2018: Courrier Sud - Antoine de Saint Exupéry Vol de Nuit - Antoine de Saint Exupéry Maigret - Georges Simenon Vingt mille lieues sous les mers - Jules Verne
1. Libre/Open office needs to figure out that tables are NOT spreadsheets. When I select a row and hit ^X, it should delete the entire row, not just the data. Same with moving rows.
2. Libre/Open office makes it nearly impossible to hide text. With word, there is a formatting option, "hidden." With Libre, you have to set up a rule, write a bunch of Visual Basic, access a database.... I exaggerate, but not much.
One note: I'm working on a document in Open Office that's about 450 pages on a netbook with 1 gig of memory, a single 1Ghz processor, and it's perfectly usable. (Ubuntu netbook remix)
Webex works better than skype for most of what we do. Seeing the other people isn't as valuable as being able to present a desktop, in my experience. Get a headset.
If your remote desktop is Linux, you'll want xWin32. You can't effectively run KDE without it (that I know of), and Gnome works better with it. Unfortunately, it's not free. If you're willing to suffer with Gnome, you can use VNC, but it's buggy.
Not sure how well webex works in Linux, but you can run both W7 and Linux on the same box using virtual machines, as many have pointed out. I recommend VMWare, as it seems a tad more stable than Virtual Box. "VMWare Player" (that's what you want, which is tricky to determine from their confusing product page) is free for Windoze and Linux, but I think it's $$ for the Mac. At least, one of my colleagues reported having to pay for it. I don't run a Mac, but I run WXP, W7, SuSE, Mint, and Ubuntu net remix.
We have a VPN... I regard that as essential. You can fake it with ssh, but it's clumsy.
The nice thing about groovy is that it interoperates with java smoothly, since I'm gathering that the native Android APIs are in Java.
However, I think what you really want is a scripting language that's geared for writing miniature touchscreen/phone apps. Which is something that may not exist yet.
I picture things like location and orientation incorporated into the native language, the way threads are in Java. Mind you, I do not have one of these devices, but I like Groovy.
the Libre/open office team(s) haven't yet figured out that tables are not spreadsheets. When I hit ctl+X with a row selected, I want to cut the row, not just the data. As a consequence, moving rows around in Libre/OO is simply painful.
Also, their implementation of hidden text is ridiculous. It takes about fifteen steps, versus about two that it takes in Word (select, set as 'hidden')
I say that as a longtime OO user, and advocate evan. I use it on my netbook constantly for writing novels, presentations, what have you. I love the fact that you can open documents in windows and Linux both, and that it does better than M$ Office sometimes, opening M$ documents. (Particularly true of Office 2003, with XML docx... thought OO has a nasty bug that deletes annotations when you save in docx format).
For basic writing and formatting, OO equals or surpasses M$ Office. I just wish they would fix the two above design flaws.
Also handy for hitching a ride when the planet is about to explode.
OK tech, weak plot towards the end
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
It was written like the plot of a video game, not surprisingly, since that's what Mr. Suarez does for a living. Very mechanical, not much in the way of human characters. I found it difficult to care much about any of them. A good beginning, but I felt cheated as the questions were answered. For example, why would this guy murder all these people who helped him? It seems like it would have more sense to choose an accomplice from those he knew while he was alive.
A truly unrealistic feature of Daemon is that nothing ever seems to go wrong. Devices run for years in the outdoor weather without a glitch. Right. I mean, sure, the main character's a "genius," but to write that amount of code without any bugs whatsoever? More realism on that count would have made for a better story.
Suarez could lay off some of the gore. Callous and unrealistic. Superficial pseudo-action, just the sort that would to appeal to, well, a hard core gamer who doesn't get out much.
I've seen both sides of it. I failed a phone screen once with someone was asking ridiculously specific questions about Java threading, expecting instantaneous responses. It had been a few years since I was really thinking about it, so I guess my immediate answers weren't optimal. Sorry. I found it rude and annoying that they didn't have the patience to discover that I really did understand the concepts they were asking about.
