Heh. That sounds like it sucks. They should just put it in a tricky comment and hope the schmuck doesn't notice. It's especially be easy to do this in Perl, where you could do one of those "make this a string until my secret code" things, put it in a string that is re-assigned/never used and voila! Hell, you could have this guy submitting snippets of SNOBOL or C++ or Java or similarily shitty languages (no offense to SNOBOL) long after you switched to Perl or whatever better language...
jesus h. chriminey. I'm sure glad I work for a public institution, a University. Hell, I'm a civil servant and proud of it. Yes, I still code. I also do other desktop support. But it sure as hell beats working an 80 hour week! Hell, it beats working 60, or even 50!
I just got this job two months ago. For the 5 years before this, I've worked with the same group of folks in the same University library doing the same thing, but as a student worker. I still have my degree to finish, but one of the biggest perks of this whole civil servant thing is that my tuition is free now! That adds a healthy $8k/yr to my salary in equivalent dollaradoos.
I used to work 50 hours a week and go to school full time, which isn't as bad as 80 hours at your desk coding a week. I was on campus, either in class or at one of my 5 jobs for 70 hours a week, 8 AM - 10 PM Mon-Fri. I only rarely worked on the weekends. Though it was on the weekends I did homework, which if counted would add another 5-15 hours per weekend.
It fucking sucked. And you bet my marks sucked too. My brain didn't function well at all. After the days would start to really shorten in November (yay for Northern Minnesota!), I wouldn't see any sunlight during the week until March or so.
I can't help a chuckle escaping when someone asks me how I'm dealing with working "full-time" (= 40/week), figuring I'd never done more than a lot of college kids, that is, drinking beer, occasionally going to class and getting a lot of money from mum and da. I tell them: "it's like a vacation, but one I'm paid to take!"
So. The point of this post? Good question. Perhaps it is: don't do it. Go get another job. Like me, as a civil servant! Or just at somewhere that doesn't want to anal rape you. Or just some place that won't ask an anal rape of you more than once or twice a year.
I think there is a very important distinction to make in this case: code head written by a speed freak is quite different from a non-addict with a mild dose of amphetamine as a coding/study aid.
Though code written by a speed freak is indeed quite fucked in the brain. Code written by stoners isn't horrible, though the overall system designs is usually either ingenius or downright retarded. If I had to pick some drug for a coder to be addicted to, I think I'd pick orally administered opiates- especially if the poor schmuck had to work 50-80+ hours a week. Opium has a long history of being used by people who did more work than they'd like to in a week, while staying sane and relatively healthy. Drunks code like shit- both alcoholics and a non-alkie coding whilst drunk....but what the hell is the point of thise post? I guess it's: if you're ever starting some sort of rehab work program for ex-software developers addicted to various drugs to go with opium.:P
When you put it that way I couldn't agree more. I think that the small amount of show there is really had gotten a good start toward creating a rich and detailed sci-fi universe. It's a shame really, but we all know that already.:/ So many little things mentioned, in the dialog or visually that were hinting at a really interesting fleshed out whole. *sigh*
Maybe we'll find out more about propulsion in the film. Or better yet, perhaps/. could do an Ask/. for Joss, where we could ask such questions! now that'd be great.:) (but no buffy questions, please!)
But we know absolutly nothing about its propuslsion systems, so its all conjecture for us!
Not exactly. We humans have the gift of... logic! It's pretty easy to deduce that they have FTL travel . Myself or someone else could do the outline of you need it. It's not like Star Trek has a monopoly on the idea.
I'd use the Ubuntu Live CD. It's a GNOME distro, based on Knoppix. The recent Gnoppix is based on the new Ubuntu live CD, though I'm not sure what Gnoppix has done to the 4.10 Ubuntu to change it from Ubuntu Live to new Gnoppix... But this Ubuntu Live CD really is awesome. Ubuntu in general is pretty rad, but the Live CD is nice as well.
Though really- why the hell do this? I mean, anyone who would even remotely appreciate this- fellow nerds, be them friends or family- would likely already be running Linux or not be interested in it. The rest of em will just be confused, or think something like: "Wow. What a dork. too bad he wasted this perfectly good CD-R- I would've preferred a copy of the new Heiruspecs CD..."
