On the subject of C books, I'll toss out three that helped me: "Practical Programming C" by Steve Oualline (published by O'Reilly), "A Book on C: Programming in C" by Kelley& Pohl (published by AW) and "The C Programming Language" by Kernhigan & Ritchie (a classic, published by PH). C is probably one of the most frequently used languages for demo programming becuause it lets you get really close to the machine, but you don't *have* to start there right off... The goal of a demo is to produce neat graphics (and possibly sound), and a lot of languages can do that. For example: Java is usually a little easier for newbies to grasp (no manual memory management, etc) and with a modern JRE/JDK you have access to Java2D (and Java3D as an optional add-on). I've even seen fairly impressive graphics demos done using nothing more than JavaScript and DHTML. Flash MX brings a lot of linguistic power to ActionScript, making some very impressive (and portable) demos possible (see orsinal.com). Learning C will pay off down the road because so many languages were based on or influence by it, but you're trading off initial pain for long-term benefit...
One bit of advice: start small! Even if your first project just puts one colored pixel to the screen, it's a start. In other words, the easiest way to get discouraged and quit is to straight-off try to build all of Rome in a single day.
You'll probably end up buying a LOT of computer books. This is natural, becuase you've got a huge body of knowledge to assimilate. Your best bet is to find a place that gives good reviews (e.g. www.accu.org), look at the list of recommended books, and then buy one or two from a place with good prices (I use bookpool.com a bunch, their prices are very low, service is good, and shipping is less than sales tax if i order a couple books at once).
Oh, inconsistency in penalties is nothing new in the American legal system (or any other for that matter;-)). For example: the penalties for possession or distribution of "crack" cocaine are usually higher (sometimes by *significant* margins) than for flake or powder cocaine. (Guess which form factor tends to be owned by oppressed minorities and which form factor by rich yuppies?) And in my own home state of Texas, for a long time it was possible to get a longer prison term for possession of as little as one marijuana cigarette than you did for murder.
It'd be nice if people stopped thinking that laws are a perfect, crystalline structure. They're not, they're a messy conglomeration of the populace's fears that are infinitely malleable as a contract between the populace and the state with examples of the divergence between "legal" and "right/just" abounding. Lawyers and judges do the same thing for the social contract that programmers do for source code, the good ones write clean, tight stuff with comments and no unspecified behaviors and the bad ones run obfuscators...;-)
you raise an interesting point, but what's the lower limit of perception for (most?) users? i'd be suprise if anyone noticed a time delta of more than a tenth of a second, and 100msec is a long time in system terms (couple of moniter vsyncs, $bignum cpu cycles, etc. forgive me the math, it's almost 4am and i'm dead tired) of course the question of how much of the time delta perception is "real" and how much is derived from a placebo-like effect is one that'll throw you for a loop, so let's ignore it.;-) ["Here's your Shiny New Computer(tm)!" "Wow, it sure feels faster, just looking at it!"]
FYI, your mathematical model fails to account for hemaphrodites, pre-op transexuals, and The Artist Known As Prince Who Was Known As A Symbol After He Was Known As Prince The First Freakin' Time. Gotta check those equations, dude!;-)
I hear you... I've had more than one "one off, never again used" job. And in all but one instance I got called back later to update the "one off" job becuase they needed to use it again.;-) In my experience, "we'll never need this again" translates to "leave your business card, we'll be calling you in six months or so". Any Turing complete language would do in those situations... the more obscure the better because it guarantees that you'll get the next contract, heh. There's been more than one occasion when the thought of using Inline.pm from within perl to write a data conversion job in Befunge has occured to me.
