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Another morse encoder and decoder, with JavaScript-source: http://www.xs4all.nl/~rvtol/morse_js.html

Clickable: http://www.xs4all.nl/~neteagle/oops/downloadnow.ht ml

Also, be sure to check out www.turnofftheinternet.com (turn your popup blocker off.. works best in IE6.. remember your Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Del.. it's nothing you can't get out of, don't worry). Funny trick to set up in a computer lab, for instance...

A few folks have a contrary opinion on the use of Verdana and fixed font sizes when applied to the web:

• Why you should avoid the Verdana font
• The Wrong Size Fonts Or why not to over-ride the reader?s font size
• Another way to think about font-size control

A popular article on the differences in designing for printed media and the web at Web Pages aren't Printed on Paper. Check out the global comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets for further resources.

A few folks have a contrary opinion on the use of Verdana and fixed font sizes when applied to the web:

• Why you should avoid the Verdana font
• The Wrong Size Fonts Or why not to over-ride the reader?s font size
• Another way to think about font-size control

A popular article on the differences in designing for printed media and the web at Web Pages aren't Printed on Paper. Check out the global comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets for further resources.

Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes, Dr. Nazarewicz said.

The discoveries fill a gap at the furthest edge of the periodic table and hint strongly at a weird landscape of undiscovered elements beyond.

Those numbers should help map out what Dr. Nazarewicz prefers to call generically a "region of stability" among the superheavies. (Because, he says, it could resemble a peninsula more than an island.) Various theories have suggested that the next magic proton number is 114, 120 or 126, he said. There is general agreement that the next magic neutron number is 184, he said.

Q.E.D

The scroll wheel is amazing, and I'm angry at Apple for patening it.

Well, tough shit. Know what I'm angry about? Twenty years of people pooh-poohing Apple products, and then turning around and cranking out shit-ass knockoffs of those same Apple products so cheap people can delude themselves into thinking what they bought is just as good.

If anyone deserves to use patents to defend distinctive features of their products from being ripped off by shifty competitors, it's Apple.

The Infocom game where I first learned of H2G2... about twenty years ago.

I know we're not the only ones to have been burned by Wind River's malloc. I know several major companies that also had to replace Wind River's code.

As far as being able to dynamically replace code, VxWorks isn't alone in that. Numerous other RTOSes out there can do the same thing, including QNX. QNX even supports the concept of a hot standby process to take over if the main process dies.

To give you an idea about how Wind River's malloc works, they keep a sorted linked list of fragments from the smallest to the largest. When you try and allocate a block, it walks the linked list until it finds a block large enough. Likewise, when you free a block it checks if it can coalesc the block with a neighboring block. It then goes through the linked list looking for a slot to insert the free block.

Yes, VxWorks may have been around since the 80's, but that's part of the problem too and it is showing its age. In the 80s embedded processors typically did not have MMUs. Now MMUs are quite common in the more powerful embedded processors.

You say you can't have low latency and memory protection? QNX proves that you can. It is low latency and *very* robust. If your driver dies, no problem, restart it. Timesys Linux also has a very low latency, although not as low as QNX. Timesys also has an interesting feature where you can guarantee CPU and networking resources. I can schedule a task to be guaranteed 5.8ms of execution every 8.3ms and it will guarantee that that task will get the CPU time allotted to it with the desired resolution. This is without increasing the system tick rate (usually 10ms). Timesys can also schedule a task to be higher priority than an interrupt. I'm not as familiar with QNXs scheduler, but it's also quite flexible from what I've heard.

As far as FAT, it is not a robust filesystem. It never has been. If the FAT gets corrupted or a directory entry gets corrupted it's difficult to recover. Other than possibly having 2 copies of the FAT cluster table, any corruption can be difficult to repair. If the FAT table gets corrupted, which table is corrupt and which is not? If a directory entry gets corrupted, it can be impossible to fix. For flash memory, unless you are using a device with special wear-leveling, FAT is about the worst choice since any file write that changes the size of a file requires a write to the directory entry and possibly the FAT table. If the table gets corrupted and you don't run a repair operation (which often ends up leaving orphaned files as lost clusters), the file system can happily corrupt itself to death. Why do you think every time DOS/Windows9x/ME crashed it had to repair the disk with scandisk? FAT is a poorly designed file system that was originally designed for 160K floppies and scales poorly. FAT32 is an improvement, but it's still not very robust. For flash, something like Linux's journalling flash file system 2 (JFFS2). More information on VxWorks file system support can be found here.