I can't say I've any clue what they were doing back then. Though I've followed them for a while, since around '98- we used to use the Ten Thumb Typing Tutor, which was (is) a pretty good little app. Playing with RunRev I wouldn't be surprised if they used some beta of RunRev on TTTT, which is a cross-platform app, though back in 1999 or so they didn't have any beta or alpha out, or at least didn't want to share one with me. I exhanged some emails with them about their cross-platform technology, looking to use it myself, though they weren't willing to share anything then. *shrug*
Runtime Revolution isn't that new, Java is certainly older than it. You may have used MetaCard or HyperCard, but Runtime Revolution just came out in 2001. I mean, it's only been 3 years since it came out- not that surprising that it's still alive.
Boy am I glad I worked a good helpdesk. I worked for two years for 20 hours a week at a medium-sized university helpdesk. I liked the job, frankly. Sure, there was a neverending stream of dunderheads, dolts and downright dunces, not to mention an *incredibly* bureaucratic IT staff... But we all need something to complain about. People with PhDs who need to ask "how do I get to Google... on a Mac?" among others. And underpaid- yay for $8.50/hr! But I've seen much worse jobs...
Nope. Most of the hangover is caused by dehydration. You can drink the cheapest of assey vodka, but if you drink a lot of water during the night and have a good 16 oz before you go to bed, you will wake up fine. The more booze you drink, the more water you need to offset it.
Unless you are considering alcohol itself to be an "impurity." Then, if you rid your drink of "impurities" you don't have a hangover- but only if you leave the booze out. The other impurities could help to make the hangover worse, or give you a headache that is outside of the hangover, etc- but the hangover is dehydration.
Maybe it's something about XP vs Linux? That is, I've never run Windows under VPC- I've always used it when I needed to do Linux/x86 development when a Mac was my main machine. Now I've the option, I use VMware for that. Perhaps vmware tools on XP somehow helps performance?
How's it feel to be responded to by a zealot? Seriously though, if VMWare won't cut it, what makes you think VPC will?
No joke. This guy may be marked a troll, but it's true: if VMware doesn't cut the cheeze, VPC won't. I I have a pretty badass setup- two monitors, two computers (one mac and one pc) and one kb+mouse, hooked up with win2vnc. I've XP on the PC, and wanted Linux too. First, I tried it under VPC, but it was so slow that I gave up. But under VMware it's quite nice- 5 times as fast. This Mac isn't the fastest on the block- a 1.25 GHz G4 PowerMac- but it's not like the PowerBooks are any faster, with the fastest at 1.5 GHz.
I totally dig my Mac, but VPC probably wouldn't cut it for this guy.
It all depends on how you use it. If I was just using it as an address/day/notebook, I certainly wouldn't spend all that money on a PDA. In a situation like that, I really see the case for using your phone as that. But using my PDA as a date/addressbook is what I spend the least amount of time doing. I use my PDA as a computer, web/email access, development and notetaking. For that, there are no smartphones that even remotely come close to the power, versatility, screen size and res and downright usefulness as a laptop replacement as many of the PDAs I've had.
Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...
First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.
The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.
One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.
Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time.:)
There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.
First, there are two kinds of small languages: 1. small languages like lua, io, and scheme that are small in the built-in libraries and in the total distro. These three are great places to start- both are small, OOPish, allow higher-order programming by passing classes, objects, functions and methods as objects.
2. Then there are languages that are big in some ways, but small in syntax. Some of these are easier to extend than so-called "little languages." The reason is usually that their syntax is small, in an isolated place, easy to get at, and meant to be modified. The two best examples for this are Smalltalk and Lisp. Both of these languages satisfy your other requirements and really kick ass for extention. Unlike the above languages, the so-called little-languages, most Smalltalk and Lisp dialects have big, useful libraries. Unlike a big fat language like perl or C++, having a useful library doesn't mean that the language is a huge pain in the ass to extend.
