TwitchTracker is one of those stat sites derived from Twitch where you can see charts of what has been going on about a particular stream over a day period or the entire streamer life period. Here is one example with average viewers and hours streamed, spanning over the streamer life period :


Chart from TwitchTracker : there is something hard to understand

There is something hard to understand, which is the fact that it's impossible to tell to which axis the series of data belongs to, i.e. average viewers are on the left scale or on the right scale ?

Since scales on the left and on the right are different, an easy fix to the problem one would assume is to make those scales equal.


Chart from TwitchTracker : equal scales does not really improve the situation

But this does not improve the situation since we have had to change the scale which means either stretch the graph or downsize it. We may lose visual significance doing so.

So the solution is quite simple. Just color the axis labels with the same color than graphs.


Chart from TwitchTracker : finally something that can be understood at first sight

Tous les trimestres environ, Instagram sort une fonctionnalité qui change la façon d'utiliser ce réseau social. Il y a encore deux ans, avec un smartphone, utiliser Instagram était très contraignant, on ne s'en rendait pas forcément compte, mais en version PC, c'était beaucoup plus libre d'utilisation. Aujourd'hui la version PC a rejoint la version la plus coercitive. Déjà ça pue.

J'apprends aujourd'hui que Instagram a (ou va) sortir un sous-titrage automatique des vidéos courtes que les gens mettent en ligne sur ce réseau. En principe, c'est très bien. Sur le plan technologique, c'est un progrès car ça permet par exemple à des sourds d'extraire un texte d'une vidéo. Ca permet de récupérer un texte puis de le faire traduire dans une autre langue, ce qui permet indirectement de suivre une vidéo en langue étrangère.

Mais dans le monde dans lequel nous vivons, où faut-il le rappeler, Instagram est une filiale de Facebook, cet horrible monstre qui cherche à monétiser votre profil en ligne, en gros ce que vous lisez, quand, comment, etc. c'est une autre histoire. En fait, on peut tout à fait dire que cet outil automatique de sous-titrage permet de faire rentrer les vidéos dans le champ des objets dont le contenu est indexable et requêtable, bref un outil policier.

Autrement dit, si vous pensiez, par la vidéo, échapper aux contraintes un peu folles de notre société, et en particulier à des minorités actives qui traquent le moindre propos déviant de l'idéologie ambiante, vous vous trompez. Il faudra peut-être penser à héberger vos vidéos sur des sites russes ou chinois, où vous risquez d'être un peu plus tranquille...

Une fois de plus, la Russie montre la voie. On apprend :

extrait : "Russia said on Wednesday it was slowing down the speed of Twitter in retaliation for its alleged failure to remove banned content, and threatened a total block if the U.S. platform did not comply with its deletion demands."

Que l'état Russe intervienne sur la capacité d'une entreprise à servir ses utilisateurs, évidemment je suis contre, par principe. Mais rien ne prouve aujourd'hui que Twitter soit un service public, par le fait qu'elle censure tout ce qui sort de l'idéologie progressiste de son PDG. Et à ce moment là, instantanément, Twitter n'est plus une plateforme de communication libre, ce n'est plus qu'une plateforme de propagande. Parfaitement attaquable dans la plupart des démocraties du monde pour leur particpation dans son rôle "d'éditeur" qui interfère dans la communication entre les utilisateurs. Twitter ne peut pas se cacher en disant qu'ils ne sont qu'un tuyau. Ils pourraient l'être, mais ont décidé que non.

Freiner ou bloquer Twitter n'est que du fair play. Refuser par principe de bloquer ou freiner un outil de propagande de masse est irresponsable : et c'est ce qui se passe dans nos démocraties actuellement. La Russie sauve l'honneur de ce point de vue.

Plutôt que d'acheter aux enchères le premier tweet, les gens perspicaces et qui réfléchissent feraient mieux de parier sur la fin de twitter. Car elle est proche. Ce service était vulgaire d'emblée, mais aujourd'hui il est devenu dangereux pour la santé de ceux qui l'utilisent. Au même titre que la nicotine, utiliser twitter est dangereux pour la santé. La meilleure chose qui puisse vous arriver c'est de perdre votre mot de passe et de ne plus pouvoir vous connecter. A bon entendeur...

extrait : "The next on-premises/hybrid version of Windows Server, called Windows Server 2022, is now available in preview. It introduces advanced multilayer security, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible application platform, Microsoft says, and “secured-core capabilities” based on Windows Defender System Guard and virtualization security models to minimize the risk from firmware vulnerabilities and new forms of malware."

Year after year, I wonder if behind this security push is hidden the fact that this is now virtually impossible for an ISV to get their products downloaded and installed from the web. I mean aside Microsoft business partners, who probably get a pass.