Ever occured to you that perhaps the language(s) used are part and parcel of the results? If you write your code in Haskell, and I write it in Java, assuming identical end functionality and other end-user quality metrics, which is better? The Java codebase. Why? Maintenance. It is *really* dumb from a business perspective to depend on any one person being in any one position. If the Haskell-codebase's maintainer died, quit, got sick for six months, shaved his/her head and became a Hare Krishna dropout, where does this leave the company? Searching desperately for a Haskell programmer, which may take a long time given that the number of really good Haskell developers is epsilon small compared to, say, the number of really good Java developers. [I'm using Haskell and Java as comparative examples here, you can sub in any(rare|common) couplet of languages you want.]
like this. it's a really cool engine somebody built that takes information on what you like and suggests other bands. definitely click the "related bands" link under the suggested band it pops out.
i realize that this is probably dooming somebody's server to a firey death, but maybe go back in a week or so.;-) take what it suggests and pop over to shoutcast to look for stations streaming those (sorts of) bands. if you like what you hear, go to your local independent CD shop and buy it, making sure to tell them "yeah, I heard this music online from an mp3 station and now i want to buy it from you". most of the record store owners I know think that mp3s are satan incarnate, helping them see the benefits of fluid, low/no-barrier music preview and discovery would be a good thing long term...
Well, I don't know if there is a swedish localization for MATLAB for Linus' usage, but I know for a fact there is a native binary for Linux (I worked as a junior admin at my college's math department for a while back in '99).:-)
I'd be disturbed to see someone with 10 eyeballs while driving down the street, and would probably decide to run them over. Becuase they're either, as my long video game and B-movie experience has taught me: a) a zombie b) an alien c) a mutant OR d) all of the above, and as such must be destroyed at all costs.
Oh, how can anyone overlook Fallout and Fallout 2? They've come well after doom (fallout was in '97 iirc), and are excellent examples of the adventure/discovery/plot-driven genre. Oh, yes, they're also dark, dank, and quite dystopian. And there's lots of killing. But the violence is secondary to the plot. Let's face it, when you're trying to restore order to an irradiated anarchic wasteland, guns are going to come out at some point...
i've seen these things in Fry's (large US computer parts and every-damned-thing else chain, imagine a store larger than a Wal-Mart packed to the rafters with geek stuff) that are USB-attached programmable keypads (most of them have had something like a 5x5 or 6x6 array of keys, with some relabeling mechanism so you can label each key with what you programmed onto it). Maybe you could grab something like that and program it to generate all the troublesome characters? (googling for a minute lead me to P.I. Engineering, makers of a device that might suit your needs (albeit at ~100 USD))
I think the main thing PHP buys you is speed and sessions. In exchange you give up a decent, coherent database access mechanism and elegant syntax ($foo for all datatypes is just stupid).
Note that I'm talking about the as-is distributions here. You can get speed and sessions out of perl (mod_perl, Apache::Registry, Apache::DBI, and the various session modules off CPAN), and you can get a coherent (I've heard) DB access layer using the PEAR DB.php class. (I don't think you can do much about php being ugly code-wise. [by ugly i mean things like variable denotation and the gawd-awful looking preg_* function calls to get decent regexp behavior. what kind of web language puts regexps in the function-call ghetto anyway?]) But many people just don't take the time to get the full oomph out of their development environment, for better or worse. That's why people who do get paid well...;-)
Re:One person's experience with PHP ...
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PHP5 Coming Soon
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· Score: 1
Just as an FYI from somebody who has written a lot of code for oil companies (read: welcome to NT-land, hope you enjoy IIS!), you can use much nicer languages than VBScript as your ASP language. JScript is much less of a syntactic jump than vb from php, and if you can get approval to install ActiveState's perl, you can use PerlScript seemlessly (and perl for the simple uses you'd have in a webapp would take any decent php coder less than a week to pick up fluently). So you gain the "home-field" advantage of IIS/ASP/COM, with a decent language to code in...
