In the 1960's, what we now know as Exxon was called Enco. When they started expanding globally, they had a big misstep in Japan: the Japanese translation of "enco" is "broken-down car."
It's pointless because many of us are adjusting our temperature via the web already. RS232-Controllable thermostats have been around for years and can be controlled by every home automation software product available.
The one I use can be retrofit to communicate over your existing HVAC wires to a central controller. I use Misterhouse (open-source home automation software) to control it. Misterhouse has a web interface, but I rolled my own (BTW, I can also control my lights and my whole-house audio system, and I'm installing a sprinkler system which of course I'll add to the web interface).
If everything I have connected had its own IP address, its own web server, and its own interface, it would actually be less convenient.
What seems to be new is that they're calling them "disk" drives.
Never mind that you can take just about any flash drive and buy an ATA adapter. Never mind that there have been 3.5" form factor IDE flash drives for years.
I agree. However, I do conscientiously avoid the proper grammatical construct placing punctuation inside "quotes," as I have just done in this sentence. The punctuation is not part of the quote, and this can cause problems when quoting certain things. What if you saw the instruction to type "rm -rf/us?"
I have an Averatec laptop with built in Wi-fi... I get 100% coverage inside my house, and can even go four or so houses in any direction
I'm seeing similar results with my new Averatec 3220. It's even better than my D-Link DWL-650+ card, which was previously the best I'd found. Having it on depletes battery life quite a bit faster though.
Now if I can just get Linux working on the damn Averatec...
Remember, its not your job to add to the company value, its YOUR job to do what they say
That's ridiculous. It's every person's job to add to the company value. If you don't feel you are contributing, you need to make it known. If what you think you should be doing is different than what your superiors think you should be doing, you have to communicate those differences--once they understand your reasoning, they're likely to agree. Sometimes this takes a while. But there may be a point where a profound philosophical disagreement (or stubborness) prevents them from seeing it your way. Ever. In that case, you need to leave and find someplace where you add value and the value is also known to others. I would never recommend your shut-up-and-put-up advice, especially when you feel you are not contributing to the company value.
Incidentally, in the wake of this story I noticed that he's been promoting something called "Fischerandom Chess" in which the first row pieces are places semi-randomly
Yes, I play this way. I put all my pawns on their row in random order.
I'm always amused that you have to break out of Perl into C to parse HTML and XML. And even more amused that it doesn't bother the Perl fanatics. What's wrong with this picture?
Nothing at all. Most of the Perl fanatics I know operate on the Principle of Least Effort. If a hand-optimized C program is available that does exactly what you want, use it! That's why we have Inline::C and XS. That's why Perl has the `backtick` operator.
I really should upload my XML/SGML/HTML parser to CPAN. It's all in Perl, and uses HTML::Element as the representation.
Sounds cool. I'd like to see it.
It's written for robustness, not speed;
Hmm... yet you were complaining about inefficiency...
it can parse ill-formed XML/SGML/HTML, producing good trees for the valid parts. This is necessary to parse the material that appears in SEC filings.
Very interesting. Tag-based balanced text parsing (like HTML/XML) is very difficult when you have to recover from sloppyness that makes it invalid.
I have had incredibly good luck with XML::LibXML's recover() option. I use it to parse arbitrary web sites (yes it can do HTML too), many very broken, and so far it has been able to create a DOM from them all (knock on wood). I love being able to use XPath to extract stuff from HTML. Makes virtually all extractions one-liners.
In fact I proposed a Perl Lightning Talk on using XML::LibXML to parse HTML at OSCON 2004. Don't yet know if it has been accepted, but if not, I'll still give it at the Perl CFTs (community forum talks).
Is that kneejerk sarcasm because you work there? Or do you have blind faith in all things Google? Or do you think all innovation comes from "warehouses full of Ph.D's"?
Sorry, but that's the kind of attitude I would expect from someone working for a software company in Redmond.
I happen to agree with the grandparent-post. The image search could be enhanced by taking it beyond surrounding-word analysis, perhaps by using a wavelet-decomposition index or other method of indexing by actual image contents. Perhaps you could refine your search by seeing your picture in the center of a block of nine similar pictures, where choosing one on the perimeter will move it to the center and you repeat until you find what you want. If you've ever used Photoshop's "Variations" tool you know what I'm talking about. This is just one hastily conceived example. There are a myriad other ways it could be improved.