You can believe this is a free market. It isn't. If you're an ISV shipping software for Windows, the most used PC OS on earth, Microsoft is putting you out of business by not letting you in in the first place.
Actually, it's not just Microsoft that is blocking you. Before you can even install software, it's quite possible actually that Google Chrome, the most used web browser right now out there, may block it for some reason, either because "it's not known enough" (I kid you not), or because whatever arbitrary rules it has in place after each and every release (the cadence of release is now increased to one every 4 months). Saying I don't use Chrome so I don't care is not valid, because your customers do use Chrome. And if they use Microsoft's default web browser, Edge, it's now based on Chrome. So you are screwed regardless.

If you think that stops here, you are being innocent. Of course if you ship software, at some point, you sell it, so you need a payment system. Turns out that payment systems are being more coerced these days, adding rules and breaking things apart every year or so. At some point, those changes made it impossible for me to both sell new software and get money for existing sales. Those problems have been solved last year, but to make it perfectly clear, I expect more coercion more road blocks at any time, and no way out. To say that this is not a stable environment to begin with is an understatement.

If you think this isn't enough, you are being delusional. It gets even worse. Your software is download from your website. Your website is hosted by a web hosting company, right ? Now why wouldn't you expect this hosting company to put road blocks every now and then in the name of security (i.e. bullshit most of the time), or else. Let's only take this example of SSL certificates made invalid over night and forcing you and your customers to use whatever SSL protocol the hosting company chose, like TLS 1.3 or even TLS 2.0, and by doing so making it impossible for a customer using a 5-year old PC to even connect to your website? There are many ways to screw you : force a PHP upgrade and it breaks your website overnight ; force OpenSSL off and connections do not work anymore, not even your emails ; make you responsible for email spams even though you are in the receiving end ; force you to rewrite MySQL code ; ... the list is endless.



And if you say it's not a problem because there are at least as many customers outside in the mobile world, putting aside that these are not the same customers, you are screwed as well because Apple and Google have a say in what you are trying to ship, in addition to hundreds of coercion rules from app stores.

All that means is that if you're an ISV these days, you are actually better off just giving up and becoming a plumber.

Chrome blog :

extrait : "For more than a decade, Chrome has shipped a new milestone every 6 weeks, delivering security, stability, speed and simplicity to our users and the web. As we have improved our testing and release processes for Chrome, and deployed bi-weekly security updates to improve our patch gap, it became clear that we could shorten our release cycle and deliver new features more quickly. Because of this, we are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021."

Une livraison publique tous les mois, c'est la garantie d'être sans arrêt emmerdé par des mises à jour et à cette occasion des choses qui ne marchent plus par rapport à la version précédente, que l'on soit utilisateur, développeur ou webmaster. Si on m'avait dit dans les années 80 que l'informatique ça deviendrait ça, je pense que j'aurais laissé tomber tout de suite car ça n'en valait pas la peine. Pour moi, l'informatique ce sont des produits stables dans le temps. L'instabilité vue comme un progrès, c'est fort de café !

xlsgen 4.9.0.4 adds a new property to the xlsgen object model, to be used before loading files. This Style optimisation property allows to disable the style optimisation algorithm done by xlsgen on behalf of the client application, trying to remove useless styles. This algorithm is on by default and has been going on for years, it is nothing new. By setting this property as false, the algorithm is disabled, in order to meet scenarios where style optimization is not expected to occur (i.e. pure template scenarios).

engine.Workbooks.StyleOptimisation = False

engine.Open("mytemplatefile.xlsx", "")

...

Build 4.9.0.3 of xlsgen adds direct support for elapsed time, i.e. time used with either hour, minute or second enclosed in square brackets, as in [hh]:mm:ss in order to display out of boundaries numbers.

Using elapsed time, you can display with 30:00:00 the fact that you've had an event lasting 30 hours, notably bypassing the implicit limit of 24 hours. All it takes is to pass 30:00:00 as a date and apply a number format of the form [h]:mm:ss.

It works like this :

worksheet->Cell[2][1]->HtmlDate = L"<div format=\"[h]:mm:ss\">30:00:00</div>";

In Excel this is effectively stored as an elapsed duration of 30 hours, not a display artefact. Which means that formulas that depend on it can do their calculations properly.


Square brackets can apply to minutes or seconds as well, to represent an arbitrary duration in minutes or seconds.

This feature has been in Excel just about forever, but it was not added to xlsgen until now.

Build 4.9.0.2 of xlsgen removes half a dozen memory leaks, in all parts of the library. This makes sustained scenarios better work.

Another option we are introducing for the Search tool is one that lets you decide, upon a Search folder, whether a given file is supposed to be searched for depending on its size. That is, depending on whether the file is more than X mega-bytes and/or less than Y mega-bytes in size, it is included in the search process.
For instance, this option ensures extremely large files are not searched for. Or a large number of very small files where you know in advance it is no use doing a search in them.

The search tool has a new option available from the Options dialog. It is for including or not including sub-folders.

By default, and before that, the search tool does search inside all subfolders if a "Search folder" is initiated.

Depending on the folder organisation, this option may be welcome.

Quand je vois Nvidia puis Amd annoncer des versions mobiles de leurs derniers GPUs, qui sont des monstres de puissance, je m'interroge.

