Background on medical checklists saving lives (and yet meeting up with resistance at times from medical practitioners) in this important New Yorker piece by surgeon/writer Atul Gawande:
Gawande now has a book out about checklists called "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" that expands on this and also describes the usefulness of checklists in other areas: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742 (If the topic interests you, btw, Amazon apparently is selling this $24.50 hardcover book for only $10).
(Mind you, it appears that ecommerce may be handled outside of Drupal--whether that's due to some a lack in Drupal or some WBR-specific reason (e.g. legacy system), you'd have to ask check w/Ethan).
Of course you have some evidence that Saddam sent his weapons to Syria? And by evidence I don't mean the MSM, or the Bush Whitehouse. If I gave you several bad cheques in a row, would take another one? They lie. They lie all the time.
There have been several reports that WMD was moved to Syria, including from a top Iraqi air force general, from a top Israeli general and a Syrian journalist:
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq WMD located in three Syrian sites
06 January, 2004
AFP
Nizar Nayuf (Nayyouf-Nayyuf), a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper âoeDe Telegraaf,â that he knows the three sites where Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are kept. The storage places are:
-1- Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.
-2- The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian air force camp. Vital parts of Iraq's WMD are stored there.
-3-. The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of Homs city.
Nayouf writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein's Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat , Bashar Assad's cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family.
And, again, there's more there.
On the other hand, stories like this came out, in Apr. 2005, about how it was unlikely that WMD was shipped to Syria after a report about the issue came out:
By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, April 26, 2005; Page A01
U.S. investigators hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have found no evidence that such material was moved to Syria for safekeeping before the war, according to a final report of the investigation released yesterday.
Given the way things work in the middle east, though, and given how clueless Western intelligence can be about the area, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility too quickly.
And, here's a list of all the (eleven) articles he did for Data Management Review: http://www.univdata.com/pubs.htm (this includes the clickstream analysis data model article previously listed as well as others about "Universal Data Models for Financial Services", "Universal Data Models for Health Care", "Using "Universal Data Models to Jump-Start Your Data Modeling Effort", etc.)
Re:anyone know of a good "schema cookbook"
on
SQL Hacks
·
· Score: 1
Such things do exist--there are some free resources online as well as books that one can buy.
Books: A guy named Len Silverston has made this his niche--he's written these books: "The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 1: A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises" "The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 2: A Library of Data Models for Specific Industries"
On average, I also used to go to OfficeMax every week or two and walk out with plenty of free-after-rebate stuff, but that was a long time ago--pretty much ever since OM was bought out by paper-company Boise Cascade Corp. OfficeMax's free-after-rebate deals got worse and worse and then basically disappeared. I haven't been inside an OfficeMax in a long time because of that.
Even their post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sale in 2005 was lame as far as free-after-rebate stuff goes--it was about as good as what they used to have on a typical Sunday--so for the first time I didn't even bother stopping in (this after years of waiting on line to get in prior to opening and then waiting on long lines at checkout).
Actually, there are not one but two templating systems for osCommerce--there's BTS (the Basic Templating System) and STS (Simple Templating System). My understanding is that BTS is similar to what will eventually wind up in the next version of osC.
These templating systems are available fully-rolled in, along with a bunch of worthwhile user contributions, in osC variants such as oscMax, which uses BTS and CRELoaded CREloaded which uses STS.
I used osCMax for a site I implemented and it's been nice to have the templating there along with a bunch of other features so I didn't have to implement them.
As to the quality of osCommerce code...well, I'd have done things differently if I had to write a store myself but...I didn't have to write it myself--*big* win there, my friends.:-).
osCommerce does the job--it gives you quite a lot right out of the box, including multiple language/currency support, gives you more features in the form of "contributions" that can be added in--including support for all sorts of payment systems from other countries.
It is easily and cheaply hosted (if your web host doesn't actually provide it for you, as some do) and there are lots of people out there who know it who can be hired to make it work if you'd rather not bother or don't have the skills (and, conversely, as a developer, osCommerce crops up a bunch in job listings). There are also companies that provide graphical templates specifically for osCommerce stores to make stores look better if you don't like the basic osC look.
