TheMuffinMan

Not doomed at all; going abroad is a privilege. Best of luck to you wherever you end up; you’ll be fine.

What is the purpose of counting channels? A handful of servers I’m in have one.

Nobody challenged your legal rights.

You are a vile human being.

What in the world are you talking about?

God I love London lol.

However, triggering multiple cameras at once at the exact same time was a similar experiences with additional trigger lines and multiple discussions with the manufacturers application engineers.

100% this; synchronisation challenges are the bane of my existence. There are also a lot of cases when it would have been really helpful if data output from a device were timestamped (even with something incomplete like “number of milliseconds past the minute”), rather than having to timestamp it on receipt and make some iffy assumptions about latency.

Depending on the command the byte order also had to be swapped which was not documented at all and I had to find it by trial and error.

“Determining endianness is left as an exercise for the reader” type logic, honestly lol.

So I’m not sure if it’s the military grade that makes it such an experience. Industrial grade seems like a similar experience.

It’s quite plausible (and disappointing to hear) that it’s a broader issue with industrial grade hardware; my own experience is limited to products specifically aimed for military/defence applications.

I guess a lot of consumer devices also do shit like that under the hood but hide it in firmware and drivers.

Yep, but I think there’s also a broader point about work that is niche or “cutting edge” versus industry standard. The example that comes to mind is the quality of code written in academia versus in industry, the former often being significantly worse. I think part of it is that code quality is far less emphasised compared to the higher level technical concept it’s used to demonstrate. I honestly believe that a sizeable chunk of the professors and lecturers from my university would struggle to produce work that is “up to standard” in a regular software eng role, at least initially.

I talk to myself when I am thinking, especially if what I am thinking about relates to emotional processing. I have never recorded myself doing this, but I don’t think I vocalise complete sentences. While I’m processing, I repeat a contextually relevant word or phrase over and over again, even if I think I’ve moved past it in my head.

I find myself doing this in public sometimes (whoops), but with silent mouth movements. Earphones help me avoid looking dodgy or like I’m hallucinating.

Allow me to explain with a practical example: you have a camera on the network, and you want to automate taking snapshots in response to some arbitrary trigger (e.g. every minute, or whenever a separate motion sensor is activated). There are standards and conventions for type of integration, but military grade hardware often wants you to do things from first principles.

Typical consumer/IP camera: the camera has a REST API for its command set, so you can formulate a HTTP request like GET http://my-camera-ip/command/snap?stream=0 and the server will respond with image data. You can knock this out in maybe < 30 mins and < 100 lines of code. If you’re a bit crafty, you can add support for multiple different camera models, which may vary in URI formation and authentication.

On the other hand, trying to do this with a military grade camera, the experience is usually something like this: The camera comes with proprietary client software that is closed source. In UI you can click a ‘snap’ button to take an image, but no viable route for automation. You try to reverse engineer it with WireShark, but it appears to be a WebSocket connection with constant data transfer, which makes dissecting the ‘snap’ command difficult.

You check the manual, and the only mention of how to directly command the camera is via a serial line. That’s the first problem: you don’t want to run a long cable from the server running your automation, to the camera itself. So you buy a small serial device server, and run a serial cable between it and the camera. It will forward any byte sequence that is sent to it over your LAN, to the camera’s serial input.

The manual references a separate document that explains the communication protocol, which should explain what byte sequence to send to ‘snap’ an image. You hunt down this document, and. Uh-oh. It’s 344 pages long. Ctrl+F, you look for “snap” and find it’s in section 17. It references some earlier sections about sync bytes, message headers, and checksums. You finally work out that the full byte sequence you need to send to trigger a snapshot is00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A. You write code that sends that sequence over TCP to the serial device server. But there’s a problem: you’re not receiving any bytes back. Where is the resultant image?

You go back to the manual and it mentions that “snapshots and recordings are stored on the internal SD card” and “SD card contents are available via FTP”. It doesn’t give a spec, or even a filesystem, for the SD card. After trying a bunch of different ones, the camera finally detects your SDXC card formatted as exFAT: the magic combo.

There is no explanation of the FTP functionality in the manual, so you try the default FTP port, and make some educated guesses for the right username/password combo. None of them work, so you contact the manufacturers for help. 2 weeks later, they respond with the credentials. Finally, you’re in, and you’re seeing new image files showing up whenever you send the byte sequence. Success! Now, your code does something like this:

1. Send 00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A via TCP to serial device server
2. Wait a moment
3. Connect to camera FTP server and download image file from SD card

A week later, your boss walks in and says that a new competitor, manufacturer B, has cameras with much more impressive IR sensors for nighttime surveillance. The existing cameras will be replaced starting next week. None of what you have built is reusable for manufacturer B cameras; it’s time for a new adventure.