La situation est paradoxale, sur un ordinateur portable, on cherche à minimiser la consommation d'énergie c'est pourquoi l'ensemble du matériel est dimensionné pour consommer le moins possible. Il n'est donc pas performant. Et par ailleurs Intel est incapable de faire des puces à moins de 12 nm, par conséquent on met en porte à faux l'ordinateur très facilement.

C'est la raison pour laquelle je comprends bien qu'un gamer va mettre son ordinateur portable sur le 220 Volts pendant qu'il joue mais que cela changera rien en performance car le matériel est bridé par conception.

Et donc dans ces conditions venir mettre du RTX 3060 voire du RTX 3080 n'a guère de sens, si ce n'est commercialement bien entendu.

Lorsqu'on accuse Twitter de censurer Donald Trump pour avoir supprimé son compte Twitter, on se trompe de cible. Twitter le fait au nom de minorités actives qui ne sont jamais nommées et c'est très précisément parce que Twitter ne les nomme pas que c'est un problème.

Je crois me rappeler qu'il y a 4 ou 5 ans, Twitter avait publié un rapport annuel des demandes de censures et autres fermetures de compte en France et Twitter avait indiqué que les deux tiers des signalements provenaient d'une seule (de mémoire) association de minorités actives.

Les médias n'ont pas repris ni insisté, ayant peut-être compris que le sujet était brûlant pour eux (les médias).

Bizarrement, je crois que Twitter n'a plus jamais publié ces détails dans ces rapports annuels. Surement un oubli malencontreux...

Just a hint, if you happen to change your PC motherboard for an AsRock, in my case a AsRock B365 Pro4, and can witness the fact that the mouse remains powered even when the computer is turn off, just make this change to the BIOS :

- Reboot and hit F2 on the keyboard to enter the AsRock BIOS
- Advanced
- Chipset
- Scroll down to DeepSleep
- Switch from Disabled to Enabled in S5
- Save and Exit

Problem fixed !



For the record, Sleep states are :
S3 = Sleep
S4 = Hibernate
S5 = Shut down

I wonder now that we are just a few days off 2021, if it has become a strategic time to become literate in ARM technologies, and by that I mean the instruction set, machine code, etc.

Why ? Perhaps because Apple's M1 is showing the world that x86 is a thing of the past, and while x86 is certainly useable for a long period of time still, its ugly machine code has probably turn away legion of developers who might give a new look, this time at ARM machine code.

Imagine if we started seeing code snippets written in ARM machine code in code repositories out there. Could this be enough to spawn a new generation of software developers who are happy to code in ARM assembly language almost as much as they were in disgust and quit trying doing that with X86 ?

Only future will tell. But I might embark onto it.

The positive outcome would be to be able to write code libraries for use in most mobile computers out there from day one. And perhaps a growing number of laptop and desktop computers if M1 turns successful from a marketing and technological standpoint.

It's time to get rid of Wintel, that's for sure.

I can't believe that we are days before 2021, and Firefox can still kill your tabs in a split second without anything meaningful in the UI for recovering them.
The scenario is pretty simple : just open a tab in a second Firefox instance, then quit your main Firefox instance (intentionally or not). There you have it : the tabs from your main Firefox instance are lost.

The fix for this is to find the local folder where Firefox stores compressed urls (json lz4). Then, given that you can do nothing with it meaningful, pass it to a LZ4 decompressor so it shows the list of urls. Finally create a new tab for each such url. When this process completes, the tabs are back, except the fact they were not recovered, but recreated by hand one by one.

This begs the question : are we really in 2021 ? or back in Mosaic days ? This is ridiculous state of the art. Perhaps Firefox needs to go down the toilet.

Build 4.9.0.1 of xlsgen makes it possible to retarget the scope of a defined name. Particularly make it local to a sheet. To that end, the Local property of existing named ranges can be set accordingly as in :


// let's say we have two sheets, Sheet1 and Sheet2

// also let's say range2 = Sheet2!R2C2:R20C5, and of global scope

workbook->WorksheetByName[L"Sheet1"]->DynamicRange[L"range2"]->Local = TRUE; // tell range2 to be local to Sheet2

xlsgen 4.9 developer friendly edition ships !

Features, most notably :

- multithreaded calc engine
- PDF Unicode and font embedding
- SVG charts
- HTML markup for rich labels
- Rendering treemaps and sunbursts
- Advanced OpenOffice
- Performance improvements

xlsgen 4.9 adds the following support to LibreOffice/OpenOffice files :

• read existing pivot tables
• write pivot charts (introduced in libre office 5.4.1)
• read cell data validations
• read auto filter and custom filters
• improved writing of custom filters

xlsgen 4.9 includes performance improvements. Those are particularly noticeable in server scenarios where xlsgen runs for long periods of time.

• for reading and creating XLS files, memory consumption much lowered by defaulting to 4KB blocks instead of 64KB blocks
• for reading chart formatting details from any Excel file, memory leak removal