Is it perfect? No. But can you install it quickly and get a store up in a matter of hours that actually works, with all sorts of nice extras built-in? YES. Again, I'd suggest one of the variants with templates, etc. already rolled-in.
And, I suppose I should link to the store I did using oscMax, in case anyone is interested in seeing what it can do: KosherGourmetMart.com sells, as its name would suggest, gourmet kosher products.
P.S. There are some flash tutorials for doing things with osCommerce--just Google for: oscommerce flash tutorial (or click this to do that).
Six female mathematicians programmed the ENIAC during World War II and were the arguably the
world's first computer programmers. Their story
was largely forgotten until Kathryn Kleiman did
her undergraduate thesis as Harvard about them and got people interested in their story.
Ars Digita University, at present a one-year program for people looking for a serious introduction to computer science and related topics, has Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs on-line here. There are also videos of the lectures from the courses that are being taught, either for streaming or for download as well as problem sets.
Check out these URLs (and poke around a bit yourself):
AOLServer (www.aolserver.com) is a free, "one-process-with-threads" web server whose strength is that it keeps open database connections that you can get a handle to as needed, so you don't have the usual overhead of spawning new processes, etc.--using the TCL API you'd say something like this:
set handle [ns_db gethandle]
Using ns_db with other arguments you then get to do your queries/inserts/etc (simplifying just a little):
A quick quote from part 1: "AOLserver runs as a single Unix process. You can deliver the 20 dynamic pages per second of our example without your server having to start any new programs. If those pages need to connect to Oracle, they simply ask AOLserver to let them use an already-open connection from a configurable pool. Note that this ability to pool database connections is a consequence of AOLserver's one-process-with-threads architecture. With a process-pool Web server such as Apache, nothing stops you from linking in the Oracle C libraries. Your Apache server can then function as an Oracle client. However, there would be no way to share a database connection among Apache server processes. What's the bottom line difference? A site like http://photo.net can serve 700,000 hits per day, to about 120 simultaneous users at once, with one AOLserver process holding open eight connections to Oracle. That's a total of nine Unix processes (one AOLserver, eight Oracle). With Apache, providing the same level of service from photo.net would require 120 Apache server process, each of which held open two connections to Oracle: 360 processes total.
Another dividend from the single-process architecture of AOLserver is that you can cache stuff in AOLserver's virtual memory. For example, consider the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock (http://www.webho.com/WealthClock). It gets as many as two hits per second at peaks. Yet it relies on invoking CGI scripts running at foreign Web sites where they probably wouldn't appreciate getting hammered by my server. The solution is to cache the page in AOLserver's virtual memory. Again, this is something you could do with a process-pool server such as Apache but you'd be gradually building up 120 separate copies of the same data. "
Part 2 shows how to use the "ns_db" command that I mentioned above in some detail.
P.S. Philip Greenspun developed a great open source toolkit that sits on top of AOLServer called the Ars Digita Community System (aka the ACS) and wrote a book about it that is well known as a must-read for web-heads. It is on line for free, complete with all the photos:
P.P.S. There's a version of the ACS available that uses the open-source Postgresql database, if you don't want to pay for Oracle: Open ACS (they have a working beta but are waiting for Postgresql 7 to come out before making an official release).
The real deal with Ars Digita and the ACS toolkit:
Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).
Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net
So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html
Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html
Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.
Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.
By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.
And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all:-)
___ DC
P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash):-)
P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:
Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 12:26:11 -0500 From: Isabelle Drewelow To: anonymous_coward@slashdot.org Subject: Your Slashdot Posting October 28, 1999 anonymous_coward@slashdot.org BY E-MAIL Re: OpenGL for Dummies
Dear Mr. Coward,
IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. ("IDG Books") is the publisher of the well-known and well-regarded "...FOR DUMMIES" series of reference books and products.
