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I usually code in 14 to 16 point font. I find that at this level most of the "standard" fonts are usable (i.e. something in the courer-TNR-arial-whatever family). I usually end up using a TrueType version of courier if it's available.

I also go out of my way to get a) syntax highlighting (becuase no matter how good I get at C I always forget that fscking terminating */ ;-) ) and b) a dark back ground color scheme (this way the lighter colors in a syntax schema show up better).

Are you sure it uses motif? I don't recall it needing it when I installed rp8 on a machine with no motif... But then I have OpenMotif installed (yeah, it's big, but it's free ;-) ) so I may not have noticed a problem if they changed it to using motif recently (the non-motif-having machine install was a while ago whereas my most recent install of rp on this machine was about a week ago).

Yeah, that is a nasty bug. Thanks for posting the fix! (I installed OpenMotif so the libXm thing isn't a problem, and libXt on my system is .6, so that's why I didn't notice anything amiss...)

It is real hard to hear substantive aural differences once your encoding bitrate is 128 kbps or higher. That is unless your hearing is extremely sharp. The "crappy sound" of most mp3's if they're encoded at 128 or above is more due to crummy sound reproduction in the computer (noisy sound card, cheeepass2000-model speakers, etc.).

I tried Mozilla 0.8 a few days ago (the last milestone I tried was 0.6 IIRC), and was pleasantly suprised by how much it has improved. Didn't crash once in several hours of use, even when I fed it Java. It even liked my 4.x series plugins[1] (namely Flash, I haven't tested realplayer or acrobat yet), which is a very cool point 'cuz that means there are whole masses of plugins that people use/rely on that won't have to be recoded all in a hurry for the new version.

So all in all: yay Mozilla! Thanks, coder dudes! :-)

[1] easy to do: cp /path/to/4.x/plugins/* /path/to/mozilla/plugins/ worked for me (one other filesystem level oddity was that to get java to work I had to symlink the libjavaplugin_oji.so from ~4 levels deep under (/path/to/mozilla)/plugins/ back to plugins; seems odd that the installer wouldn't do this).

Proof positive I need to drink at least one cup of coffee before reading /. after waking up. The thought of M$ being invovled in some sort of webcam-of-giant-booger, and what nefarous reasons they would have, dude, that's just wrong. :-)

Um, actually I can think of two ways to do this:

• Wine (I've seen it done, it ran pretty well considering...)
• iBCS2 kernel support and the solaris IE binary (no idea how well this would work but it's a possibility)

The broadband 'explosion' is crawling to a halt, and many providers are wondering why. It's quite simple, really - everyone has as much pornography as they want. Pornography has always been the driving force behind Internet innovation, after all. It was for pornography that ever faster connections were demanded, and it was for pornography that the basics of online financial transactions were fleshed out. However, there's simply a limit to the demand for pornography. To put it bluntly, everyone who uses the stuff is beating themselves sore, and can't possibly consume any more. Thus, the adoption of home broadband connections has dropped off severely. I predict, though, that our wily friends the pornographers will find a way to stimulate demand. Perhaps they will lobby congress to allow advertisements for pornography on television. Perhaps they will hire a celebrity spokesperson, such as Bob Doll or Heidi Wall. Regardless, once the pornographers get back on their feet, broadband demand will ignite once more.

Well, as one person (whose name I can't recall) said: "The entire body of computer science can be viewed as nothing more than the development of efficient methods for the storage, transportation, encoding, and rendering of pornography.".

It's easy to see how pr0n providers could cater to and increase demand for the broadband market: higher resolution and encoding for stills and motion picture files, high quality sound in motion picture files, Flash site navigation, etc. etc. etc. Figure, what, the average file size of a pr0n JPEG is 40-80KB? You could easily 10x that if you went for higher quality encoding and/or greater resolutions.

btw, Bob Dole is already a spokesperson for the sex industry. "Take viagra! It gave me a stiffy!"

AFAIK the 2d acceleration is pretty generalized (the XAA in XFree 4.x, I think in later 3.3.x too). So any driver that implements this will have "good 'nuff" 2d accel, which is most of them (again AFAIK; I did use one card that didn't (a shitty embedded SiS chipset video thing), and that sucked[1])). I know that, for example, things besides the rage128 in the ATi line are accelerated (e.g. Xpert 98, my fav' ubercheap agp card). I've also seen Matrox cards perform impressively in this regard (G200 & G400).