Re:This book is great
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Professional PHP4
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· Score: 3, Informative
You could write the serial control mechanism in perl (or C, or whatever), then use system() (or related) calls from php to poke it / read the output. Not elegant perhaps, but... The other option, since reading and writing to serial ports isn't exactly rocket science or a new thing, would be to grab some C source to do said, and wrap it into a PHP extension (which seems like a semi-easy process from what little I looked at it, if it were truly difficult there wouldn't be bazillions of php extensions). Honestly though, if you start doing hardware access to vital resources from php PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD make the server machine accessible only on the local lan. In other words, you might want JoeBob the store manager in the back office to be able to have a real-time web interface to moniter the sales line, but you wouldn't want to expose that interface to Dieter the 13 year old German 1337 h4X0r.;-)
Obviously poor Mr. Ralsky is in need of salvation due to the continual lack of concern for his fellow members of the human race. I think that having several different sects arrive at the same time would be enough to enlighten anyone's soul. Do the various proseylitizing (too tired to speel) faiths accept web-based appointments?
You see, it's awful hard to mail the standard factory issue turd through the mail. It tends to smell up the post office, postal workers notice, and you get popped for mailing poop through the mail... Now, if you have the foresight to freeze said article before shipment, it will remain unthawed and relatively scent free (scent molecules after all being volatile compounds that don't go flying about in significant numbers unless a certain energetic threshold is crossed) until it is already in shipment... Since you live so close, it wouldn't be in the postal system for very long and would probably be reaching maximum ripeness only when the payload was reaching the target...
Bonus points if the payload is constructed of used Hormel Spam.
I can see how you got your slashdot username. Seeing a phrase like that in a comment making an essentially ungrounded editorial interrogation of somebody excercising the one fundamental power consumers have (warning other consumers about shitty companies like Speakeasy.net), well. "Pot calls kettle black. Film at 11."
I did cancel within the first month. After, of course, their autobill perl script nails me for three month's service. (Still waiting on a complete refund there, fat chance at this point in my mind). Really far from the CO? Heh. I live on 18th street. The CO is on 16th street. I could probably hit it with a rock thrown from my window if i had a good enough windup. If it were just latency and throughput suckiness (like having all my packets routed through vienna austria), I could probably deal (although for 100+ a month that's just unreal). Being lied to on several occasions by their customer support staff ("We tried to call at 8 on monday." Right. My contact number was my cell phone, which has caller id and call logging. Guess what, no calls from speakeasy then (and it had power, of course).), getting rude responses, having trouble tickets closed with no solution or explanation,... yeah, that was the kicker. OK, so you've had good service from them. It's nice to know that luck runs in your family.;-)
Heh, you're lucky. I was getting an average hop count in excess of 25 to every site, with traceroutes showing my packets going (for example) from austin to washington, dc, to vienna, austria, back to washington, then to wherever (dallas, houston, then here for local sites). "My packets went to Vienna and all I have is this lousy traceroute." 300+ msec pings to grace.speakeasy.net, same for work shell servers. Bah.
Did you read the link you posted? On the first page there were several horror stories similar to what I described: overcharged, underprovisioned, horrible speeds and/or latency, rude/lying/unresponsive customer service, etc. etc. Their advertising promulgates an image of them as being a place that caters to geeks by providing a low-fluff connection and great service for a premium, which is 100% A-OK, but as I and other people have observed, they're not very good about living up to their advertising. Sure, there are a bunch of 5 star reviews, but there are also a bunch of 1 star reviews. If i had the time to flame them good, believe me, I'd be typing in pages there and giving them a ZERO star rating if the form allowed it... Maybe, being *very* charitable, it's a case of growing too fast on their part... Honestly I as a paying customer shouldn't have to care about that though.
I was paying for 1500/768, getting more like 300/200, and that with 300-500 msec pings to grace.speakeasy.net (their shell server) or any of the servers where I work (an ad firm/programming shop here in Austin).
If speakeasy.net is the cream of the crop, the others must shoot your dog or something. I honestly don't see how an ISP could be any worse.
Yeah. Dallas isn't actively bad, like LA or Sarajevo, but it's bland. You get pretty much the same perks living in Austin, and the culture here is much more lively. [For that matter, picking the right parts of Houston will do the same thing, e.g. montrose, and with a larger job market.]