It has come to my attention that you are using the subtitle "OpenGL for Dummies" in a chat room on your Web site at: http://www.slashdot.org While we wish you every success in your work, we must raise certain issues with respect to your use of IDG Books' federally registered trademark.
As you probably know, IDG Books publishes and distributes globally a line of reference books known as the "...FOR DUMMIES" series. This series has been in existence since 1991 and has been translated into 38 languages. In addition, there are many other successful FOR DUMMIES products including calendars, audio books, musical compact discs, toys, games, and clothing.
IDG Books has made a substantial investment in promoting the identification of this trademark to its distributors and customers, and currently has registrations in many countries.
Because of the significant efforts that IDG Books has undertaken to promote and protect its trademarks, and because of the potential for confusion and/or dilution, we trust that you can appreciate our concerns. For your information, dilution is a relatively new area of law which requires the owner of a trademark to protect it against "erosion" and/or dilution. Some famous examples of trademark dilution are Kleenex tissues, Scotch Tape, Xeroxing and Aspirin, as these marks were not protected by their respective owners and, today have become almost generic terms. At IDG Books, our goal is to prevent such "generalization" from happening to our trademarks.
Therefore, we hope that this matter can be resolved quickly and amicably. Accordingly, we request that you change "OpenGL for Dummies" to a non-infringing title and provide IDG Books with written assurances that you will refrain from using its trademarks in the future. We look forward to hearing from you by November 10th , 1999.
Very truly yours,
Isabelle Drewlalot Trademark Coordinator IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.
There is a driver so you can use ACS with InterBase, which I am given to understand is a free RDBMS on Linux. Read about that here
As the site below points out, there are other drivers for the AOLServer and then you'd just need to port the SQL that the ACS toolkit uses, since there are some differences in SQL implementations amongst the database vendors.
This site (the best one page FAQ/summary of what ACS is, etc.) that I've yet seen, is actually running ACS, so you can see what ACS looks like, and how AOLServer performs, on a cheap Linux box. (on his status page, http://www.alexium.com/status.html, he says he is running the system on a $500 linux box with a $49/month DSL connection. Runs pretty well, I think).
___ DC
As alexium.com mentions, Philip Greenspun's book on database-backed web-sites, which describes how to think (and how not to think) about doing this sort of stuff, is available on-line, complete with all the photographs: http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook (and go up and check out http://www.photo.net/wtr, where Philip Greenspun for lots more stuff).
If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.
No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.
[N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]
Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.
Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:
If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.
___ DC
P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here.
And, lest we not forget, in addition to "Toon" (which apparently is available on amazon.com) and the others, he also did that classic SPI wargame, "The Creature That Ate Sheboygan". Ah, those were the days...
Slashdot Mirror
Background on medical checklists saving lives (and yet meeting up with resistance at times from medical practitioners) in this important New Yorker piece by surgeon/writer Atul Gawande:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all
Gawande now has a book out about checklists called "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" that expands on this and also describes the usefulness of checklists in other areas: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742 (If the topic interests you, btw, Amazon apparently is selling this $24.50 hardcover book for only $10).
For reference: the Wikipedia page for Tetrachromat.
FWIW, Warner Bros. Records uses Drupal very heavily for its artist sites.
Check this out post, for example, on WBR's VP of Technology Ethan Kaplan's blog: http://blackrimglasses.com/archives/2007/07/26/wbr/
(Mind you, it appears that ecommerce may be handled outside of Drupal--whether that's due to some a lack in Drupal or some WBR-specific reason (e.g. legacy system), you'd have to ask check w/Ethan).
Of course you have some evidence that Saddam sent his weapons to Syria? And by evidence I don't mean the MSM, or the Bush Whitehouse. If I gave you several bad cheques in a row, would take another one? They lie. They lie all the time.
There have been several reports that WMD was moved to Syria, including from a top Iraqi air force general, from a top Israeli general and a Syrian journalist:
The Iraqi and Israeli generals are quoted here:
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/iraqs-wmd-secreted-in-syria-sada-says/26514/
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."