On the other hand, recently our company has been interviewing, and it's truly amazing what people will put on their resumes. I don't blame them -- if they don't have those keywords in there, then their resume will never turn up in the word searches.
I'll ask (pointing to their resume), "so you say you know javascript?" and I'll get something like: "well, I looked at some javascript code once, back when I was in college, for maybe five minutes. Well actually, I saw the word 'javascript' on the spine of a book in the store...." and of course they can't answer any questions about it.
What amazes me are the ones who can talk up a storm, and even talk with fair intelligence about polymorphism and Spring, hibernate, object patterns and java beans and so on, but are completely incapable of writing a simple Java class declaration, and fail completely to answer even the most basic coding questions.
Or (here's my favorite) they'll tell me they "know" red hat and suse and ubuntu linux, but I ask them a simple shell question and they go blank. (e.g. "how would you FIND all of the files recursively from a subdirectory, with the extension.java?")
One that I find more interesting is the concept of normalization. I have seen people who can give me textbook-perfect definitions, but completely fail to grasp an example I give them, but I've also seen the reverse: people who immediately get the concept when they see the example, but are completely incapable of defining the term. Go figure.
I don't think it's generally that people are dishonest. They just overestimate their own understanding.
Here's a simple way to eliminate 80% of backscatter:
Ban qmail from the internet!!
The stock version doesn't check for validity until after the connection with the SMTP server has broken. Then it obediently sends the bounce to the reply-to address. Yuck!
I'm not being facetious -- this is a major problem. It's why, as an experienced performer, I don't perform very much. You can't divorce the scene from the alcohol, and I'm no longer willing to put up with the alcohol.
The problem is, there is something seriously wrong with the lack of respect that trained and experienced musicians get in our culture.
Running SuSE 9.3 (with updates) on my desktop, I tried running Evolution under KDE, until I came up against a nasty crash-on-startup bug that the developers wound up blaming on my theme manager. The problem was never fixed, and I had to switch (to Thunderbird, which has its own set of problems, a whole nother story). Since it is only Evoloution that crashes the theme manager, I thought blaming it was a bit of a cop-out (and didn't help me get my data back). I've also seen Evolution segfault when given an email address with two @'s in it.
I really want to like Evolution, and -- don't get me wrong -- I appreciate the enormous amount of work that's gone into it. But I don't think it's quite a polished product.
I've been running Outlook Express since about 1997, and kept all my incoming and outgoing mail in it, across Win95, 98, and XP. Unlike any of the open-source alternatives, it has been stable and reliable.
Trust me -- I'm no huge fan of Microsoft. I just wish the open source community could come up with a decently featured reliable UI-based mail client.
The 'fish and chips' book looks like a winner. Thanks for the tip!
More good geek reading: A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Excellent for geek or non-geek alike.
With everyone yakking about mythical man month I wonder if anyone still reads ESR's Cathedral and Bazaar? which offers a counter-thesis. (i.e. if it's really true that the more people you add to a project the longer it takes, then how does Linux succeed?)
Please do not give the Vlissides Object Patterns book to someone you care about. Seriously. If they want it, they will go out and get it. Essential maybe, but too dry to be considered gift for a festive occasion.
OT, but I'm right now reading The Poisonwood Bible. by Barbara Kingsolver. Great book. (at least so far, and I'm almost to the end...)
The first time I read this essay I was simultaneously laughing and crying. The code I was working on at the time contained examples of every single technique -- all written by programmers who had (voluntarily) left the company!
Learning music at the age when the mind is open to acquiring language skills seems to make a difference. The same part of the brain processes both. I read once that people who learn music at an early age tend to have more connections between the right/left brain.
In my opinion, music has taught me way more about programming than the other way around. (and music is more difficult to do effectively -- it's all real-time -- even though the pay is much better for programming)
As a piano player for 37 years now, I always get a kick out of when I can play stuff that's just notes, and it makes people laugh. It's all about expectation and fulfillment.