Slashdot Mirror
On the subject of C books, I'll toss out three that helped me: "Practical Programming C" by Steve Oualline (published by O'Reilly), "A Book on C: Programming in C" by Kelley& Pohl (published by AW) and "The C Programming Language" by Kernhigan & Ritchie (a classic, published by PH). C is probably one of the most frequently used languages for demo programming becuause it lets you get really close to the machine, but you don't *have* to start there right off... The goal of a demo is to produce neat graphics (and possibly sound), and a lot of languages can do that. For example: Java is usually a little easier for newbies to grasp (no manual memory management, etc) and with a modern JRE/JDK you have access to Java2D (and Java3D as an optional add-on). I've even seen fairly impressive graphics demos done using nothing more than JavaScript and DHTML. Flash MX brings a lot of linguistic power to ActionScript, making some very impressive (and portable) demos possible (see orsinal.com). Learning C will pay off down the road because so many languages were based on or influence by it, but you're trading off initial pain for long-term benefit...
One bit of advice: start small! Even if your first project just puts one colored pixel to the screen, it's a start. In other words, the easiest way to get discouraged and quit is to straight-off try to build all of Rome in a single day.
You'll probably end up buying a LOT of computer books. This is natural, becuase you've got a huge body of knowledge to assimilate. Your best bet is to find a place that gives good reviews (e.g. www.accu.org), look at the list of recommended books, and then buy one or two from a place with good prices (I use bookpool.com a bunch, their prices are very low, service is good, and shipping is less than sales tax if i order a couple books at once).
Oh, inconsistency in penalties is nothing new in the American legal system (or any other for that matter ;-)). For example: the penalties for possession or distribution of "crack" cocaine are usually higher (sometimes by *significant* margins) than for flake or powder cocaine. (Guess which form factor tends to be owned by oppressed minorities and which form factor by rich yuppies?) And in my own home state of Texas, for a long time it was possible to get a longer prison term for possession of as little as one marijuana cigarette than you did for murder.
;-)
It'd be nice if people stopped thinking that laws are a perfect, crystalline structure. They're not, they're a messy conglomeration of the populace's fears that are infinitely malleable as a contract between the populace and the state with examples of the divergence between "legal" and "right/just" abounding. Lawyers and judges do the same thing for the social contract that programmers do for source code, the good ones write clean, tight stuff with comments and no unspecified behaviors and the bad ones run obfuscators...
you raise an interesting point, but what's the lower limit of perception for (most?) users? i'd be suprise if anyone noticed a time delta of more than a tenth of a second, and 100msec is a long time in system terms (couple of moniter vsyncs, $bignum cpu cycles, etc. forgive me the math, it's almost 4am and i'm dead tired) of course the question of how much of the time delta perception is "real" and how much is derived from a placebo-like effect is one that'll throw you for a loop, so let's ignore it. ;-) ["Here's your Shiny New Computer(tm)!" "Wow, it sure feels faster, just looking at it!"]
ice sucks. cool the reservoirs if you want cold drinks, but leave the damn liquor alone!
i only have an efficiency (one room) apartment, you insensitive clod!
(well, i guess you could count the bathroom and kitchen as seperate rooms but you probably don't want to sleep in the tub or oven, do you?)
I hear you... I've had more than one "one off, never again used" job. And in all but one instance I got called back later to update the "one off" job becuase they needed to use it again. ;-) In my experience, "we'll never need this again" translates to "leave your business card, we'll be calling you in six months or so". Any Turing complete language would do in those situations... the more obscure the better because it guarantees that you'll get the next contract, heh. There's been more than one occasion when the thought of using Inline.pm from within perl to write a data conversion job in Befunge has occured to me.