There's more there.
The Syrian journalist's report:
http://www.2la.org/syria/iraq-wmd.php
A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq WMD located in three Syrian sites
06 January, 2004
AFP
Nizar Nayuf (Nayyouf-Nayyuf), a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper âoeDe Telegraaf,â that he knows the three sites where Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are kept. The storage places are:
-1- Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.
-2- The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian air force camp. Vital parts of Iraq's WMD are stored there.
-3-. The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of Homs city.
Nayouf writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein's Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat , Bashar Assad's cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family.
And, again, there's more there.
On the other hand, stories like this came out, in Apr. 2005, about how it was unlikely that WMD was shipped to Syria after a report about the issue came out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501554.html
Report Finds No Evidence Syria Hid Iraqi Arms
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 26, 2005; Page A01
U.S. investigators hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have found no evidence that such material was moved to Syria for safekeeping before the war, according to a final report of the investigation released yesterday.
Given the way things work in the middle east, though, and given how clueless Western intelligence can be about the area, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility too quickly.
For those didn't get the reference and are too lazy to Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Pirate_Roberts#Role_in_The_Princess_Bride
P.S. Just found a list of all the data models that Silverston has in his 2 Data Model Resource books:t ml
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-106466.h
And, here's a list of all the (eleven) articles he did for Data Management Review:
http://www.univdata.com/pubs.htm
(this includes the clickstream analysis data model article previously listed as well as others about "Universal Data Models for Financial Services", "Universal Data Models for Health Care", "Using "Universal Data Models to Jump-Start Your Data Modeling Effort", etc.)
Such things do exist--there are some free resources online as well as books that one can buy.
d ex=books&field-author=Len%20Silverston&page=1
r ehouse/dp/0471153648
= 4479
Free data model collections:
http://www.databasedev.co.uk/data_models.html
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/
Books:
A guy named Len Silverston has made this his niche--he's written these books:
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 1: A Library of Universal Data Models for All Enterprises"
"The Data Model Resource Book, Vol. 2: A Library of Data Models for Specific Industries"
More about them on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&in
Or check this out:
http://www.univdata.com/book.htm (univdata.com is Silverston's company).
Another book (Silverston co-authored): "The Data Model Resource Book: A Library of Logical Data and Data Warehouse Designs " http://www.amazon.com/Data-Model-Resource-Book-Wa
If you want a free taste of what Silverston is about, here's an article he did with a data model for clickstream analysis:
http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId
And this is a more general article on universal data models that he wrote:
http://www.tdan.com/i010fe04.htm
On average, I also used to go to OfficeMax every week or two and walk out with plenty of free-after-rebate stuff, but that was a long time ago--pretty much ever since OM was bought out by paper-company Boise Cascade Corp. OfficeMax's free-after-rebate deals got worse and worse and then basically disappeared. I haven't been inside an OfficeMax in a long time because of that.
Even their post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sale in 2005 was lame as far as free-after-rebate stuff goes--it was about as good as what they used to have on a typical Sunday--so for the first time I didn't even bother stopping in (this after years of waiting on line to get in prior to opening and then waiting on long lines at checkout).
Actually, there are not one but two templating systems for osCommerce--there's BTS (the Basic Templating System) and STS (Simple Templating System). My understanding is that BTS is similar to what will eventually wind up in the next version of osC.
:-).
These templating systems are available fully-rolled in, along with a bunch of worthwhile user contributions, in osC variants such as oscMax, which uses BTS and CRELoaded CREloaded which uses STS.
I used osCMax for a site I implemented and it's been nice to have the templating there along with a bunch of other features so I didn't have to implement them.
As to the quality of osCommerce code...well, I'd have done things differently if I had to write a store myself but...I didn't have to write it myself--*big* win there, my friends.
osCommerce does the job--it gives you quite a lot right out of the box, including multiple language/currency support, gives you more features in the form of "contributions" that can be added in--including support for all sorts of payment systems from other countries.