Basic VxWorks information can be found http://www.slac.stanford.edu/exp/glast/flight/docs /VxWorks_2.2/vxworks/guide/.

Here is some gregorian chant, or polymetric stuff.

nonstandard key signatures,

See this example

cutout scores, feathered beaming, ossia measures, etc.

These are not supported, although feathered beaming would not be difficult to implement. However, I have played in a ensemble that plays 20th and 21st century music exclusively for the past five years, and I have rarely seen the contraptions that you mention in modern music; most of it is notated with traditional notation, with a lot of time-sig changes. In fact, publishers nowadays will not engrave such funky scores, but have them written by hand, or they will reproduce the manuscript (Unless you happen to be called Xenakis or Berio.)

I had a copy job that I originally tried to do in Lilypond via the text interface and copying one part from the score took almot nine hours of typing, rendering it, fixing it, and re-rendering it to ensure that it came out right.

YMMV; I have recently produced parts & score (4 pages for the 2nd part). It took me approximately 30 minutes. Granted, it was a straightforward piece, but the speed depends much on how well-versed you are with the software. Finally, LilyPond has progressed very much in usability over the last year. If the last time you tried it was more than a year ago, you might want to give it another go.

Lilypond would need to have a nicer MIDI-compatible interface thrown on top of it to compete.

Have you seen RoseGarden and NoteEdit.

structured navigation: u, n, p take me, respectively, up a level, to the next section, and to the previous section. My understanding is that html gives the ability to express that kind of structure but that most browsers don't currently provide a convenient user interface for it; so maybe that'll change some day.

TI was the first CHEAP digital watch. Before that was Pulsar which was anything but cheap, and oddly stylish today in a retro sort of way. And who could resist using a little magnetic bar to alter the time?

Cheap digital watches drove the market for cheap (and much less accurate) clock crystals. It was all downhill from there.

Pulsar was a brand name used by Hamilton, one of the few and great American watch companies. They sold Pulsar as a brand name to some Asian consortium and the $17 Pulsar you find in Wal Mart today has as much to do with Hamilton as the $17 Gruens had to do with the original Gruen company.

Hamilton, in turn was sold to SMH, now "The Swatch Group" (which was formed in 1933 when Omega, Tissot and Lemania merged).

My ISP, xs4all, gives me an IPv6 /48 as part of my basic ADSL.

Or isn't that what you meant?

I couldn't agree more, but I have my reservations.

From this page:

With a fractured skull and a bashed in nose, he was blind for some days, but he pulled through, and six months later he joined 80 Squadron at Elevsis near Athens, Greece, that flew Hurricanes now instead of Gladiators. With a whopping seven hours training on Hurricanes, he managed to shoot down two enemy bombers. This squadron and 33 Squadron of famous ace Pat Pattle (the whole RAF force in Greece, 'all twelve of us') fought against great odds but had to pull out of Greece with heavy losses. He gives a very unglamourous insider view of the 'Battle of Athens' in which Pattle was killed.
80 Squadron was reassembled in Haifa, Palestine. From here, Dahl flew missions every day for a period of four weeks, but then he began to get blinding headaches that gave him black-outs in the air, and he was invalided home to Britain.

It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives.

Jobs hated hard drives because they were loud and power hungry. A Macintosh with internal hard drive would require a cooling fan, and that was agains Jobs will. He was always a fan of silent computing (and still is - the hard drive in my iBook is incredibly silent, and the machine is almost entirely mute, until the fan kicks in, but that's not very often). Oddly enough, many people in early 80's considered hard drives to be a dead end and obsolete technology. The mass storage of the future was supposed to be bubble memory. Kind of like the gallium arsenide story, methinks - but I still remember predictions in computer press that no hard drive can go past the 100 megabyte barrier and no silicon-based CPU can break the 100 megahertz.