LISP is a good match for operating on HTML and XML... Perl, PHP, and Java don't do trees well. You have to hammer the tree into an object paradigm, which doesn't help all that much.
I'm sorry, but DOM is a standard tree representation. DOM works well in this regard, and it is a fairly standard API across most languages. You should never have to build your own data structures.
Perl's representation of a tree is rather inefficient, too. I do considerable parsing of large documents into trees in Perl.
I do too, and I know it doesn't have to be inefficient. How are you currently doing it? If absolute efficiency is what you want, use a stream-based API like SAX, TokeParser, etc. If a tree-based approach is what you want (such as for conveniences like XPath queries) use XML::LibXML, which uses libxml, the most efficient and fastest parser available. It is written in C, and is fast, fast, fast. There are language bindings for not only Perl, but PHP, Python, Ruby, and many other languages.
I'm a Fedora user with a gripe about installing software on linux... I'm too long in the windows universe perhaps, but I still like RPM. Now if only it had a GUI.
Just about every Linux distro except Fedora has a standard graphical installer. If that is important to you, I think you may have chosen the wrong distro.
But if you decide to use Fedora anyway, you should be using yum, which is a layer on top of rpm that automatically resolves dependencies. yum is much easier to use than rpm.
The main problem I see with complicated A/V systems is that each device stores its own state and the remote is completely unaware of what state each device is in.
Actually, most devices accept "discrete codes" which are separate non-toggle (i.e. ON-only and OFF-only) codes. The problem is that most manufacturer remotes only have toggle buttons, I guess to save space on the remote.
However, many of the sophisticated remotes allow you to download discrete codes for your equipment. Read a recent post of mine where I outline my solution using a Pronto Neo.
Of course XML is going to be hard to represent in a relational database. Unless your tables are ( id, object text) and you pull out your XML and parse it.
This is completely false. If you had RTFA, it is mentioned that the relational model can represent hierarchies (and thus XML) just fine. It is SQL that is deficient for this purpose.
Also, it makes no sense to call XML "object-oriented," which is a programming language term[semi-OO? LOL]. XML is a syntactic hierarchy that can be used to represent "objects", just as it can be used to represent other types of data.
Last, just about every major database now supports XML as a native datatype, meaning you don't have to pull out XML documents and parse them.
And before everyone suggests CURRENT PRODUCTS, don't - because I've tried them all.
Have you really tried the computer-programmable ones? The philips pronto series (all of 'em) support downloaded IR codes. There are libraries of discrete codes (ie. non toggle, ON means ON) for just about every manufacturer you can think of.
Personally, I use the Pronto Neo. I like it for many reasons. A fully programmable touchscreen--I created custom graphics for it. I like that it has a decent amount of hard buttons too. Every button (both hard and virtual) can send IR codes, navigate/change "screens", start timers, and remote-specific things (turn on/off the backlight), or have a macro that does many or all of the above. I downloaded discrete codes for all my stuff. The System Off button turns everything off, period.
My wife loves it. She is greeted by simple icons. If she wants to watch TV, she touches the TV picture and then the TV, cable box, and receiver turn on, and she sees the network logos for her favorite channels. There are tabs for other channel logos (including a Kids tab that my kids use), and a tab that leads to a number pad for direct channel input.
If she wants to watch a DVD, it's similar. Push the DVD logo, push the "play" button. Which, by the way, slowly dims the lights down to 10% thanks to this and IR codes that I downloaded for it. The pause button ramps the lights up to 50% (for bathroom breaks).
Another little trick, I use the above IR-to-X10 gateway to turn on my PS/2 when someone touches the Game icon, thanks to an appliance module. Otherwise, it would be a pain becuase the PS/2 has a hard power switch on the back, and I have it mounted in a built-in cabinet with no room to reach behind it.
I also have a Music tab, which has buttons labeled "Jazz", "Ambient", etc. so you can turn on music without having to know what digital cable channel they're on. And, I don't even have to open the cabinets to turn all this stuff on or off, thanks to an IR repeater I have tucked in the surrounding bookshelves.
The complexity is MIND boggling. I will give ALL OF MY MONEY to someone who can fix the problem.
