contract onsite in St. Louis for a "card processing company". Which made me think of greeting cards. But then someone suggested credit cards - which makes a lot more sense.

This is from a good friend so I know it's not some bull**** job at least.

Ermagerd react 16

Here's a mystery.

I have this site that woks like this: I generate XML, that is sucked into some JavaScript stuff, and it displays what I need.

This used to work, and now it doesn't. I haven't updated the site lately, so not sure what change would have happened. The error is now "Not a valid XML file." The irritating part is that this works on my local machine just fine, but fails on the server.

Any ideas?

In my limited experience it sounds like character encoding issues. Are your server and your local machine the same os?

Sent from my SM-G900R4 using Tapatalk

Local is Fedora, remote is Heroku. Maybe they changed something on their end?

Microsoft curly quotes?

Did you npm i recently?

If i go to boiling-inlet-xxx/page, the XML loads just fine. It works on local, on the underlying url, but not the public url. I opened a ticket with Heroku, but I'm wondering if Cloudflare is causing this... this will take a few days, I'm sure.

Not really sure how magic quotes work programmically, to be honest, unless str() does some strange stuff on Linux these days.

I didn't / can't NPM the lib in question. I had to extend and modify to get it to work. Open Source FTW!

Did you try adding a logging add-on to dump heroku log information to or look at logplex on heroku to determine if there is any error being thrown as it's trying to parse/process the xml?

Sent from my SM-G900R4 using Tapatalk

This is probably not a revelation for anyone else, but the more I work with js the more I'm convinced that:

a) It's a good language for people that just want to hack something together
b) It's a good (great?) language for experts because its expressive and available on everything
c) It's a terrible language for everyone else, especially for production work.

It's just way to easy for junior devs to mangle the patterns designed by senior devs because there's nothing that stops them from mutating interfaces, using wrong types of data in functions that work in some edge cases but not others, and doing other weird stuff that a stricter language would prevent them from doing.

Curious - since I just learned some basic JS for a personal project (not a software dev but I do a lot of programming)... Is your critique mostly because of the dynamic typing or are there other things at play? For example - would you feel the same way about python?

Are you using prettier, jsdoc, and eslint and still coming to those conclusions?