The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed
Is there an "Open Source license-picking wizard" anywhere?
Remember the old mainframe(?) "animals" game in which you pick an animal, and it would keep asking you questions to differentiate between two types, until it guessed your animal, or didn't have your animal in it's list? (actually it was a binary tree)
We could use one of those. It keeps asking us questions, one at a time, until there is only one license that matches our selections. Any new license can be added to the tree at any time by creating a question that differentiates it from the license you would otherwise get by answering the questions for it.
- bp
Re:Maintainability of Perl code?
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd like to argue that Perl is very maintainable. Many studies show a correlation between LOC and number of defects. So the important thing is reducing the LOC written. The differences accountable to language syntax is negligable when you can reduce the amount of code you write by order(s) of magnitude. With Perl, you have CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/), a repository of pre-written, tested code, the vast majority of which are classes ready to use in object-oriented fashion. Now, I'm not going to say that Perl's OO syntax is anything but inelegant, but it works. What is elegant is the way CPAN works. I won't go into that here, but it does allow you to decrease by orders of magnitude the amount of code you have to write. There are great solutions for all kinds of things, such as object-relational mapping (point Class::DBI at your database, and you instantly have get/set methods to update your tables) and powerful templating (http://template-toolkit.org/), just to name a couple. There are 4000+ other examples there.
But this doesn't apply to just database or web frameworks. Thanks to CPAN, this applies to anything you set out to do. CPAN modules (in general; there are exceptions) are encapsulated best practices, well tested, and a major productivity booster. And, they drastically reduce the amount of code you need to write, making your code more maintainable.
Ubuntu's installer is based upon the new installer, and it's not unreasonable to believe that many people use Ubuntu because it's an easier-to-install Debian, in no small part due to the work on Debian's new installer (and the great work of Ubuntu developers).
Well, that's interesting, because I've recently switched to Ubuntu after many years using Mandrake and Fedora Core (1,2, and 3) (and trying SuSE briefly). My first impression was that the installer sucked (especially the partitioner) compared to the other distros. I'd hate to see the old Debian installer!
However, the rest of Ubuntu is top-notch and I will be sticking with it for the long-term. I've been particularly pleased on my laptop, where other distros have had little niggling problems but Ubuntu has been working great!
I just saw the counter go down. Cool, they're even counting "returns".
Actually, the javascript only updates once a minute, and when it does, it computes a new rate, so the increments you see are only estimates until the next update.
That would only be implausible if the IRC app didn't fit into his available RAM. But since IRC apps are fairly small and not likely to require swapping or other disk activity, it's plausible. That doesn't mean it's true, of course.
1. Online newspaper sites become more inundated with ads. An annoyance that can be somewhat mitigated by Firefox+Adblock.
2. Articles by independent and/or local writers will become more prominent.
3. The AP gradually slides into irrelevance (from an influence and mindshare perspective at least), as newspapers reduce the number of AP stories posted online and other syndicated news agencies pick up the slack.
It's closer than I thought. Offhand I see a couple of differences:
1. There doesn't seem to be a culture of providing tests. CPAN will refuse to install a module unless its tests pass, and you need to have them, preferably covering all your code (there's a module, Devel::Coverage I believe, that will tell a module author what % of the code is covered by tests). It seems that many RubyGems don't even have tests, and all of them will install by default without even running them.
2. There's no organization. The packages seem to have one-word names. There's no way to browse by category. This will quickly get out of hand unless you institute a package category hierarchy.
Ruby has the RAA which is similar to and serves the same purpose as CPAN
Does it? (This is a serious curiosity question). Does RAA come with Ruby as a command-line executable? Does it automatically download, extract, build, and test a module/app before installing? Does it identify dependencies and do the same with them? Are there test results available by an independent testing team so you know if it should work on your platform before you even download it? Does it automatically extract and build local documentation for the module? Is there even a module documentation standard that I can rely on? Is there a place I can look up ratings and/or reviews of the modules?
Yes, you can do that with the Google API. You could make a simple web-app or a firefox plugin (or opera plugin, I guess) that applies your "blocked search site" list to your searches.
Yes, it's a bit impractical because you need to sign up with google to get a unique key for your Google API queries. And there's a limit (I believe it's 1000 per day) so everyone who wants to use it would basically have to sign up and plug in their own Google API key.
Of course, you can use web scraping to do this quite easily, but this probably violates the Google TOS. (Though I can't find a specific reference right now)
heh... but there are always people who missed the first one. And moderators too, which makes it a good opportunity to copy-and-paste some +5 Funny posts from the previous article. Instant karma boost!