Partly, my ability to do so springs from my experience playing musical underscore for melodrama shows (e.g. the Gaslighter theatre in Campbell back in the '80's), which is a lot of fun -- translating dramatic dialog into musical themes.
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Nominally, it's based on the overtone series, but the actual scale we use is based on exponents of the twelfth root of two. A chromatic scale is defined mathematically as the frequencies:
F * 2^(1/12); F * 2^(2/12); F * 2^(3/12)...
Whereas the overtones are simply multiples:
F 2F 3F 4F...
One is rational integers, the other irrational exponents.
And when you look at how neatly the key signatures and the cycle of 5ths fit together, it's quite amazing... and the fact that it works emotionally is remarkable when you understand how entirely artificial it is.
I heard once (from my analytic geometry teacher) that Chopin objected to people's emotional reaction to some of his pieces. The semantic world that he lived in, of advanced harmonic modulation, didn't entirely connect with the emotional content he was conveying.
Very useful for copying between Java text areas and other X apps.
Incidentally, I find it highly ironic that Java, which was born and raised in the X-based Solaris, does not have any way whatsoever to get at the primary selection -- unless you want to write impure java.
As a composer, I was told I can only recover 3 songs for free. The rest cost $7 each.
Or give them $100 for 'lifetime' membership, though they obviously cannot guarantee they'll be around for anybody's lifetime.
Yet another mu$ic indu$stry scam... composers are forced to pay in order to get their stuff heard. Hey! Is anybody listening? We're the ones doing the work. You should be paying US!!
Slashdot Mirror
Currently:
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
2018:
Courrier Sud - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Vol de Nuit - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Maigret - Georges Simenon
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers - Jules Verne
Juliette Benzoni - Le Collier de Montezuma
aside from the handful of books I'm reading on and off. And the news.
I read that he was paid by the LINE, which is why he put so much dialog in.
Statistics have shown that heart attack rates decrease on the day that we fall back.
Obviously, we should set our clocks back an hour every week, to promote cardiac health.
LOL ...
Slashdot needs a "like" button.
The window 7 logo was #65535 and then it cycled back to zero.
(LOL)
Brazil? (the movie)
Close.
"Believe nothing until it has been officially denied." [Claud Cockburn]
1. Libre/Open office needs to figure out that tables are NOT spreadsheets. When I select a row and hit ^X, it should delete the entire row, not just the data. Same with moving rows.
2. Libre/Open office makes it nearly impossible to hide text. With word, there is a formatting option, "hidden." With Libre, you have to set up a rule, write a bunch of Visual Basic, access a database.... I exaggerate, but not much.
One note: I'm working on a document in Open Office that's about 450 pages on a netbook with 1 gig of memory, a single 1Ghz processor, and it's perfectly usable. (Ubuntu netbook remix)
Webex works better than skype for most of what we do. Seeing the other people isn't as valuable as being able to present a desktop, in my experience. Get a headset.
If your remote desktop is Linux, you'll want xWin32. You can't effectively run KDE without it (that I know of), and Gnome works better with it. Unfortunately, it's not free. If you're willing to suffer with Gnome, you can use VNC, but it's buggy.
Not sure how well webex works in Linux, but you can run both W7 and Linux on the same box using virtual machines, as many have pointed out. I recommend VMWare, as it seems a tad more stable than Virtual Box. "VMWare Player" (that's what you want, which is tricky to determine from their confusing product page) is free for Windoze and Linux, but I think it's $$ for the Mac. At least, one of my colleagues reported having to pay for it. I don't run a Mac, but I run WXP, W7, SuSE, Mint, and Ubuntu net remix.
We have a VPN ... I regard that as essential. You can fake it with ssh, but it's clumsy.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
-= miles =-
The nice thing about groovy is that it interoperates with java smoothly, since I'm gathering that the native Android APIs are in Java.
