If you're just trying to get it to work, taping off the switches is more sensible than ripping the switches out of the wall, then having to put everything back when you realize the system you chose had basic flaws.

The big problems with wiring a house for remotely-controlled switches are that 1) the wall switches may only have the hot wire go through the box, leaving you without a good way to power your "smart" switches other than ground leakage, and that 2) wires to the lamps and outlets are on the same branch, so you can't put the relays in a box next to the breakers, and the relays basically need to be put at or in the lamp itself, and any on/off smarts (occupancy detection and on/off schedules) need to also be at the relay.

Then you need some way to get a signal from the switch to the relay (assuming you don't do the old X-10 thing with the relay in the switch). Fortunately, wireless technology has significantly improved in the past decade or so.

But indeed, this "isn't for everyone".

That's great, until you ask a question about second-year college stuff. Like "show me how to reverse a linked list", which is basic Data Structures class material, not the hard stuff. And then suddenly they get the deer-in-the-headlights look. Back around '04 or so, the group I was in interviewed some people, with the same interview style that I got hired with. All the Java-addled recent CS grads were useless. Only the EE grads actually knew how to program.

Someone should write an emulator that runs on an Arduino.

Um, yeah, I'm gonna have to put up a [CITATION NEEDED] here. Sure, that's a thing, but so is Systems Hungarian Notation.

It's called the DRY principle, as in Don't Repeat Yourself. Any time you do the same sequence of stuff in multiple places, when that sequence needs to change, the chance of missing one is increased.

minor change:

case 2: if (AcquireResource3()) ok = false; else DoStuffWithResources(); break;

int i;
bool ok = true;
for (i = 0; ok && i < 3; i++) {
; switch (i) {
; ; case 0: if (!AcquireResource1()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 1: if (AcquireResource2()) ok = false; break;
; ; case 2: if (AcquireResource3()) ok = false; break;
; }
; if (!ok) break;
}
switch(i) {
; case 3: Cleanup3();
; case 2: Cleanup2();
; case 1: Cleanup1();
}

Why yes, I read thedailywtf.com, why do you ask?

I think part of it was just the era, when FORTRAN still was a significant programming language. Its arithmetic IF was basically a triple GOTO statement, and you could literally go anywhere from it. Only being able to use numbers for labels, with no enforcement of numeric order, made it even worse.

As long as you make the effort to use the standard (and more readable) control structures where they apply, the really weird stuff like error abort stuff then can stand out by its use of goto. I still don't feel that it's significantly more readable to abuse stuff like do { } while(0) (other than in a #define macro to ensure statement atomicity) over a "goto abort".

The real fun comes when every one of those layers has an else block. So you end up with about 300 lines of code, then come up on a dozen else error("some message"); else error("another message"); else error("another twisty message all different"); else etc. To paraphrase the real estate agent's motto: locality, locality, locality!

And of course the legacy code that I had to work on did all of this in main(). He also had a fondness for putting assignments inside the if statements, like: if (retval = longnamefunction(parameter, anotherfunction(parm, pram), paremater, &pretamer) and they would go to about column 120 or so

That's why you never pick the numbers from a fortune cookie. It actually happened once, and the lottery people at first suspected fraud when there were 100 winning tickets. Then they found out it was a fortune cookie number. (Hint: they're mass-printed on sheets before being cut into strips.)

What's wrong, did you buy a bubble-priced house in the People's Republic of California and end up underwater? Here in Texas, housing prices didn't skyrocket into the stupid. The other day I noticed a price for a comparable house (100sqft larger) a few blocks away that is about 70% more than what I paid for my house 14 years ago. At that price my loan is over 60% equity.

Any regular reader of thedailywtf.com would also include the support classes like BubbleSortFactory, BubbleSortFactoryFactory, automated testing support, etc. Who needs regular fluffy when you can have enterprisey fluffy!

Nope. 4 and 5 left index finger, 6 and 7 right index finger.

But just because a broken keyboard broke your typing doesn't mean you can't type well. My usage of the right shift key was broken by a few months in college of having to use a 1970's era IBM 327x terminal, where the right-shift location was either the "SEND" key or something else useless. (I really looked hard but could only find pictures of 327x keyboards with a proper right shift key.)

So now I always use the left shift, and to type an uppercase A, my left ring finger goes to the A key.

The 6 key is on the left side? Do you even touch-type, bro? This is the one thing that annoys me the most about split keyboards.

How instantly is instantly? My big TV set takes about 10 seconds to start up, half of that time with "Please wait" on the screen. (I think all big-screen TV sets these days run an embedded Linux, so it probably cold-boots when turned on.) I have a smaller set that takes like three seconds just to turn the power LED on.

I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a "pair of scissors filter". <img src="RonSwanson.jpg">