Re:Really out of the box thinking?
on
Re-Imagining Apple
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
How about something new guys? I don't mean to troll, but if this is the most creative you can be then this company is going downhill fast. Whatever happened to the Apple that had all those great new ideas?
um... the design firm is not affiliated with Apple. It was hired by Business 2.0 magazine to present the "ideas".
Well, the firm was working for Apple from 89-96, when Apple did go downhill fast. Now we know why.
Sorry, manipulating the headers is how you get blocked by FairUCE. Unlike many so-called spam solutions, this one does not rely on headers being correct. It is a bit more sophisticated, as it requires insertion at the MTA level (in other words, you can't just use any mail server--currently you have to install Postfix as the external server, with a bridge to whatever mail server you want on the inside).
That being said, it still currently relies on IP blacklists, so it is no panacea.
The linked news article has lousy information. IBM's overview is much better.
In answer to your length of the keys array of a hash question, just use (keys %hash) in a scalar context, or (keys %hash).length.
Wouldn't it be nicer if you could do
%hash.keys.length
..or would that be too much sens^H^H^H^H like Ruby?
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
We had a bunch of slightly different document formats that some hapless and unintelligent programmer elected to describe with XML.
Agreed. It would have been better to describe them in XML Schema (that's what it's for!), or in an XSL Template.
Unfortunately, XML has no control structures
XSL has control structures. It looks like your programmer has tried to use XML when it didn't quite fit.
the tools don't handle includes robustly
xinclude has been robust for me. As long as you're using modern parsers/processors, it should be robust.
there are no conditional constructs, no loops,
Again, it seems like what you wanted was XSL templated documents. Actually, any form of templating with conditionals and looping would probably work. I have done cool things with Template Toolkit. But when working with end-to-end XML, you can't beat XSL.
So if you have two invoice forms, one with 10 lines for detail items and one with 11, you are stuck with cut-and-paste-and-manually-edit as your primary software development model
Editing XML files is not software development! You should generate them. There are many ways to do it, but more details would be necessary to find the best way.
The problem with XML is that some people don't use it correctly. But that's true with any technology. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with XML.
Are you kidding? There are several options. The one I decided on is DansGuardian. I use it for my whole home network. One of the reasons I chose it is because it comes with a rich set of family-friendly content filters. But it can be configured to block only ads if you want--it's very flexible.
It would seem that you can automatically extract that kind of information without "linking" to it at all. For example, WWW::Mechanize is a way to create a virtual browser that could even start at www.orbitz.com, follow links and/or fill out forms, meanwhile providing all cookie/referer information Orbitz needs, to get whatever data you need.
If you don't create a link, can you call it deep linking?
I'd dislike perl less if it were not the programming language of choice of the computer-illiterate.
Good news. The vast majority of them have moved on to PHP:), leaving some very high-quality programmers. Many recent CPAN modules are case in point. There's Bryar and Catalyst, excellent Ruby-on-rails style MVC application platforms, just as one example. Template Toolkit, SOAP::Lite, Class::DBI (object/relational mapping) etc. are excellent tools to build upon.
The advantage of Perl is not the Syntax. Hell, if it was, everyone would have moved on to Python by now:). The advantage is CPAN. Any application you want to write is 80% done already.
IF Stevie has RP, then he would be a candidate. RP is a loss of photoreceptors. This procedure bypasses photoreceptors, so it doesn't matter how long you've had the disease.
I doubt this is true. There's also a part of the brain that "shuts off" (sorry don't know the medical term). A friend of mine had misaligned eyes when I met him. When he was little he could see out of either one. Of course, using both at the same time resulted in double vision, so he had to use only one at a time. Eventually, he favored one and his brain shut the other one off. He migrated as a young adult to the USA with his family and had surgery to straighten his eyes. He will not regain vision in his "bad" eye, even though there's nothing physically wrong with it. The doctors told him that if he had surgery much earlier, he'd still have vision in both eyes.
That wouldn't help. You'd still see comment spam, yet you wouldn't be able to follow genuine links in comments.
The nofollow idea allows you too see and follow links in comments, while reducing the incentive (pagerank++) for comment spammers to spam.
Basically, what this translates to is a gradual decrease in comment spam, without reducing the functionality of comment pages. You don't have to (and shouldn't do) anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of open-source licenses has exploded, leaving many in the community miffed
Is there an "Open Source license-picking wizard" anywhere?
Remember the old mainframe(?) "animals" game in which you pick an animal, and it would keep asking you questions to differentiate between two types, until it guessed your animal, or didn't have your animal in it's list? (actually it was a binary tree)
We could use one of those. It keeps asking us questions, one at a time, until there is only one license that matches our selections. Any new license can be added to the tree at any time by creating a question that differentiates it from the license you would otherwise get by answering the questions for it.
