> By spending time now building the interfaces and > tools that will enable them to use computers more > easily, you will also be ensuring your own ability > to use them in the future.
Nobody thinks they are going to be disabled.
It's as simple as that I'm afraid.
In the Perl world I know one major hacker that has done a ton of accessibility work. In his case, it's his daughter that has the the disability, so he has a direct and immediate interest in helping her.
You use Wx when you specifically want your program to "look native" (without having to emulate it) across all three Win32/GTK/Mac platforms.
Yes, that means it has the idiosyncrasies of all three platform. And if your open source application doesn't have a development team large enough to deal with three separate applications sharing backend components, then it's a fairly cheap way to achieve both platform support and native look and feel.
I've used it a couple of times for exactly that purpose.
But if you're Google, and you can afford the programmers to support three forks with common components, then you don't pick Wx. You go straight to lower layer source and use GTK.
> I suspect that has a lot to do with the character and nature of Australians in general. > I may get criticised for stereotyping, but most Australians of my acquaintance take > pride in the blunt honesty prevalent in their culture, so I don't think I'm out of line.
Speaking as an Australian, I'd say that it's not because the honourable minister is blunt and straight forward, it's just that he's a bloody idiot.
I mean, I built an identical thing to what they've built (image recognition engine for fixed icons) once using the Perl regular expression engine (mostly just to prove it could be done). It was pretty awesome.
But I have no illusions that it is the sort of thing that I should be promoting on Slashdot....oh wait...
After a few horrendous early bad attempts (Cane Toads for example) Australia's CSIRO (the government's research arm) has gotten very very good at importing biological controls to deal with other invasive species. They now have methodologies in place that let them do so on a regular basis.
And they've introduced no less than 5 different species (3 weevils, 2 flies and a moth) to successfully control Onopordum Thistles (although the program is ongoing).
I think the rule of thumb here is that you don't solve your invasive species problems by just wandering over to their source country, picking up the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc)
There's a big difference between admitting to a bug that you can fix with a low/no-cost firmware upgrade, and admitting to a bug which requires a massive recall, and announcing to the market you'll be taking a multi-million dollar loss.
Anywhere other than New Zealand you might get to go is an 8 hour long haul, and anywhere interesting (the US or Europe) is a 20-25 hour flight.
As a result, operations are almost always centralised, and nobody really travels much unless they are project managers or network operations types.
The only time I've ever been sent anywhere was because the project involved specialised hardware on a closed secure network, so we didn't have a way to do testing except on site.
For smaller setups with less than ten machines, I like to use colours.
Red - Production Server Orange - Staging Server Yellow - Test Server Green - Dev Server Blue/Purple/etc etc for other things like the database server etc.
This way, when I'm setting up PuTTY or another shell, I can set the foreground text colour for each machine to match the server name, which stops most of those embarrassing mistakes when you run a command on production that you meant to run on test, and so on.
I had a similar situation to yours recently, except I was trying to detangle a horridly complex product substitution graph for a logistics company.
I used a bunch of Perl to crunch the raw databases into various abstract graph structures, but instead of graphviz or something created by/for developers, I found that the best software for graph visualisation is the stuff that the genetics and bio people use.
The standout for me was a program called Cytoscape which can import enormous graph datasets and then gives you literally dozens of different automated layout algorithms to play with (most of which I'd never heard of, but it's easy to just go through them one at a time till something works)
It's got lots of plugins for talking to genetics databases and such, but if you ignore all that and use Perl/Ruby/whatever for the data production part of the problem, it's a great way to visualise it.
I wrote something almost identical years ago, but couldn't since I'm not part of the security community it never really took off. Blacklists were The Thing at the time still...
> Perhaps the problem is with the way you code your modules
At the lowest point, just after the release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 the were ZERO modules available starting with the letter S...
To their credit, ActiveState did finally recognise the old PPM build farm was a piece of shit, and they've now rewritten it from scratch and junked the old version entirely. The situation is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
On top of licensing issues, other accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before, so the accumulated time to find the right torrent, download it, work out how to install everything etc etc was something they greatly didn't look forward to doing.
It's not that they couldn't, it's just that they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.
Shortcutting that process by just letting them log directly into a running instance is considered a significant improvement for that group.
My issues with ActivePerl have been that it is fundamentally different to all the other Perl platforms (you don't get the full CPAN, just binary packages) and that because one company is the central gatekeeper of all the binary packages, there was never a reasonable way for CPAN authors to debug their modules.
I for one wrote 150+ modules, of which a grand total of 7 were available on ActivePerl, due to various bugs in the ActivePerl build farm that went unfixed for years.
To be truly first-class, you should be the same as the other platforms, not similar-but-different.
Slashdot Mirror
> By spending time now building the interfaces and
> tools that will enable them to use computers more
> easily, you will also be ensuring your own ability
> to use them in the future.
Nobody thinks they are going to be disabled.
It's as simple as that I'm afraid.
In the Perl world I know one major hacker that has done a ton of accessibility work. In his case, it's his daughter that has the the disability, so he has a direct and immediate interest in helping her.
FYI, the new Padre Perl IDE is itself written in Perl.
http://padre.perlide.org/wiki/Screenshots
wxWidgets is mainly just a wrapper around GTK.
You use Wx when you specifically want your program to "look native" (without having to emulate it) across all three Win32/GTK/Mac platforms.
Yes, that means it has the idiosyncrasies of all three platform. And if your open source application doesn't have a development team large enough to deal with three separate applications sharing backend components, then it's a fairly cheap way to achieve both platform support and native look and feel.
I've used it a couple of times for exactly that purpose.
But if you're Google, and you can afford the programmers to support three forks with common components, then you don't pick Wx. You go straight to lower layer source and use GTK.
