Comments for brainsnorkel.com

Comment on The Book Depository vs Amazon.com by Tom

Tom — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:12:08 +0000

Wow, so you’re on the opposite side of the world, and it takes 4 days, I’m in the UK and mine still haven’t arrived. Won’t be using them again.

Comment on The Book Depository vs Amazon.com by Jessica

Jessica — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:39:30 +0000

Book Depository is absolutely terrible. Last year I ordered Christmas presents (books) from Amazon. They arrived within 3 days. I have been ordering from BD throughout the year and was happy with their service, week-week 1/2 shipping time.
This year I ordered 3 weeks in advance to leave plenty of time for the books to arrive by Christmas (as recommended on the website). My father ordered two books last week. His arrived yesterday. Mine have not. Thus, nobody in my family will be receiving Christmas presents from me this year.
Also, there was no email confirming the order and the only way I could find an order number was through my credit card bill.
Book Depository are rubbish, stick with Amazon.

Comment on The Book Depository vs Amazon.com by Barbara Carter

Barbara Carter — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:50:53 +0000

I have become a Book Depository fan and the real winner for me are the prices and the free shipping. The only down side is the time it takes to get from UK to Brisbane which at quickest is 2 weeks and slowest so far 4 weeks. I do also use BetterWorldBooks.com which also has free shipping and have the added benefit of also doing second hand books ( not sure in Book D do this also but never noticed!! ).

Comment on Death by radix by Chris

Chris — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 06:46:40 +0000

I apologise for maligning you and Bjarne with my quip about std::cin with only one comment between it and a dissin’ of PHP. iostream certainly behaves itself now.

Late last millenium, VC++ was not being so reasonable.

Comment on Death by radix by Alastair

Alastair — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 06:25:28 +0000

Eh? Don't be draggin' c++ down with the PHP riffraf! std::cin, along with all c++ iostreams, is defined to use decimal numbers on construction. [ref]. Of course if you change the base you can sometimes forget to change it back, and affect other parts of the code (damn global state). However, as far as I know there's no way to do this funky radix-sniffing which, as we can all agree, is an anti-feature anyway....

Comment on Death by radix by Chris

Chris — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 05:18:53 +0000

I’ve also been a victim of over-exuberant octal conversion by std::cin many times. This is an open invitation to participate in ritual public flogging next time I fall for this.

Comment on Death by radix by Richard Atkins

Richard Atkins — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:07:54 +0000

Ah, Sunny. This is a bug you can trip up on in almost any language. And I think Chris was using JS to implement it in this particular case.

For C/C++, you’ve got strtol(char*,char**,int) which optionally takes 0 for the last arg to let the system interpret the value for itself. For Java, you’ve got Integer.valueOf(String) which does the same. I’m sure PHP can do it too, but I’m bored of researching broken parsing APIs already :)

As for why on earth you might do this, the only reason I can think of is that you’ve decided to let the user pass in numbers in whatever format they prefer, and you’re just going to handle it. This could be for yet another calculator app, or a bytecode generator, packet editor, whatever. Still, it’s crazy to use anything other than base 10 if you don’t need this flexibility.

Comment on Death by radix by Sunny Kalsi

Sunny Kalsi — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:29:40 +0000

OK thinking more logically now, a better critique of PHP is that PHP needs a variant of every function which reads:

[function]AndDontBeSmartAboutIt(…)

Comment on Death by radix by Sunny Kalsi

Sunny Kalsi — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:27:15 +0000

This is PHP’s fault. Fuck PHP.

Comment on Death by radix by Alan Green

Alan Green — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:40:30 +0000

Octal drives me crazy. The Java lexer even includes a special exception to ensure that a lone “0″ digit is interpreted as a decimal zero, and not one of those crazy octal zeroes:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/second_edition/html/lexical.doc.html#48282

Comment on The Book Depository vs Amazon.com by Donna

Donna — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:55:03 +0000

I’ve ordered from them a few times and those went off without a hitch. My most recent order was botched, they sent me the wrong set of books entirely which is annoying but it would be okay if they would tell me how to get these books returned to them, which – over a week later – they still haven’t. So now I’ve asked to cancel the order so I can return their book and get a refund. This has also failed quite miserably which angers me especially since I do not have the money to throw away.
The only question they have ever asked me is what is the ISBN on the book I have received which will ‘help them figure out what happened’. I’ve told them what happened – they put the wrong ISBN label on the boxset and the person who packed the order is apparently illiterate and couldn’t tell if it was the right item.
What makes things worse is that this is a 21st birthday present and it doesn’t look like Book Depository is going to get anything resolved. I am deeply disappointed because I previously thought very highly of Book Depository. Very disappointed.

Comment on The Book Depository vs Amazon.com by sue

sue — Sun, 22 May 2011 05:04:07 +0000

I have been using book depository for several years. Initially delivery times were very short, but since they switched to using TNT books have been taking more than 2 weeks to arrive.
The website indicates that shipping is free to many countries around the world. What the website does not say, however, is that the price charged for a book depends on where you live. The price is often quite a bit higher if you order it from outside the UK than if you order it from within the UK.