How do you know? Of all the people that have contracted cancer how do you know which one's were cause by radiation from plutonium, or by-products?

The only "by-products" of radioisotopes are stable metals of a lower element number. These are all over the place and won't affect you any more than the hundreds of thousands of batteries disposed every year. As for the radioactive plutonium itself, this stuff is EXTREMELY radioactive. You can get cancer from a small particle embedded in your system. However, that small particle still puts out enough radiation to be detectable on a geiger counter or medical tracing equipment.

In other words, we would have heard of at least one instance where someone got cancer and they found it was due to plutonium.

Meteriods are made of "light" elements, such as iron.

Whoever told you that was wrong.

Thirty miles high

Yeah... here's an article about accidently destroying the universe: Oops

I read that there is one high energy particle experiment that could destroy our universe : Oops

Has anyone set up their wireless access point this way, and if so, is it straight-forward? I assume one can do it with OpenRadius?

Political spam isn't top much different from unsolicited political phone calls.

and we know how to deal with unsolicited phone calls! :)

the most impressive feature it has to offer is the kparts system, which integrates virtually everything which (you decide) is useful.

Yeah, it's pretty cool that you can even watch those trailers from http://www.apple.com/trailers/ in Konqueror. Anyways the app I'm using (kdeextragear-2/kmplayer) isn't included in release, but maybe in the future.

Well, here's a shot using the kpart ;)

If you install it, the calculator no longer does math.

Kinda defeats the purpose of having a calculator, no?

Now if someone ported the yacas engine to it, and made it similar to the original interface, that would be something!

I'm not going to put an alternative OS on my calculator that just plays games, when I can have a gameboy advance for $100 and get color too!

My own personal opposition to cloning comes not from moral reasons, but because we have a population problem


We have a population problem? We might, but it's not in the direction you think. Women are having less babies and it's not just in America, it's around the world. As women become more liberated and birth control (including)becomes more popular, less and less women will have children. Impotence in males is also rising, it may come to a point where we need to clone ourselves, or our ancestors.

I have been using the base Morphix system for a Bengali l10n Live CD project (which was mentioned at slashdot a few days back). I am really amazed by its capabilities - if you want to have a LiveCD of your own - this is probably the best starting point.
For documentation, you may want to have a look at the Morphix Wiki.

Why is it so hard to make real, clickable links? WHY, Mr Anderson???
Here's the link

When you have finished your post production, you might want to take a look at my little application LiVES

more science jokes

An Engineering Student, a Physics Student, and a Mathematics student were
each given $150 dollars and were told to use that money to find out exactly
how tall a particular hotel was.

All three ran off, extremely keen on how to do this. The Physics
student went out, purchased some stopwatches, a number of ball bearings,
a calculator, and some friends. He had them all time the drop of ball
bearings from the roof, and he then figured out the height from the time
it took for the bearings to accelerate from rest until they impacted with
the sidewalk.

The Math student waited until the sun was going down, then she
took out her protractor, plumb line, measuring tape,and scratch pad,
measured the length of the shadow, found the angle the buildings roof
made from the ground, and used trignometry to figure out the height of
the building.

These two students bumped into the Engineering student the next
day, who was nursing a really bad hangover. When asked what he did to
find the height of the building he replied:

"Well, I walked up to the bell hop, gave him 10 bucks, asked him
how tall the hotel was, and hit the bar inside for happy hour!"

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. - Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)

How many consulting engineers does it take to change a light bulb? One, that'll be $50 please.

How many nuclear physicists does it take to change a light bulb? One, he raises it into place and the world revolves around him.

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Can't be done. It's a hardware problem.

How many mathematicians does it take to change a light bulb? Approximately 1.000000000000000000000.

How many Pentium owners does it take to change a light bulb? 0.99987, but that's close enough for most applications.

How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? It burned out? You must be using a non-standard socket.

How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they merely change the standard to darkness and then they upgrade the customers.

How many Apple employees does it take to screw in a light bulb? Seven, one to screw it in and six to design the T-shirts.