WRT Nautilus, I know basically zero about it but another poster is saying that they haven't addressed optimization yet (good for them, as Knuth said: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil.").

[1] I'd move a window, and it would screw up the blitting, so the window would leave glitches on the desktop and surfaces "below" it, as well as picking up glitches itself. Oh, and of course since everything was integrated and sharing the same limited bandwidth on the MB, moving the window caused so much traffic or something that the audio from a playing CD would stutter. :-( This was on the POS[tm] brand developer workstations I had at my last startup job (but to be charitable, they were very cheap and did basically let us get the job done).

Yeah, I got the 19 becuase my 17 went all bbbZZZt-pop on me. ;-) Oh well, it gave me 5 and a half years of faithful service so I can't complain too loud. (The 19 was only ~$50 more than a nice 17 what with this random super-duper rebate thing, which to my suprise the company actually honored.)

... the same ever again. Or patch cable for that matter. That's just wrong! Wrong, I say!

The other reply by Mr. Currie is very correct. Small additional note: really cold metals still have really low resistance, even if it ain't exactly zero. :-) So unless by T > Tcrit you mean T = 500 K or something, it probably won't die horribly. I'd guess you'd see increasing glitchiness as T rose, leading to total system failure. So you'd have functional warnings besides temp alarms (much like a computer that's overclocked too much now).

... it's the fsckin' moniter. My case is pretty light compared to my behemoth of a moniter (19" flatscreen, weighs about 60 pounds and is really unwieldly to carry). If somebody made a "moniter carrier" (like straps and handles or something), I'd buy it.

Well, to be honest I doubt that we'll reach room-temp or higher superconductors any time soon (== next hundred years or so). How ever, I suspect that in the next 20-50 years we'll discover a superconductor whose critical temperature is reachable with common industrial refridgerants (like say -40 C instead of -113). This is an easier goal to reach energetically and would open the field to industrial applications like the cool plasma deposition things the other poster was speaking of.

I did a little research into this field a few years back in a special topics class (as a chemist). My impression was that superconducting compounds (I was studying the Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxide family) were superconducting by virtue of "channels" forming through the crystalline structure that had surrounding electron densities just right such that free electrons could flow "down" them with 0 resistance, and that since the surrounding atoms "wiggled around" too much at T > Tcrit, the "channels" were disrupted. Or something. I was a chemist, and a freshman, so I wasn't exposed to a lot of the real underlying theory.

yep. OR... they're using a wireless modem.

heh, in which case the frustration of doing any thing shell-related in graphitti and over a 1KB/day link is far more punishment than any private citizen could legally inflict on them...

Minor sidenote: their are a goodly number of addon libs associated with SDL that address some of the things you say zoolib offers. (image and movie file formats, networking, fonts, etc. etc.). This is not to knock zoolib (about which I know basically zip), I'm just pointing it out for the sake of completeness.

But if they're doing it over an IR port they're probably within arms' reach... So you can shoot them or stab them or pinch their nipple and make 'em holler for their mamma... :-) Come on, how many times have you wanted to get one of the 31337 hax0r d00ds in spanking range?

Python has always been a superior language to Perl...

I realize you're just trying to be funny, but them's fightin' words. ;-)

Seriously though, use the right fsckin' tool for the goddamned job at hand. Python has cool features, and so does perl. Anyone who focuses solely on Python's OO syntax simplicity vs. perl's is really missing the point.

(personally python annoys me but that's just cuz' the whitespace-as-block-delimiter thing rubs me the wrong way, code just don't look right unless it's got curly braces (this is the same reason haskell and lisp and scheme annoy me, oh wait, they also annoy me becuase they're functional languages, but that's another 20KB rant in of it's own right)... ;-))

(I don't own a palm(-compatible) but I wish I did. Techie toy #1 on the post-graduation buy list.)

Doesn't the PocketC thing require the users to install a runtime or something? Are there any C-like environments for the Palm (that like PocketC run entirely on the device) that compile "pure" binaries (i.e. runtime-less)?

A friend of mine and I have set up ~5 slashcode[1] sites now (geekaustin.org is an example; they're all hosted off the same box). The first one you do is a royal with cheese pain in the ass. The engine is very flexible, but it'll probably take you a good month or two to get it up and become familiar with the inner workings.

So for a quick fix, my .02 USD is to avoid Slashcode and go with something simpler.

Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee. ;-)

Good luck!

[1] the mod_perl/shtml/MySQL monstrosity that powers this website among (many) others. it works but on the inside it ain't pretty...