Ever occured to you that perhaps the language(s) used are part and parcel of the results? If you write your code in Haskell, and I write it in Java, assuming identical end functionality and other end-user quality metrics, which is better? The Java codebase. Why? Maintenance. It is *really* dumb from a business perspective to depend on any one person being in any one position. If the Haskell-codebase's maintainer died, quit, got sick for six months, shaved his/her head and became a Hare Krishna dropout, where does this leave the company? Searching desperately for a Haskell programmer, which may take a long time given that the number of really good Haskell developers is epsilon small compared to, say, the number of really good Java developers. [I'm using Haskell and Java as comparative examples here, you can sub in any(rare|common) couplet of languages you want.]
like this. it's a really cool engine somebody built that takes information on what you like and suggests other bands. definitely click the "related bands" link under the suggested band it pops out. i realize that this is probably dooming somebody's server to a firey death, but maybe go back in a week or so. ;-) take what it suggests and pop over to shoutcast to look for stations streaming those (sorts of) bands. if you like what you hear, go to your local independent CD shop and buy it, making sure to tell them "yeah, I heard this music online from an mp3 station and now i want to buy it from you". most of the record store owners I know think that mp3s are satan incarnate, helping them see the benefits of fluid, low/no-barrier music preview and discovery would be a good thing long term...
Well, I don't know if there is a swedish localization for MATLAB for Linus' usage, but I know for a fact there is a native binary for Linux (I worked as a junior admin at my college's math department for a while back in '99). :-)
I'd be disturbed to see someone with 10 eyeballs while driving down the street, and would probably decide to run them over. Becuase they're either, as my long video game and B-movie experience has taught me: a) a zombie b) an alien c) a mutant OR d) all of the above, and as such must be destroyed at all costs.
Oh, how can anyone overlook Fallout and Fallout 2? They've come well after doom (fallout was in '97 iirc), and are excellent examples of the adventure/discovery/plot-driven genre. Oh, yes, they're also dark, dank, and quite dystopian. And there's lots of killing. But the violence is secondary to the plot. Let's face it, when you're trying to restore order to an irradiated anarchic wasteland, guns are going to come out at some point...
case (location == SovietRussia):
? "case switches YOU!"
i've seen these things in Fry's (large US computer parts and every-damned-thing else chain, imagine a store larger than a Wal-Mart packed to the rafters with geek stuff) that are USB-attached programmable keypads (most of them have had something like a 5x5 or 6x6 array of keys, with some relabeling mechanism so you can label each key with what you programmed onto it). Maybe you could grab something like that and program it to generate all the troublesome characters? (googling for a minute lead me to P.I. Engineering, makers of a device that might suit your needs (albeit at ~100 USD))
I think the main thing PHP buys you is speed and sessions. In exchange you give up a decent, coherent database access mechanism and elegant syntax ($foo for all datatypes is just stupid).
;-)
Note that I'm talking about the as-is distributions here. You can get speed and sessions out of perl (mod_perl, Apache::Registry, Apache::DBI, and the various session modules off CPAN), and you can get a coherent (I've heard) DB access layer using the PEAR DB.php class. (I don't think you can do much about php being ugly code-wise. [by ugly i mean things like variable denotation and the gawd-awful looking preg_* function calls to get decent regexp behavior. what kind of web language puts regexps in the function-call ghetto anyway?]) But many people just don't take the time to get the full oomph out of their development environment, for better or worse. That's why people who do get paid well...
Just as an FYI from somebody who has written a lot of code for oil companies (read: welcome to NT-land, hope you enjoy IIS!), you can use much nicer languages than VBScript as your ASP language. JScript is much less of a syntactic jump than vb from php, and if you can get approval to install ActiveState's perl, you can use PerlScript seemlessly (and perl for the simple uses you'd have in a webapp would take any decent php coder less than a week to pick up fluently). So you gain the "home-field" advantage of IIS/ASP/COM, with a decent language to code in...