However, I think what you really want is a scripting language that's geared for writing miniature touchscreen/phone apps. Which is something that may not exist yet.
I picture things like location and orientation incorporated into the native language, the way threads are in Java. Mind you, I do not have one of these devices, but I like Groovy.
It was from the Xerox Altos.
I know ... I was there, and I used them. (Only I didn't have the savvy to cultivate a swarm of irritating devotees the way Jobs did)
the Libre/open office team(s) haven't yet figured out that tables are not spreadsheets. When I hit ctl+X with a row selected, I want to cut the row, not just the data. As a consequence, moving rows around in Libre/OO is simply painful.
Also, their implementation of hidden text is ridiculous. It takes about fifteen steps, versus about two that it takes in Word (select, set as 'hidden')
I say that as a longtime OO user, and advocate evan. I use it on my netbook constantly for writing novels, presentations, what have you. I love the fact that you can open documents in windows and Linux both, and that it does better than M$ Office sometimes, opening M$ documents. (Particularly true of Office 2003, with XML docx... thought OO has a nasty bug that deletes annotations when you save in docx format).
For basic writing and formatting, OO equals or surpasses M$ Office. I just wish they would fix the two above design flaws.
"Here's a great book I just read. Let me lend it to you..."
Also handy for hitching a ride when the planet is about to explode.
It was written like the plot of a video game, not surprisingly, since that's what Mr. Suarez does for a living. Very mechanical, not much in the way of human characters. I found it difficult to care much about any of them. A good beginning, but I felt cheated as the questions were answered. For example, why would this guy murder all these people who helped him? It seems like it would have more sense to choose an accomplice from those he knew while he was alive.
A truly unrealistic feature of Daemon is that nothing ever seems to go wrong. Devices run for years in the outdoor weather without a glitch. Right. I mean, sure, the main character's a "genius," but to write that amount of code without any bugs whatsoever? More realism on that count would have made for a better story.
Suarez could lay off some of the gore. Callous and unrealistic. Superficial pseudo-action, just the sort that would to appeal to, well, a hard core gamer who doesn't get out much.
I've seen both sides of it. I failed a phone screen once with someone was asking ridiculously specific questions about Java threading, expecting instantaneous responses. It had been a few years since I was really thinking about it, so I guess my immediate answers weren't optimal. Sorry. I found it rude and annoying that they didn't have the patience to discover that I really did understand the concepts they were asking about.
On the other hand, recently our company has been interviewing, and it's truly amazing what people will put on their resumes. I don't blame them -- if they don't have those keywords in there, then their resume will never turn up in the word searches.
I'll ask (pointing to their resume), "so you say you know javascript?" and I'll get something like: "well, I looked at some javascript code once, back when I was in college, for maybe five minutes. Well actually, I saw the word 'javascript' on the spine of a book in the store...." and of course they can't answer any questions about it.
What amazes me are the ones who can talk up a storm, and even talk with fair intelligence about polymorphism and Spring, hibernate, object patterns and java beans and so on, but are completely incapable of writing a simple Java class declaration, and fail completely to answer even the most basic coding questions.
Or (here's my favorite) they'll tell me they "know" red hat and suse and ubuntu linux, but I ask them a simple shell question and they go blank. (e.g. "how would you FIND all of the files recursively from a subdirectory, with the extension .java?")
One that I find more interesting is the concept of normalization. I have seen people who can give me textbook-perfect definitions, but completely fail to grasp an example I give them, but I've also seen the reverse: people who immediately get the concept when they see the example, but are completely incapable of defining the term. Go figure.
I don't think it's generally that people are dishonest. They just overestimate their own understanding.
Here's a simple way to eliminate 80% of backscatter:
Ban qmail from the internet!!
The stock version doesn't check for validity until after the connection with the SMTP server has broken. Then it obediently sends the bounce to the reply-to address. Yuck!