A lot of people here have bad feelings about Lisp-like languages. It's a shame, since Scheme, ISLISP (OpenLisp is a great implementation) and Common Lisp are all *very* powerful languages. You can be quite productive with them once you get over the part about whining about parens. But Lisp may very well be the best option here, there is a long history of people writing custom-syntaxes and language extensions. Look up Common Lisp macros- power almost beyond comprehension, a lot of fun to play with, and with an elegance all its own.
To, one of the big advantages to using a language in the second category is that syntax extension/modification is done in the language itself, rather than in C. With that comes the familiarity of the language you're creating and the other benefits you gain by using a high-level language like Smalltalk or Common Lisp.
Just some thoughts...
Re:Cool... Drool... XMas present, anybody?
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Sony U750P Handtop
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I put the crack away. Their price, w/ shipping, for the U50 is now $1600. However, it was lower a month or so back, when I checked last. Perhaps it's gone up now that Sony has apparently stopped making them? Pricejapan.com works by finding the lowest price in Tokyo- and then the guy who runs it goes out, buys it, and ships it to you. A lot of people have got a Zaurus C860 for the best price around ($560, w/ shipping) and give it a bunch of thumbs up.
Re:Cool... Drool... XMas present, anybody?
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Sony U750P Handtop
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· Score: 1
Man, this sucker really is expensive. One can (could?) get a Japanese u50 from a cheap and reliable importer like price-japan.com for something like $1250 w/ 2-3 day shipping. But they want $2000 for the US version? Bah.
I'd like to do an informal study to figure out if there's a relationship between how old school someone is and if they think of the classic non-Gates quote about 64KB/640KB being enough for anyone. That is, there was a time when PC clones came with 640 KB on board- and that's it. That was the base-level RAM in DOS, anything more in your x86 was considered XMS or EMS. Those of us who remember using DOS on any machines know this and usually remember the quote as 640KB, whereas folks who don't have the same real world connection to this quote take it to the reverse-hyperbole (hypobole?) of 64 KB. The C64 had 64KB of RAM, but most PCs had more. The first IBM PC did have 64 KB, back in 1981, but it went up after that...
Re:Has anyone here compared seaside and zope
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Zope X3 3.0.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've used both Zope and Seaside- though I've not used Zope since around 2002, started to use it in 1999. I'm not sure what is different about it now. I've used seaside more recently.
Seaside, in some ways is similar to Zope. Both are web application frameworks written in a dynamic OOP language. Zope does a little more, IMHO, though Seaside is catching up. I mean that in a good way- Zope has a lot of bloat and a fair bit of kudgey hackery, and where Seaside is adding similar functionality it is usually in a better way. This probably has a lot to do with what the kind of power that the Smalltalk language provides out of the box, but there is also a fair bit of looking back at what Zope and other packages did well and where they could be improved. Hindsight is 20/20.
I've seen folks remark that Zope is sort of a really-bloated version of Smalltalk written in Python, which is true in some ways. Zope takes Python and adds a lot of cool features to it, features that are very handy to have for writing web apps but have uses outside of writing a web app. Smalltalk includes a good many of these features that Zope adds to Python, though many of them are quite a bit more mature, having been tested and refined over the 25 year history of Smalltalk, whereas Python+Zope is a lot newer.
Seaside is a lot simpler than Zope. It's a lot smaller, both in LOC and memory foot print. Zope does a lot more, which is both good and bad, depending on your background, your team and your project. A lot of companies don't want a huge package like Zope, but they don't want to have to start from scratch to reinvent the wheel yet another time. Seaside is great for situations like that. It has just about the right ratio of freedom vs features.
I've used both Zope and Squeak, both for smaller personal and business projects, though sites that got no more than a couple hundred hits in a day. As someone who knows both Python and Smalltalk, I'd say that for me, Seaside was a little more productive. Once you know Smalltalk, it doesn't take long to start making stuff with Seaside. Smalltalk is as simple a language as one can get, with the exception of Lisp- and no, smalltalk isn't parens-land like lisp is! Even given a good working knowledge of the Python language, Zope has more of a learning curve than Seaside IMHO. It does a lot of things differently than most people with some dynamic web experience using PHP or Perl+CGI are used to. Not a bad thing at all, but it's something people have to get over before they are productive with it.