It’s mind-boggling. It’s like the manufacturers’ engineers have not spoken to anyone who has written any software in the last 20 years.

Having additional virtual network interfaces on VMs is completely normal, ens18 does indeed sound like the right one you should be looking at.

Seconding the other commenter who mentioned the possibility of a second DHCP server.

Is your Proxmox host wired via ethernet to the pfsense? Or are there WiFi APs in the mix anywhere

For most of the year, yes, agreed, but the hot summers days here are absolutely brutal , especially in the last 5 or so years.

Ironically, hot days are more of an issue to me now than they were back when I was living in a country where August temps would hit low-mid 50s. (That’s the negative part of the tradeoff; I would still take England weather over the desert heat, since walking outside is very possible and doesn’t kill you.)

As someone who works in defence & surveillance as a systems engineer (so by every measure a civilian), I’m still the one on the right… military grade hardware is a fucking nightmare to integrate into larger systems.

I am also very confused. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is the list of started/not yet completed tasks, vs. the list of things that were actually followed through to completion. But that is not at all how they’re labelled.

I 100% agree but they at least didn’t pay for their coffee.

He is being childish, but if I am completely honest, it sounds like you are a little too. Not in how bothered you are by the situation (understandable), but more how you perceive it.

I totally understand wanting to just do the work and cut the meaningless chatter, but the reality is a job usually has more abstract requirements outside of specific job tasks. One of these is getting your manager to like you. Social cohesion is one of the things workplaces tend to look for.

Not every manager cares about small talk perhaps as much as yours does, but that’s the situation you are in.

My advice would be to decide on one of the following 1) work elsewhere where you can thrive without this obstacle, 2) develop the skill of faking being interested, or 3) do nothing but get frustrated and possibly miss out on promotions or similar.

Wishing you the best, from a socially inept person with autism who relates to that dread, haha.

“centred around” is a subjective projection rather than statement of a fact in cases where gamete production genuinely does not occur. For this person, her gonads never developed into either testes or ovaries, so by this definition she would be of neither sex. I’m OK with that, but it does undermine your point about the strict binary.

My question to you is why does this matter, in the context of accessing bathrooms and changing rooms? Do you think inspecting reproductive anatomy is a proportionate measure?

More broadly speaking, what is the point of recording the ‘biological sex’ of a person who, through transition, has changed their physiology and endocrine profile to that associated with the opposite, and no longer has their natal reproductive anatomy? Who would this benefit?

…nope. Her body can’t produce either. And she has a uterus and fallopian tubes.

so I ended up having to force a weird circumlocution

Sorry to derail this a little as I’m aware you’re a native speaker, but you did remind me of my interactions with ESL Germans online, where they’d say “Apologies if my English isn’t great; there are gaps in my vernacular” or something wonderfully eloquent like that, that which always comes off as such a casual flex 😆

You are totally right of course. Vaping weed is the way to go. I misplaced my dry herb vape when I moved houses several months ago and it hasn’t cropped up yet, which is why I’m back on spliffs for the time being. (Dry herb vapes are spenny as you probably know)

The only other slight quirk is that vaping weed uses it up pretty fast and it hits fast too. I’m an enjoyer of the process itself rather than just being high (which is why things like pipes and bongs never appealed to me either); the way spliffs let me pad/space out the intake matters to me more than I’d like it to.

I will switch back once I find my vape, but in the meantime I’ve found using activated charcoal filters instead of roaches does cut out a lot of the nastiness of tobacco. It does weaken the effect of the weed a bit too, but that’s nbd.

Gotcha. Their point is kind of right though; sex is less of a strict binary category and more 2 clusters we (people) created that allow us to more easily classify specimens based on strongly correlated traits. Both clusters have some overlap, and no trait on its own completely determines the cluster.

E.g. I knew a case of this woman who grew up her whole life never knowing she has XY chromosomes, because she had seemingly typical female sex characteristics. It was only when she and her husband where struggling to conceive and they went to a fertility clinic, that that fact came to light. “Biological male” might be the cluster you’d want to put her under, but she lacks many of the features of that cluster, so in that case the binary classification is a little weak.

Of course most people/animals are not intersex (or transitioned), but the point is that the biological sex binary is kind of a shorthand / way of making life easier to classify most of the population, but it’s not perfect or tidy.

The easiest way to stay accurate is to just narrow down to the specific relevant trait (“person with facial hair”, “person with androgenetic alopecia”, etc.) depending on what specifically is measured/being talked about. But being that precise can come at the expense of being less clear/accessible to the layman, which is why we use biological sex as a concept.

I’m not the person you asked, but ‘assigned sex’ is fine. The common one is ‘assigned gender at birth’.