> I suspect that has a lot to do with the character and nature of Australians in general.
> I may get criticised for stereotyping, but most Australians of my acquaintance take
> pride in the blunt honesty prevalent in their culture, so I don't think I'm out of line.
Speaking as an Australian, I'd say that it's not because the honourable minister is blunt and straight forward, it's just that he's a bloody idiot.
... for Perl the Padre IDE is getting pretty awesome.
Works identically on Windows, Mac and Linux and they even managed to get the entire IDE to install itself from the CPAN.
Setting the scene or the tone for something is easy.
You have a couple of shiny eye-candy "hero shots", maybe introduce the opening of the storyline.
That's the easy part. Tons of shitty movies are able to put together a pretty awesome looking trailer.
Putting together enough complexity, story telling and depth to carry an entire movie is a whole different kettle of fish.
> "could give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale"
Indeed. Which is why they have invested the vast sum of 1 MEEEEEEEEELION dollars.
Clearly, forwarding the Departmental Press Release your boss insisted on issuing to SlashDot has paid dividends!
Not necesarily, there's ways to implement the equivalent of alpha channel support in the regex.
I agree though, that you can't do a percentage match like the neural net does.
Indeed.
I mean, I built an identical thing to what they've built (image recognition engine for fixed icons) once using the Perl regular expression engine (mostly just to prove it could be done). It was pretty awesome.
But I have no illusions that it is the sort of thing that I should be promoting on Slashdot. ...oh wait...
After a few horrendous early bad attempts (Cane Toads for example) Australia's CSIRO (the government's research arm) has gotten very very good at importing biological controls to deal with other invasive species. They now have methodologies in place that let them do so on a regular basis.
Examples include the moth that was used to eradicate Prickly Pear, the introducing of African dung beetles to curb an explosion in flies due to agriculture, and the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus have all been very successful.
And they've introduced no less than 5 different species (3 weevils, 2 flies and a moth) to successfully control Onopordum Thistles (although the program is ongoing).
I think the rule of thumb here is that you don't solve your invasive species problems by just wandering over to their source country, picking up the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc)
There's a big difference between admitting to a bug that you can fix with a low/no-cost firmware upgrade, and admitting to a bug which requires a massive recall, and announcing to the market you'll be taking a multi-million dollar loss.
For me, the Serenity name is perfect, because of the earth observation port.
Who wouldn't feel serene sitting in there during any rare off-time, just looking down at the earth moving by.
*cough* Australia *cough*
The nearest _city_ is a 2 hour flight away.
Anywhere other than New Zealand you might get to go is an 8 hour long haul, and anywhere interesting (the US or Europe) is a 20-25 hour flight.
As a result, operations are almost always centralised, and nobody really travels much unless they are project managers or network operations types.
The only time I've ever been sent anywhere was because the project involved specialised hardware on a closed secure network, so we didn't have a way to do testing except on site.
In a word, sudo
That's why we have the excellent fallback strategy of naming the colours with letters!
For smaller setups with less than ten machines, I like to use colours.
Red - Production Server
Orange - Staging Server
Yellow - Test Server
Green - Dev Server
Blue/Purple/etc etc for other things like the database server etc.
This way, when I'm setting up PuTTY or another shell, I can set the foreground text colour for each machine to match the server name, which stops most of those embarrassing mistakes when you run a command on production that you meant to run on test, and so on.
> Seriously, who ever heard of that company?
They're the guys that do the Koders.com code search engine.
I had a similar situation to yours recently, except I was trying to detangle a horridly complex product substitution graph for a logistics company.
I used a bunch of Perl to crunch the raw databases into various abstract graph structures, but instead of graphviz or something created by/for developers, I found that the best software for graph visualisation is the stuff that the genetics and bio people use.
The standout for me was a program called Cytoscape which can import enormous graph datasets and then gives you literally dozens of different automated layout algorithms to play with (most of which I'd never heard of, but it's easy to just go through them one at a time till something works)
It's got lots of plugins for talking to genetics databases and such, but if you ignore all that and use Perl/Ruby/whatever for the data production part of the problem, it's a great way to visualise it.
I wrote something almost identical years ago, but couldn't since I'm not part of the security community it never really took off. Blacklists were The Thing at the time still...
http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/ThreatNet-DATN2004-0.20/lib/ThreatNet/DATN2004.pm
The test bots are still running in Freenode #threatnet
> 1) Better tools... improve EPIC. Perl lacks a good IDE.
Padre is improving in leaps and bounds so that problem should hopefully be gone soon.
Vista should work fine now.
Only caveat is that there is currently no 64-bit port.
> Perhaps the problem is with the way you code your modules
At the lowest point, just after the release of ActivePerl 5.10.0 the were ZERO modules available starting with the letter S...
To their credit, ActiveState did finally recognise the old PPM build farm was a piece of shit, and they've now rewritten it from scratch and junked the old version entirely. The situation is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
OK, maybe that was overly cruel...
But yes, I'm aware the launch set only covers well-supported versions, and yes, there's more variations coming later.
On top of licensing issues, other accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before, so the accumulated time to find the right torrent, download it, work out how to install everything etc etc was something they greatly didn't look forward to doing.
It's not that they couldn't, it's just that they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.
Shortcutting that process by just letting them log directly into a running instance is considered a significant improvement for that group.
My issues with ActivePerl have been that it is fundamentally different to all the other Perl platforms (you don't get the full CPAN, just binary packages) and that because one company is the central gatekeeper of all the binary packages, there was never a reasonable way for CPAN authors to debug their modules.
I for one wrote 150+ modules, of which a grand total of 7 were available on ActivePerl, due to various bugs in the ActivePerl build farm that went unfixed for years.
To be truly first-class, you should be the same as the other platforms, not similar-but-different.