Seaside, coupled with either an RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL or an OODB like Magma, MinneStore, or GOODS, is a very powerful tool indeed. I personally prefer Magma myself, using an OODB over an RDBMS. It is a much more natural way of data storage and retrieval, IMHO.
I dunno about you, but I'd find it much, much cooler if the TTF itself was just sent down the pipe, rather than converting to an image. Converting to an image seems like a cheap (but needed) hack, where as having a TTF or other font file your browser could apply would make a lot more sense, be more flexible and stay truer to the document (text, not graphics). I've had a handful of designers ask if there was any way to do that, as they'll have nice, neato fonts on their machines but that aren't on the majority of the client machines.
That is one reason flash-based sites and to a lesser extent PDFs are pretty popular- you can embed fonts and make sure it looks the same everywhere.
As for the aboriginals in my area- the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe- we've been able to speak it online for ever, but we have the 7-vowel orthagraphy and can write Ojibwe language in regular english characters.;)
Nope, you're wrong. ID people aren't against "evolution",
And so are you. Or rather, you're only right about some IDers, I suspect a pretty small amount of them. Most of the ID/creationists I've known believe that the world was created in 7 days, with every species being created and plopped onto the earth done like a pie out the oven on their appropriate day.
I know some more intelligent folks who try to reconcile science and religion and "believe in" evolution guided by some Holy Hand. Most of them don't care whether or not their god guided evolution, because the splendor of earth's life says to them much more about god's power than how long it took, or whether or not he wrote up teh blueprints in his shop. But most of the hardcore creationists/IDers don't believe in evolution of any sort, even micro-evolution.
I don't know enough about Darwin to know if he was a straight up atheist or now, but he was not christian. He rejected christianity throughout his adult life, much to the disapointment to his very, very devout wife, who continued to pray for his conversion until death.
Though he could've been a theist. That was kind of popular around then.
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Heh. That sounds like it sucks. They should just put it in a tricky comment and hope the schmuck doesn't notice. It's especially be easy to do this in Perl, where you could do one of those "make this a string until my secret code" things, put it in a string that is re-assigned/never used and voila! Hell, you could have this guy submitting snippets of SNOBOL or C++ or Java or similarily shitty languages (no offense to SNOBOL) long after you switched to Perl or whatever better language...
jesus h. chriminey. I'm sure glad I work for a public institution, a University. Hell, I'm a civil servant and proud of it. Yes, I still code. I also do other desktop support. But it sure as hell beats working an 80 hour week! Hell, it beats working 60, or even 50!
I just got this job two months ago. For the 5 years before this, I've worked with the same group of folks in the same University library doing the same thing, but as a student worker. I still have my degree to finish, but one of the biggest perks of this whole civil servant thing is that my tuition is free now! That adds a healthy $8k/yr to my salary in equivalent dollaradoos.
I used to work 50 hours a week and go to school full time, which isn't as bad as 80 hours at your desk coding a week. I was on campus, either in class or at one of my 5 jobs for 70 hours a week, 8 AM - 10 PM Mon-Fri. I only rarely worked on the weekends. Though it was on the weekends I did homework, which if counted would add another 5-15 hours per weekend.
It fucking sucked. And you bet my marks sucked too. My brain didn't function well at all. After the days would start to really shorten in November (yay for Northern Minnesota!), I wouldn't see any sunlight during the week until March or so.
I can't help a chuckle escaping when someone asks me how I'm dealing with working "full-time" (= 40/week), figuring I'd never done more than a lot of college kids, that is, drinking beer, occasionally going to class and getting a lot of money from mum and da. I tell them: "it's like a vacation, but one I'm paid to take!"
So. The point of this post? Good question. Perhaps it is: don't do it. Go get another job. Like me, as a civil servant! Or just at somewhere that doesn't want to anal rape you. Or just some place that won't ask an anal rape of you more than once or twice a year.
I think there is a very important distinction to make in this case: code head written by a speed freak is quite different from a non-addict with a mild dose of amphetamine as a coding/study aid.