It is easily and cheaply hosted (if your web host doesn't actually provide it for you, as some do) and there are lots of people out there who know it who can be hired to make it work if you'd rather not bother or don't have the skills (and, conversely, as a developer, osCommerce crops up a bunch in job listings). There are also companies that provide graphical templates specifically for osCommerce stores to make stores look better if you don't like the basic osC look.
Is it perfect? No. But can you install it quickly and get a store up in a matter of hours that actually works, with all sorts of nice extras built-in? YES. Again, I'd suggest one of the variants with templates, etc. already rolled-in.
And, I suppose I should link to the store I did using oscMax, in case anyone is interested in seeing what it can do: KosherGourmetMart.com sells, as its name would suggest, gourmet kosher products.
P.S. There are some flash tutorials for doing things with osCommerce--just Google for: oscommerce flash tutorial (or click this to do that).
I've noticed a huge void on TV however, there are no ongoing Super-Hero shows I'm aware of.
How about Smallville?
No, Constantine is most definitely from a DC/Vertigo title, Hellblazer (though he was invented by Alan Moore during his run on Swamp Thing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constantine
A Katrina relief effort by Little Green Football readers that had over $9000 in Paypal donations got frozen by Paypal:e s-our-account-as.html
o r-realizes-error.html
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypalcom-freez
Then unfrozen, thanks to efforts of someone higher up at Paypal:
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypal-supervis
Google to the rescue (i.e. you can do a "view as text" on .ps.gz files):
Here's the article as text
Time = Faster
Functionality = Better
Money = Cheaper
As the old saw goes: "Faster, better, cheaper:
pick any two"
__
DC
Read about it in the following links:
http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/1 997/eniac.shtml
(the above link has pictures of the six)
And:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,3711,00.htm l
http://aduni.org/academics/classes/
http://aduni.org/catalog/
set handle [ns_db gethandle]
Using ns_db with other arguments you then get to do your queries/inserts/etc (simplifying just a little):
ns_db $handle "select * from table"
ns_db dml $handle "insert into table (field1, field2) values ($value1, $value2)"
Then, when you are done, you just release the handle:
ns_db releasehandle $handle
Each AOLServer process can hold 8 database connections open.
AOLServer 2.3.3 is free, non-open source. AOLSerer 3.0 is free and open source, thanks to the efforts of Philip Greenspun and company.
Philip has written an intro to AOLServer that was published in Linux Today, it is now available in two parts here:
Part 1
Part 2
A quick quote from part 1: "AOLserver runs as a single Unix process. You can deliver the 20 dynamic pages per second of our example without your server having to start any new programs. If those pages need to connect to Oracle, they simply ask AOLserver to let them use an already-open connection from a configurable pool. Note that this ability to pool database connections is a consequence of AOLserver's one-process-with-threads architecture. With a process-pool Web server such as Apache, nothing stops you from linking in the Oracle C libraries. Your Apache server can then function as an Oracle client. However, there would be no way to share a database connection among Apache server processes. What's the bottom line difference? A site like http://photo.net can serve 700,000 hits per day, to about 120 simultaneous users at once, with one AOLserver process holding open eight connections to Oracle. That's a total of nine Unix processes (one AOLserver, eight Oracle). With Apache, providing the same level of service from photo.net would require 120 Apache server process, each of which held open two connections to Oracle: 360 processes total.
Another dividend from the single-process architecture of AOLserver is that you can cache stuff in AOLserver's virtual memory. For example, consider the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock (http://www.webho.com/WealthClock). It gets as many as two hits per second at peaks. Yet it relies on invoking CGI scripts running at foreign Web sites where they probably wouldn't appreciate getting hammered by my server. The solution is to cache the page in AOLserver's virtual memory. Again, this is something you could do with a process-pool server such as Apache but you'd be gradually building up 120 separate copies of the same data. "
Part 2 shows how to use the "ns_db" command that I mentioned above in some detail.