Venues want to see warm bodies buying beer,
So you're not selling music. You're selling beer.
I'm not being facetious -- this is a major problem. It's why, as an experienced performer, I don't perform very much. You can't divorce the scene from the alcohol, and I'm no longer willing to put up with the alcohol.
The problem is, there is something seriously wrong with the lack of respect that trained and experienced musicians get in our culture.
Running SuSE 9.3 (with updates) on my desktop, I tried running Evolution under KDE, until I came up against a nasty crash-on-startup bug that the developers wound up blaming on my theme manager. The problem was never fixed, and I had to switch (to Thunderbird, which has its own set of problems, a whole nother story). Since it is only Evoloution that crashes the theme manager, I thought blaming it was a bit of a cop-out (and didn't help me get my data back). I've also seen Evolution segfault when given an email address with two @'s in it.
I really want to like Evolution, and -- don't get me wrong -- I appreciate the enormous amount of work that's gone into it. But I don't think it's quite a polished product.
I've been running Outlook Express since about 1997, and kept all my incoming and outgoing mail in it, across Win95, 98, and XP. Unlike any of the open-source alternatives, it has been stable and reliable.
Trust me -- I'm no huge fan of Microsoft. I just wish the open source community could come up with a decently featured reliable UI-based mail client.
More good geek reading: A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Excellent for geek or non-geek alike.
With everyone yakking about mythical man month I wonder if anyone still reads ESR's Cathedral and Bazaar? which offers a counter-thesis. (i.e. if it's really true that the more people you add to a project the longer it takes, then how does Linux succeed?)
Please do not give the Vlissides Object Patterns book to someone you care about. Seriously. If they want it, they will go out and get it. Essential maybe, but too dry to be considered gift for a festive occasion.
OT, but I'm right now reading The Poisonwood Bible. by Barbara Kingsolver. Great book. (at least so far, and I'm almost to the end...)
The first time I read this essay I was simultaneously laughing and crying. The code I was working on at the time contained examples of every single technique -- all written by programmers who had (voluntarily) left the company!
Learning music at the age when the mind is open to acquiring language skills seems to make a difference. The same part of the brain processes both. I read once that people who learn music at an early age tend to have more connections between the right/left brain.
:
...
... and the fact that it works emotionally is remarkable when you understand how entirely artificial it is.
In my opinion, music has taught me way more about programming than the other way around. (and music is more difficult to do effectively -- it's all real-time -- even though the pay is much better for programming)
As a piano player for 37 years now, I always get a kick out of when I can play stuff that's just notes, and it makes people laugh. It's all about expectation and fulfillment.
Partly, my ability to do so springs from my experience playing musical underscore for melodrama shows (e.g. the Gaslighter theatre in Campbell back in the '80's), which is a lot of fun -- translating dramatic dialog into musical themes.
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Nominally, it's based on the overtone series, but the actual scale we use is based on exponents of the twelfth root of two. A chromatic scale is defined mathematically as the frequencies:
F * 2^(1/12); F * 2^(2/12); F * 2^(3/12)...
Whereas the overtones are simply multiples
F 2F 3F 4F
One is rational integers, the other irrational exponents.
And when you look at how neatly the key signatures and the cycle of 5ths fit together, it's quite amazing
I heard once (from my analytic geometry teacher) that Chopin objected to people's emotional reaction to some of his pieces. The semantic world that he lived in, of advanced harmonic modulation, didn't entirely connect with the emotional content he was conveying.
Very useful for copying between Java text areas and other X apps.
Incidentally, I find it highly ironic that Java, which was born and raised in the X-based Solaris, does not have any way whatsoever to get at the primary selection -- unless you want to write impure java.
Or give them $100 for 'lifetime' membership, though they obviously cannot guarantee they'll be around for anybody's lifetime.
Yet another mu$ic indu$stry scam ... composers are forced to pay in order to get their stuff heard. Hey! Is anybody listening? We're the ones doing the work. You should be paying US!!