...but what the hell is the point of thise post? I guess it's: if you're ever starting some sort of rehab work program for ex-software developers addicted to various drugs to go with opium. :P
Though code written by a speed freak is indeed quite fucked in the brain. Code written by stoners isn't horrible, though the overall system designs is usually either ingenius or downright retarded. If I had to pick some drug for a coder to be addicted to, I think I'd pick orally administered opiates- especially if the poor schmuck had to work 50-80+ hours a week. Opium has a long history of being used by people who did more work than they'd like to in a week, while staying sane and relatively healthy. Drunks code like shit- both alcoholics and a non-alkie coding whilst drunk.
When you put it that way I couldn't agree more. I think that the small amount of show there is really had gotten a good start toward creating a rich and detailed sci-fi universe. It's a shame really, but we all know that already. :/ So many little things mentioned, in the dialog or visually that were hinting at a really interesting fleshed out whole. *sigh*
/. could do an Ask /. for Joss, where we could ask such questions! now that'd be great. :) (but no buffy questions, please!)
Maybe we'll find out more about propulsion in the film. Or better yet, perhaps
But we know absolutly nothing about its propuslsion systems, so its all conjecture for us!
... logic! It's pretty easy to deduce that they have FTL travel . Myself or someone else could do the outline of you need it. It's not like Star Trek has a monopoly on the idea.
Not exactly. We humans have the gift of
I'd use the Ubuntu Live CD. It's a GNOME distro, based on Knoppix. The recent Gnoppix is based on the new Ubuntu live CD, though I'm not sure what Gnoppix has done to the 4.10 Ubuntu to change it from Ubuntu Live to new Gnoppix... But this Ubuntu Live CD really is awesome. Ubuntu in general is pretty rad, but the Live CD is nice as well.
Though really- why the hell do this? I mean, anyone who would even remotely appreciate this- fellow nerds, be them friends or family- would likely already be running Linux or not be interested in it. The rest of em will just be confused, or think something like: "Wow. What a dork. too bad he wasted this perfectly good CD-R- I would've preferred a copy of the new Heiruspecs CD..."
I can't say I've any clue what they were doing back then. Though I've followed them for a while, since around '98- we used to use the Ten Thumb Typing Tutor, which was (is) a pretty good little app. Playing with RunRev I wouldn't be surprised if they used some beta of RunRev on TTTT, which is a cross-platform app, though back in 1999 or so they didn't have any beta or alpha out, or at least didn't want to share one with me. I exhanged some emails with them about their cross-platform technology, looking to use it myself, though they weren't willing to share anything then. *shrug*
+4 insightful? No, it's 4x.
If 320x320 is only double the resolution of 160x160, what about a resolution like 320x160? That would be twice the resolution, no?
Runtime Revolution isn't that new, Java is certainly older than it. You may have used MetaCard or HyperCard, but Runtime Revolution just came out in 2001. I mean, it's only been 3 years since it came out- not that surprising that it's still alive.
Boy am I glad I worked a good helpdesk. I worked for two years for 20 hours a week at a medium-sized university helpdesk. I liked the job, frankly. Sure, there was a neverending stream of dunderheads, dolts and downright dunces, not to mention an *incredibly* bureaucratic IT staff... But we all need something to complain about. People with PhDs who need to ask "how do I get to Google... on a Mac?" among others. And underpaid- yay for $8.50/hr! But I've seen much worse jobs...
Nope. Most of the hangover is caused by dehydration. You can drink the cheapest of assey vodka, but if you drink a lot of water during the night and have a good 16 oz before you go to bed, you will wake up fine. The more booze you drink, the more water you need to offset it.
Unless you are considering alcohol itself to be an "impurity." Then, if you rid your drink of "impurities" you don't have a hangover- but only if you leave the booze out. The other impurities could help to make the hangover worse, or give you a headache that is outside of the hangover, etc- but the hangover is dehydration.
Maybe it's something about XP vs Linux? That is, I've never run Windows under VPC- I've always used it when I needed to do Linux/x86 development when a Mac was my main machine. Now I've the option, I use VMware for that. Perhaps vmware tools on XP somehow helps performance?
How's it feel to be responded to by a zealot? Seriously though, if VMWare won't cut it, what makes you think VPC will?