How many AOL users does it take to change a light bulb? Two, one to screw in the light bulb, and one to watch him to make sure he doesn't say 'nipple'.

How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One always leaves in the middle of the project.

How many beta testers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just find the problems, they don't fix them.

How many science fiction writers does it take to change a light bulb? Two, but it's actually the same person doing it. He went back in time and met himself in the doorway and then the first one sat on the other one's shoulder so that they were able to reach it. Then a major time paradox occurred and the entire room, light bulb, changer and all was blown out of existence.

I'm just waiting to see these babies to hit the shops.

TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses.

Are you sure that's the first? I agree the TRS80s were early, but the Acorn Atom (1980 - and I have one from that year with the network card) had Econet, a network with up to 255 nodes per subnet and a protocol for servers (machines with hard disk and/or printers) to advertise themselves to clients.

Gongrijp knows what he's talking about. He was one of the founders of Hacktic magazine, a "magazine for techno-anarchists" that was published from 1989 till 1994. Hacktic publications included schematics for pay television descramblers, detailed expositions of operating system vulnerabilities, articles on "social engineering" (I think they might even have coined the phrase), and numerous topics on hacking the phone company ("phreaking") and war dialing.

These guys have also organized some huge hacker conferences such as Hacking at the End of the Universe in 1993 and Hacking In Progress in 1997 (I was there in '97). Later Hacktic professionalized and they became the first ISP in the Netherlands. Still later that turned into XS4ALL, probably the best ISP in the Netherlands.

Through everything, Gongrijp ("Public Enemy #1") was a driving force. If he says the phone is secure, then that's a pretty damn strong endorsement.

Speaking of two wheeled robots of yore, does anyone remember Topo?

http://www.xs4all.nl/~vkessels/gallery/androbot.ht ml
http://www.robotswanted.com/robotgallery/androbot/

My father worked for Androbot, and I actually remember going to the facility and seeing a Bob.. boy was that cool especially since I was 6 at the time.

I wanted to post a link to DHTML Lemmings (the original Lemmings in your browser) but it looks like they had to take it down. Help the guy figure out who, exactly, is the owner of Lemmings!

or build them yourself

The Dutch judge dismissed the claim, and showed a thorough insight in the technical side of the matter in the summation.

Mazur.

The rules are indeed stupid. It all comes down to how you define terribly vague words like "building" and "structure". Here is a good (now out of date) discussion of the issue.

Believe it or not, but this discussion can get even more complex. A few months ago I received a message from Steven Enz who lives in Canada. He sent me the most curious and clever contribution to this debate. Listen to this:

"On April 27, 1996, I attached a 3 meter helium balloon to a 1000 meter string and succesfully topped out the whole spool. Now I realize that it was a fairly flimsy structure but make no bones about it, it was indeed a structure. It wasn't intended for humans to occupy it but then again neither is a TV-mast. Oh well, you can add this structure to your list with my permission. Documented proof is available if you need it."

It sounds to me like you need the Anti-Telemarketing Counterscript. :)

-r

I am working with Jaromil on the dyne:bolic CD. The latest bootable CD also contains the LiVES video editing system. With this CD it will be possible to grab frames from a camera, edit and splice the clips, VJ with them, then encode them to any format and burn them on to CD ROM.

Exactly the reason my project is 100% mono free ! I use only perl and gtk+. Accept no substitutes !

Asking telemarketers how much they earn is great fun.

Or you could try this counterscript.

Another aspect is having a project leader that knows how to interact with users. It's a very simple way to either rise above otherwise mediocre programming skills, or to turn a perfectly good project into a deserted wasteland. People like enthusiastic or helpful leaders, not whiners or hermits. Running an Open Source project means more than just writing code.

geez, now try warez.xs4all.nl, i'm sure you'll find loads of the latest apps, gamez and movies there!

If I take a photograph of a tree and encode it into bits, those bits will always represent the content of an image, even if some stupid Baudio-like program presents those bits as though they were some other sort of media. ... If you honestly intend to listen to my image file ... then maybe we can talk about it's merits as music/line noise.

