My favourite game was always hacking around in Wine to make games work. Once I got them working I lost interest and moved on to the next game… Now I don’t have time to play games. :(

You can also type ZZ (uppercase, so hold Shift) to write and quit. But for all of the above you have to be in normal mode, so if it doesn’t work, try pressing Esc first.

Christians shouldn’t be surprised to be hated. It’s right there in 1 John 3:13:

Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.

But Christians should make sure they are hated for the right reasons (unpopular beliefs), rather than the wrong reasons (lack of kindness and love). On behalf of Christians I am sorry for times when we have allowed fear, prejudice, hysteria and selfishness to stop us from loving those we disagree with, or those we don’t understand.

I am a conservative Christian, so I am certain there is much we disagree on. But Christians everywhere, myself included, need to remember to love all people, despite our disagreements, as we are encouraged to do in Mat 5:43-48 and Rom 12:9-21.

It worked, but it was slow and dropped packets sometimes. I think the next team switched to Java. I met with them and walked them through the code and suggested they try a different approach. Hopefully they did!

What are your hobbies? Most people struggle to learn programming until they find a project that they are interested in. You mentioned an interest in music. Perhaps you could try Sonic Pi, which is a live coding environment where you can create music from code. It comes with a built-in tutorial, and a bunch of pre-written example code-music. It’s built with the ruby language.

One of the first real programs I wrote was a program to display telemetry data from a CAN bus. I was on the solar car team at uni, and we wanted to be able to view the data from the various systems live during the race. The CAN network was connected to a CAN-ethernet converter, which sent UDP packets over a wireless ethernet link to our lead car. I had no experience with networking, or UDP or CAN at all, but I had some documentation and a lot of free time, so I got to work.

Each device on the CAN network had a bit mask to identify it. For example, the bit mask for the motor controller might have been 0x1200. This meant that any packet starting with 0x12 belonged to the motor controller. For example, 0x1201 was one type of message, and 0x1202 another type, but both belonged to the motor controller.

There was specific logic for each device on the network, so you needed to first figure out which device owned a packet using the bit mask, then apply the relevant logic to decode the packet.

Looking back, I realise the correct way to approach this would be to have a list of bit masks:

0x1200
0x1300
0x1400

Then simply bitwise & any incoming packet with 0xff00, and lookup the result in the list of bit masks.

Not knowing better however, what I actually did was create a giant dictionary of every possible packet value, so I could lookup any packet and determine which system it came from. This was so repetitive that I had to make use of my newfound super-power – vim macros – to complete the 8000 line dictionary…

Excerpt from real code below:

{
    0x102:
    {
        'name':             'SHUNT_CMU_STATUS_TEMPERATURE_AND_VOLTAGE_1_2',
        'data':
        [
            'cell_0_voltage',
            'cell_1_voltage',
            'cell_2_voltage',
            'cell_3_voltage',
        ],
        'unpack_string':    'intle:16, intle:16, intle:16, intle:16'
    },

    0x103:
    {
        'name':             'SHUNT_CMU_STATUS_TEMPERATURE_AND_VOLTAGE_1_3',
        'data':
        [
            'cell_4_voltage',
            'cell_5_voltage',
            'cell_6_voltage',
            'cell_7_voltage',
        ],
        'unpack_string':    'intle:16, intle:16, intle:16, intle:16'
    },
}

I just use the KeePassXC password generator. :)

Can I suggest duckdb? You can start out writing SQL directly on top of CSV and Parquet files. But then if you want/need to do something more complicated, you can import duckdb into Python, keep running the SQL you already wrote, convert it to a Pandas or Polars dataframe, transform it, then query the result in SQL.