No joke. This guy may be marked a troll, but it's true: if VMware doesn't cut the cheeze, VPC won't. I I have a pretty badass setup- two monitors, two computers (one mac and one pc) and one kb+mouse, hooked up with win2vnc. I've XP on the PC, and wanted Linux too. First, I tried it under VPC, but it was so slow that I gave up. But under VMware it's quite nice- 5 times as fast. This Mac isn't the fastest on the block- a 1.25 GHz G4 PowerMac- but it's not like the PowerBooks are any faster, with the fastest at 1.5 GHz.
I totally dig my Mac, but VPC probably wouldn't cut it for this guy.
It all depends on how you use it. If I was just using it as an address/day/notebook, I certainly wouldn't spend all that money on a PDA. In a situation like that, I really see the case for using your phone as that. But using my PDA as a date/addressbook is what I spend the least amount of time doing. I use my PDA as a computer, web/email access, development and notetaking. For that, there are no smartphones that even remotely come close to the power, versatility, screen size and res and downright usefulness as a laptop replacement as many of the PDAs I've had.
Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...
:)
First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.
The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.
One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.
Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time.
There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.
First, there are two kinds of small languages:
1. small languages like lua, io, and scheme that are small in the built-in libraries and in the total distro. These three are great places to start- both are small, OOPish, allow higher-order programming by passing classes, objects, functions and methods as objects.
2. Then there are languages that are big in some ways, but small in syntax. Some of these are easier to extend than so-called "little languages." The reason is usually that their syntax is small, in an isolated place, easy to get at, and meant to be modified. The two best examples for this are Smalltalk and Lisp. Both of these languages satisfy your other requirements and really kick ass for extention. Unlike the above languages, the so-called little-languages, most Smalltalk and Lisp dialects have big, useful libraries. Unlike a big fat language like perl or C++, having a useful library doesn't mean that the language is a huge pain in the ass to extend.
Both Lisp and Smalltalk have a number of implementations. I am a big fan of Squeak Smalltalk, though systems like Little Smalltalk or even GNU Smalltalk maybe worth checking out.
A lot of people here have bad feelings about Lisp-like languages. It's a shame, since Scheme, ISLISP (OpenLisp is a great implementation) and Common Lisp are all *very* powerful languages. You can be quite productive with them once you get over the part about whining about parens. But Lisp may very well be the best option here, there is a long history of people writing custom-syntaxes and language extensions. Look up Common Lisp macros- power almost beyond comprehension, a lot of fun to play with, and with an elegance all its own.
There are examples of people writing a C-like syntaxes for various Scheme implementations. IIRC, Gambit-C (a Scheme to C compiler) comes with one. On Cliki, there are a bunch of other alternative Scheme syntaxes listed.
To, one of the big advantages to using a language in the second category is that syntax extension/modification is done in the language itself, rather than in C. With that comes the familiarity of the language you're creating and the other benefits you gain by using a high-level language like Smalltalk or Common Lisp.
Just some thoughts...
Yeah, I put the crack away. Their price, w/ shipping, for the U50 is now $1600. However, it was lower a month or so back, when I checked last. Perhaps it's gone up now that Sony has apparently stopped making them? Pricejapan.com works by finding the lowest price in Tokyo- and then the guy who runs it goes out, buys it, and ships it to you. A lot of people have got a Zaurus C860 for the best price around ($560, w/ shipping) and give it a bunch of thumbs up.
Man, this sucker really is expensive. One can (could?) get a Japanese u50 from a cheap and reliable importer like price-japan.com for something like $1250 w/ 2-3 day shipping. But they want $2000 for the US version? Bah.
I'd like to do an informal study to figure out if there's a relationship between how old school someone is and if they think of the classic non-Gates quote about 64KB/640KB being enough for anyone. That is, there was a time when PC clones came with 640 KB on board- and that's it. That was the base-level RAM in DOS, anything more in your x86 was considered XMS or EMS. Those of us who remember using DOS on any machines know this and usually remember the quote as 640KB, whereas folks who don't have the same real world connection to this quote take it to the reverse-hyperbole (hypobole?) of 64 KB. The C64 had 64KB of RAM, but most PCs had more. The first IBM PC did have 64 KB, back in 1981, but it went up after that...