- bp
I'd like to argue that Perl is very maintainable. Many studies show a correlation between LOC and number of defects. So the important thing is reducing the LOC written. The differences accountable to language syntax is negligable when you can reduce the amount of code you write by order(s) of magnitude. With Perl, you have CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/), a repository of pre-written, tested code, the vast majority of which are classes ready to use in object-oriented fashion. Now, I'm not going to say that Perl's OO syntax is anything but inelegant, but it works. What is elegant is the way CPAN works. I won't go into that here, but it does allow you to decrease by orders of magnitude the amount of code you have to write. There are great solutions for all kinds of things, such as object-relational mapping (point Class::DBI at your database, and you instantly have get/set methods to update your tables) and powerful templating (http://template-toolkit.org/), just to name a couple. There are 4000+ other examples there.
As an example of reducing lines of code, here's an article on writing a database-driven web application in 18 lines of code, and a similar article here.
But this doesn't apply to just database or web frameworks. Thanks to CPAN, this applies to anything you set out to do. CPAN modules (in general; there are exceptions) are encapsulated best practices, well tested, and a major productivity booster. And, they drastically reduce the amount of code you need to write, making your code more maintainable.
Actually the fact that entrepreneur is a French word makes the joke witty and funnier, IMHO. Of course, you could argue that it was accidental wit.
Do the French have a phrase for double entendre?
Ubuntu's installer is based upon the new installer, and it's not unreasonable to believe that many people use Ubuntu because it's an easier-to-install Debian, in no small part due to the work on Debian's new installer (and the great work of Ubuntu developers).
Well, that's interesting, because I've recently switched to Ubuntu after many years using Mandrake and Fedora Core (1,2, and 3) (and trying SuSE briefly). My first impression was that the installer sucked (especially the partitioner) compared to the other distros. I'd hate to see the old Debian installer!
However, the rest of Ubuntu is top-notch and I will be sticking with it for the long-term. I've been particularly pleased on my laptop, where other distros have had little niggling problems but Ubuntu has been working great!
I just saw the counter go down. Cool, they're even counting "returns".
Actually, the javascript only updates once a minute, and when it does, it computes a new rate, so the increments you see are only estimates until the next update.
That would only be implausible if the IRC app didn't fit into his available RAM. But since IRC apps are fairly small and not likely to require swapping or other disk activity, it's plausible. That doesn't mean it's true, of course.
I can think of a few possible outcomes:
1. Online newspaper sites become more inundated with ads. An annoyance that can be somewhat mitigated by Firefox+Adblock.
2. Articles by independent and/or local writers will become more prominent.
3. The AP gradually slides into irrelevance (from an influence and mindshare perspective at least), as newspapers reduce the number of AP stories posted online and other syndicated news agencies pick up the slack.
Well, that's vanilla RoboHelp output--already considered by the submitter.
It's closer than I thought. Offhand I see a couple of differences:
1. There doesn't seem to be a culture of providing tests. CPAN will refuse to install a module unless its tests pass, and you need to have them, preferably covering all your code (there's a module, Devel::Coverage I believe, that will tell a module author what % of the code is covered by tests). It seems that many RubyGems don't even have tests, and all of them will install by default without even running them.
2. There's no organization. The packages seem to have one-word names. There's no way to browse by category. This will quickly get out of hand unless you institute a package category hierarchy.
Ruby has the RAA which is similar to and serves the same purpose as CPAN
Does it? (This is a serious curiosity question). Does RAA come with Ruby as a command-line executable? Does it automatically download, extract, build, and test a module/app before installing? Does it identify dependencies and do the same with them? Are there test results available by an independent testing team so you know if it should work on your platform before you even download it? Does it automatically extract and build local documentation for the module? Is there even a module documentation standard that I can rely on? Is there a place I can look up ratings and/or reviews of the modules?
Yes, you can do that with the Google API. You could make a simple web-app or a firefox plugin (or opera plugin, I guess) that applies your "blocked search site" list to your searches.
Yes, it's a bit impractical because you need to sign up with google to get a unique key for your Google API queries. And there's a limit (I believe it's 1000 per day) so everyone who wants to use it would basically have to sign up and plug in their own Google API key.
Of course, you can use web scraping to do this quite easily, but this probably violates the Google TOS. (Though I can't find a specific reference right now)
heh... but there are always people who missed the first one. And moderators too, which makes it a good opportunity to copy-and-paste some +5 Funny posts from the previous article. Instant karma boost!