P.S. Philip Greenspun developed a great open source toolkit that sits on top of AOLServer called the Ars Digita Community System (aka the ACS) and wrote a book about it that is well known as a must-read for web-heads. It is on line for free, complete with all the photos:
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
P.P.S. There's a version of the ACS available that uses the open-source Postgresql database, if you don't want to pay for Oracle: Open ACS (they have a working beta but are waiting for Postgresql 7 to come out before making an official release).
dev.scriptics.com, a portal for Tcl developers at Scriptics, the Tcl company--uses the Ars Digita toolkit.
http://www.college411.com a commercial portal for college students. They are not an Ars Digita client but they are using the toolkit.
__
DC
Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).
Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net
So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html
Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html
Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.
Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.
By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.
And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)
___
DC
P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)
P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:
Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 12:26:11 -0500
From: Isabelle Drewelow
To: anonymous_coward@slashdot.org
Subject: Your Slashdot Posting
October 28, 1999
anonymous_coward@slashdot.org
BY E-MAIL
Re: OpenGL for Dummies
Dear Mr. Coward,
IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. ("IDG Books") is the publisher of the
well-known and well-regarded "...FOR DUMMIES" series of reference
books and products.
It has come to my attention that you are using the subtitle "OpenGL
for Dummies" in a chat room on your Web site at: http://www.slashdot.org While we wish
you every success in your work, we must raise certain issues with
respect to your use of IDG Books' federally registered trademark.
As you probably know, IDG Books publishes and distributes globally a
line of reference books known as the "...FOR DUMMIES" series. This
series has been in existence since 1991 and has been translated into
38 languages. In addition, there are many other successful FOR
DUMMIES products including calendars, audio books, musical
compact discs, toys, games, and clothing.
IDG Books has made a substantial investment in promoting the
identification of this trademark to its distributors and customers, and
currently has registrations in many countries.
Because of the significant efforts that IDG Books has undertaken to
promote and protect its trademarks, and because of the potential for
confusion and/or dilution, we trust that you can appreciate our
concerns. For your information, dilution is a relatively new area of law
which requires the owner of a trademark to protect it against "erosion"
and/or dilution. Some famous examples of trademark dilution are
Kleenex tissues, Scotch Tape, Xeroxing and Aspirin, as these marks
were not protected by their respective owners and, today have
become almost generic terms. At IDG Books, our goal is to prevent
such "generalization" from happening to our trademarks.
Therefore, we hope that this matter can be resolved quickly and
amicably. Accordingly, we request that you change "OpenGL for
Dummies" to a non-infringing title and provide IDG Books with written
assurances that you will refrain from using its trademarks in the future.
We look forward to hearing from you by November 10th , 1999.
Very truly yours,
Isabelle Drewlalot
Trademark Coordinator
IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.
There is a driver so you can use ACS with InterBase, which I am given to understand is a free RDBMS on Linux. Read about that here
As the site below points out, there are other drivers for the AOLServer and then you'd just need to port the SQL that the ACS toolkit uses, since there are some differences in SQL implementations amongst the database vendors.
http://www.alexium.com/wab/arsdigita.html
This site (the best one page FAQ/summary of what ACS is, etc.) that I've yet seen, is actually running ACS, so you can see what ACS looks like, and how AOLServer performs, on a cheap Linux box. (on his status page, http://www.alexium.com/status.html, he says he is running the system on a $500 linux box with a $49/month DSL connection. Runs pretty well, I think).
___
DC
As alexium.com mentions, Philip Greenspun's book on database-backed web-sites, which describes how to think (and how not to think) about doing this sort of stuff, is available on-line, complete with all the photographs: http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook (and go up and check out http://www.photo.net/wtr, where Philip Greenspun for lots more stuff).
If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.
No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.
[N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]
Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.
Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:
http://bmerc-www.bu.edu/needle-doc/emacs/ .
If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.
___
DC
P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here.
And, lest we not forget, in addition to "Toon" (which apparently is available on amazon.com) and the others, he also did that classic SPI wargame, "The Creature That Ate Sheboygan". Ah, those were the days...