I've used both Zope and Seaside- though I've not used Zope since around 2002, started to use it in 1999. I'm not sure what is different about it now. I've used seaside more recently.
:)
Seaside, in some ways is similar to Zope. Both are web application frameworks written in a dynamic OOP language. Zope does a little more, IMHO, though Seaside is catching up. I mean that in a good way- Zope has a lot of bloat and a fair bit of kudgey hackery, and where Seaside is adding similar functionality it is usually in a better way. This probably has a lot to do with what the kind of power that the Smalltalk language provides out of the box, but there is also a fair bit of looking back at what Zope and other packages did well and where they could be improved. Hindsight is 20/20.
I've seen folks remark that Zope is sort of a really-bloated version of Smalltalk written in Python, which is true in some ways. Zope takes Python and adds a lot of cool features to it, features that are very handy to have for writing web apps but have uses outside of writing a web app. Smalltalk includes a good many of these features that Zope adds to Python, though many of them are quite a bit more mature, having been tested and refined over the 25 year history of Smalltalk, whereas Python+Zope is a lot newer.
Seaside is a lot simpler than Zope. It's a lot smaller, both in LOC and memory foot print. Zope does a lot more, which is both good and bad, depending on your background, your team and your project. A lot of companies don't want a huge package like Zope, but they don't want to have to start from scratch to reinvent the wheel yet another time. Seaside is great for situations like that. It has just about the right ratio of freedom vs features.
I've used both Zope and Squeak, both for smaller personal and business projects, though sites that got no more than a couple hundred hits in a day. As someone who knows both Python and Smalltalk, I'd say that for me, Seaside was a little more productive. Once you know Smalltalk, it doesn't take long to start making stuff with Seaside. Smalltalk is as simple a language as one can get, with the exception of Lisp- and no, smalltalk isn't parens-land like lisp is! Even given a good working knowledge of the Python language, Zope has more of a learning curve than Seaside IMHO. It does a lot of things differently than most people with some dynamic web experience using PHP or Perl+CGI are used to. Not a bad thing at all, but it's something people have to get over before they are productive with it.
Seaside, coupled with either an RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL or an OODB like Magma, MinneStore, or GOODS, is a very powerful tool indeed. I personally prefer Magma myself, using an OODB over an RDBMS. It is a much more natural way of data storage and retrieval, IMHO.
just my 2p.
I dunno about you, but I'd find it much, much cooler if the TTF itself was just sent down the pipe, rather than converting to an image. Converting to an image seems like a cheap (but needed) hack, where as having a TTF or other font file your browser could apply would make a lot more sense, be more flexible and stay truer to the document (text, not graphics). I've had a handful of designers ask if there was any way to do that, as they'll have nice, neato fonts on their machines but that aren't on the majority of the client machines.
;)
That is one reason flash-based sites and to a lesser extent PDFs are pretty popular- you can embed fonts and make sure it looks the same everywhere.
As for the aboriginals in my area- the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe- we've been able to speak it online for ever, but we have the 7-vowel orthagraphy and can write Ojibwe language in regular english characters.
A-ha! A deist. Though I did mean theism too, just in that grand-architect, semi-angostic way. Sorry for the ambiguity-
If you want something that's "geek friendly" but shitty to use, go get a Zaurus SL-5x00 or something. Most people just want something that works well.
Nope, you're wrong. ID people aren't against "evolution",
And so are you. Or rather, you're only right about some IDers, I suspect a pretty small amount of them. Most of the ID/creationists I've known believe that the world was created in 7 days, with every species being created and plopped onto the earth done like a pie out the oven on their appropriate day.
I know some more intelligent folks who try to reconcile science and religion and "believe in" evolution guided by some Holy Hand. Most of them don't care whether or not their god guided evolution, because the splendor of earth's life says to them much more about god's power than how long it took, or whether or not he wrote up teh blueprints in his shop. But most of the hardcore creationists/IDers don't believe in evolution of any sort, even micro-evolution.
I don't know enough about Darwin to know if he was a straight up atheist or now, but he was not christian. He rejected christianity throughout his adult life, much to the disapointment to his very, very devout wife, who continued to pray for his conversion until death.
Though he could've been a theist. That was kind of popular around then.