You could write the serial control mechanism in perl (or C, or whatever), then use system() (or related) calls from php to poke it / read the output. Not elegant perhaps, but... The other option, since reading and writing to serial ports isn't exactly rocket science or a new thing, would be to grab some C source to do said, and wrap it into a PHP extension (which seems like a semi-easy process from what little I looked at it, if it were truly difficult there wouldn't be bazillions of php extensions). Honestly though, if you start doing hardware access to vital resources from php PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD make the server machine accessible only on the local lan. In other words, you might want JoeBob the store manager in the back office to be able to have a real-time web interface to moniter the sales line, but you wouldn't want to expose that interface to Dieter the 13 year old German 1337 h4X0r. ;-)
I think I have developed a more concise representation using a perl one-liner, but it is too noisy to be accepted by the lameness filter.
;-)
Obviously poor Mr. Ralsky is in need of salvation due to the continual lack of concern for his fellow members of the human race. I think that having several different sects arrive at the same time would be enough to enlighten anyone's soul. Do the various proseylitizing (too tired to speel) faiths accept web-based appointments?
>:-)
You see, it's awful hard to mail the standard factory issue turd through the mail. It tends to smell up the post office, postal workers notice, and you get popped for mailing poop through the mail... Now, if you have the foresight to freeze said article before shipment, it will remain unthawed and relatively scent free (scent molecules after all being volatile compounds that don't go flying about in significant numbers unless a certain energetic threshold is crossed) until it is already in shipment... Since you live so close, it wouldn't be in the postal system for very long and would probably be reaching maximum ripeness only when the payload was reaching the target...
Bonus points if the payload is constructed of used Hormel Spam.
I can see how you got your slashdot username. Seeing a phrase like that in a comment making an essentially ungrounded editorial interrogation of somebody excercising the one fundamental power consumers have (warning other consumers about shitty companies like Speakeasy.net), well. "Pot calls kettle black. Film at 11."
I did cancel within the first month. After, of course, their autobill perl script nails me for three month's service. (Still waiting on a complete refund there, fat chance at this point in my mind). Really far from the CO? Heh. I live on 18th street. The CO is on 16th street. I could probably hit it with a rock thrown from my window if i had a good enough windup. If it were just latency and throughput suckiness (like having all my packets routed through vienna austria), I could probably deal (although for 100+ a month that's just unreal). Being lied to on several occasions by their customer support staff ("We tried to call at 8 on monday." Right. My contact number was my cell phone, which has caller id and call logging. Guess what, no calls from speakeasy then (and it had power, of course).), getting rude responses, having trouble tickets closed with no solution or explanation, ... yeah, that was the kicker. OK, so you've had good service from them. It's nice to know that luck runs in your family. ;-)
Heh, you're lucky. I was getting an average hop count in excess of 25 to every site, with traceroutes showing my packets going (for example) from austin to washington, dc, to vienna, austria, back to washington, then to wherever (dallas, houston, then here for local sites). "My packets went to Vienna and all I have is this lousy traceroute." 300+ msec pings to grace.speakeasy.net, same for work shell servers. Bah.
Did you read the link you posted? On the first page there were several horror stories similar to what I described: overcharged, underprovisioned, horrible speeds and/or latency, rude/lying/unresponsive customer service, etc. etc. Their advertising promulgates an image of them as being a place that caters to geeks by providing a low-fluff connection and great service for a premium, which is 100% A-OK, but as I and other people have observed, they're not very good about living up to their advertising. Sure, there are a bunch of 5 star reviews, but there are also a bunch of 1 star reviews. If i had the time to flame them good, believe me, I'd be typing in pages there and giving them a ZERO star rating if the form allowed it... Maybe, being *very* charitable, it's a case of growing too fast on their part... Honestly I as a paying customer shouldn't have to care about that though. I was paying for 1500/768, getting more like 300/200, and that with 300-500 msec pings to grace.speakeasy.net (their shell server) or any of the servers where I work (an ad firm/programming shop here in Austin).
If speakeasy.net is the cream of the crop, the others must shoot your dog or something. I honestly don't see how an ISP could be any worse.
Yeah. Dallas isn't actively bad, like LA or Sarajevo, but it's bland. You get pretty much the same perks living in Austin, and the culture here is much more lively. [For that matter, picking the right parts of Houston will do the same thing, e.g. montrose, and with a larger job market.]