How do you explain artists such as Aphex Twin (who purposely encoded his face into a song for his listener's enjoyment)? As one who enjoys Richard D. James' music, I have to argue that listening to images as audio is a reality. And honestly in many of his songs you can't even tell the difference between his homebrewed instruments and his face. Granted his face isn't generally the most beautiful thing about his music.

It just that these two unrelated events don't presage that. Bummer, huh? You'll have to pay those credit card bills after all.

Or, it could be a black hole on its way to the earth throwing kupiter belt objects and other assorted space goodies at us. Soon the black hole will be here and kill us all! The government paid you to be a disinformation agent! You can't fool the good citizens of slashdot. (Do I still have to pay my visa bill?)

Um. What would be the problem with a web based interface? Obviously you haven't seen very many web based applications.

In my experience web interfaces come in three flavours...

• Simple: Think amazon order page, or eBay. These work well using just normal html but do very little. If you use them every now and again they are pretty good, if you use them a lot it can become annoying having to be so constrained.
• Hack job: These try to do something slightly more advanced (which could always just be better designed to be a "simple" interface as above), often require java/javascript without good cause, break on different browsers and are often more painful to use even if you have the "right" browser. The only reason for existance is that the programer can't design good interfaces and/or like "cute" menus etc. that don't work. A good examples are buy.com when I last used it (it's possible it's improved) and most of the timecard applications (Ohh let's require java and javascript for simple a goddamn form).
• Real apps: These are real applications, they require java/javscript/flash/whatever
• although they almost always are only tested on win32 and would always be better off being written in some portable real language (like Java with SWT, python with wxwindows, or just VB if you only care about win32). Good examples are yahoo games and
• DHTML lemmings, before that was shut down.

I help write a commercial one for a living, and our web based interface is very desktop application like, and it works in both Mozilla and IE.

I can guarantee it doesn't work in my version of mozilla (java and javascript turned off for security). And the great thing about the web before stupid people decided to try and write Excel on it was that I could do the same thing with lynx, or gtkhtml, or dillo, or...

We have even have ctrl-shift multiple selections so you can open multiple records at once, or you can double click a single record in a listing to open it.

So go write in Java or python, or whatever, the people who need to use your "application" will be happier because it'll actually be an application and you will be able to drag and drop and all the other stuff to act like a real application does. And all of the people using lynx, or dillo or whatever can be happy that you've got off the web.

I've been looking at hardware to build a terabyte sized file server for work and this is basic hardware I've been looking at (prices may not be the absolute best, I didn't shop around):

Western Digital 250GB SATA 8 MB Cache 7200 RPM $325.00 QTY 5 [Using RAID5 gets you close to 1TB]
Sub-total $1625

3Ware Escalade 8506-8 Serial ATA RAID
$490.00 QTY 1

SuperMicro SATA Mobile RackCSE-M35T1
$140 QTY:1

Total $2255+tax

The SuperMicro "RAID cage" holds 5 1" SATA drives in the space of 3 5.25" bays. I haven't found anything else that packs this many drives in such a small space. I'd be very interested to hear of people's experiences with this or other RAID cages.

If you have a big enough case, you could add this to your existing computer and be good to go. If the case isn't big enough, just get a bigger case and move the guts of the computer into it, like a hermit crab :)

Alternately, you could buy/build a cheap computer with 4 5.25" bays (need one for the optical drive) and use it as a file server. Budget about $500 for it if it's really dedicated to just serving files, you can skimp on the processor, video card and the little extras. I would choose Linux for the file server but Windows would probably be okay if your main OS is Windows (but then you have to buy a Windows license which skews the cost of the file server). You would probably want to spend a little extra and get a extra pair of gigabit Ethernet NICs, one for the server, one for your desktop PC.

The whole thing should be around $3000 which is not too shabby. It could be even cheaper if you used smaller drives but more of them.
5 250GB @$325 = $1625
6 200GB @$260 =$1560
8 160GB @$156 = $1248
The 8 drive option would probably require bigger (more expensive) case than the other two.

For my project I'm planning on getting a 7 bay case and the 3Ware Escalade 8506-12 so I can just buy 5 more drives and another RAID cage to move up to 2TB. Woo!