How about something new guys? I don't mean to troll, but if this is the most creative you can be then this company is going downhill fast. Whatever happened to the Apple that had all those great new ideas?
um... the design firm is not affiliated with Apple. It was hired by Business 2.0 magazine to present the "ideas".
Well, the firm was working for Apple from 89-96, when Apple did go downhill fast. Now we know why.
Yes, exactly. Any good book on Regexes should have a chapter on when NOT to use them.
I see many people trying to use regexes to do parsing, when they should be using a specialized parser.
Sorry, manipulating the headers is how you get blocked by FairUCE. Unlike many so-called spam solutions, this one does not rely on headers being correct. It is a bit more sophisticated, as it requires insertion at the MTA level (in other words, you can't just use any mail server--currently you have to install Postfix as the external server, with a bridge to whatever mail server you want on the inside).
That being said, it still currently relies on IP blacklists, so it is no panacea.
The linked news article has lousy information. IBM's overview is much better.
Wouldn't it be nicer if you could do..or would that be too much sens^H^H^H^H like Ruby?
We had a bunch of slightly different document formats that some hapless and unintelligent programmer elected to describe with XML.
Agreed. It would have been better to describe them in XML Schema (that's what it's for!), or in an XSL Template.
Unfortunately, XML has no control structures
XSL has control structures. It looks like your programmer has tried to use XML when it didn't quite fit.
the tools don't handle includes robustly
xinclude has been robust for me. As long as you're using modern parsers/processors, it should be robust.
there are no conditional constructs, no loops,
Again, it seems like what you wanted was XSL templated documents. Actually, any form of templating with conditionals and looping would probably work. I have done cool things with Template Toolkit. But when working with end-to-end XML, you can't beat XSL.
So if you have two invoice forms, one with 10 lines for detail items and one with 11, you are stuck with cut-and-paste-and-manually-edit as your primary software development model
Editing XML files is not software development! You should generate them. There are many ways to do it, but more details would be necessary to find the best way.
The problem with XML is that some people don't use it correctly. But that's true with any technology. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with XML.
Are you kidding? There are several options. The one I decided on is DansGuardian. I use it for my whole home network. One of the reasons I chose it is because it comes with a rich set of family-friendly content filters. But it can be configured to block only ads if you want--it's very flexible.
It would seem that you can automatically extract that kind of information without "linking" to it at all. For example, WWW::Mechanize is a way to create a virtual browser that could even start at www.orbitz.com, follow links and/or fill out forms, meanwhile providing all cookie/referer information Orbitz needs, to get whatever data you need.
If you don't create a link, can you call it deep linking?
This is all that's needed to answer such a silly question: Googlefight!
Surely that number is slightly exagerated there?
Oops! A typo. That should be "exaggerated"
My personal score would be well under 1%
The evidence you provide refutes your claim.
I'd dislike perl less if it were not the programming language of choice of the computer-illiterate.
:), leaving some very high-quality programmers. Many recent CPAN modules are case in point. There's Bryar and Catalyst, excellent Ruby-on-rails style MVC application platforms, just as one example. Template Toolkit, SOAP::Lite, Class::DBI (object/relational mapping) etc. are excellent tools to build upon.
:). The advantage is CPAN. Any application you want to write is 80% done already.
Good news. The vast majority of them have moved on to PHP
The advantage of Perl is not the Syntax. Hell, if it was, everyone would have moved on to Python by now
IF Stevie has RP, then he would be a candidate. RP is a loss of photoreceptors. This procedure bypasses photoreceptors, so it doesn't matter how long you've had the disease.
I doubt this is true. There's also a part of the brain that "shuts off" (sorry don't know the medical term). A friend of mine had misaligned eyes when I met him. When he was little he could see out of either one. Of course, using both at the same time resulted in double vision, so he had to use only one at a time. Eventually, he favored one and his brain shut the other one off. He migrated as a young adult to the USA with his family and had surgery to straighten his eyes. He will not regain vision in his "bad" eye, even though there's nothing physically wrong with it. The doctors told him that if he had surgery much earlier, he'd still have vision in both eyes.
My password's set to my dog's name.
My dog's name is currently 4$ter*Zf1, but I change it every 90 days.
That wouldn't help. You'd still see comment spam, yet you wouldn't be able to follow genuine links in comments.
The nofollow idea allows you too see and follow links in comments, while reducing the incentive (pagerank++) for comment spammers to spam.
Basically, what this translates to is a gradual decrease in comment spam, without reducing the functionality of comment pages. You don't have to (and shouldn't do) anything else.