My 6-year old can fully operate my setup. If there's something specific you'd want to do with your setup, let me know and I'll tell you how to do it with the Pronto Neo (or the more expensive Prontos). No need to give me all your money.
I can provide screen shots of my setup if you want.
SuSE 9.1? Tell me, how has SuSE improved since 8.2 when it comes to HW support? I remember 8.2 out-of-the-box was a BITCH to get working on SuSE.
A co-worker is a big SuSE fan, and gave me a stack of 9.1 CDs right at the point where I was ready to install Linux on my laptop. It mis-detected my display and I had to reinstall, specifying generic VESA drivers to get it to work. The sound didn't work either, probably another misdetection. I like the look-and-feel of SuSE, and YaST is nice, but I was otherwise unimpressed.
And Fedora Core 2? The one that kills Windows? No thanks.
You're either exaggerating for effect, or were misinformed. There is a bug with 2.6 + grub (SuSE 9.1 and Mandrake 10 exhibit this problem too) where a resized Windows partition will no longer boot (but be otherwise intact). It only happens on some drive geometry/BIOS combinations, and only if you reduce the size of your Windows partition. You can easily fix this with a Windows install disk, or prevent it altogether by using Knoppix or a pre-2.6 distro (or even PartitionMagic, etc) to repartition your disk before installing. It's not a big deal.
Of all the distros I've tried, Fedora is my favorite so far. Then again, I mostly have experience using it as a server, not a desktop.
Why generic display drivers? It's an S3 UniChrome - AFAIK, it's usually well supported under Linux.
I noticed the unichrome project recently. I'll try the drivers there.
The WiFi is Broadcom, could be better, but it can work.
Yeah, some people have got it to work with NDISwrapper + the Windows drivers, though it seems more people have failed than succeeded. It seems that people who tried DriverLoader got it to work, but that's a commercial product.
The flash drive? Probably a 2.6 problem
Yes it is. SuSE 9.0 automatically mounts usb disks. In FC1 I got them to work. There's some conflict with ACPI and usb devices in kernel 2.6.
I'm considering the 3220H1, but I'm not going to run SuSE or FC2, that's for sure.
To each his own. I've never tried a debian-based distro, so that's next for me. Maybe I'll try Mandrake 10 if I'm not happy with Debian. I can always fall back to Fedora as a last resort, because I'm familiar with it and have been happy with it.
Sharp do indeed make a good subnotebook, as do other vendors. I won't run Windows any more, and I'm *not sure* I could manage to successfully put Linux on one of these systems and have all the ports work properly and the graphics catered for correctly.
I found this out the hard way. My current laptop is an Averatec (3220H1). So far I've tried Suse 9.1 and FC2. I've had trouble getting all the hardware to work on it. So far I've had to settle for generic display drivers, no Wifi, and no USB flash drives (though this may have to do with the 2.6 kernel, not the hardware).
Linux was much a much smoother install on my previous machine, a Sony VAIO.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1960's, what we now know as Exxon was called Enco. When they started expanding globally, they had a big misstep in Japan: the Japanese translation of "enco" is "broken-down car."
It's pointless because many of us are adjusting our temperature via the web already. RS232-Controllable thermostats have been around for years and can be controlled by every home automation software product available.
The one I use can be retrofit to communicate over your existing HVAC wires to a central controller. I use Misterhouse (open-source home automation software) to control it. Misterhouse has a web interface, but I rolled my own (BTW, I can also control my lights and my whole-house audio system, and I'm installing a sprinkler system which of course I'll add to the web interface).
If everything I have connected had its own IP address, its own web server, and its own interface, it would actually be less convenient.
Next, you're gonna tell us that you can verb a noun so long as it's a registered trademark.
Well, you just verbed the noun "verb."
cummings
would
be
proud
What seems to be new is that they're calling them "disk" drives.
Never mind that you can take just about any flash drive and buy an ATA adapter. Never mind that there have been 3.5" form factor IDE flash drives for years.
These are diskless disk drives!
I agree. However, I do conscientiously avoid the proper grammatical construct placing punctuation inside "quotes," as I have just done in this sentence. The punctuation is not part of the quote, and this can cause problems when quoting certain things. What if you saw the instruction to type "rm -rf /us?"
I have an Averatec laptop with built in Wi-fi... I get 100% coverage inside my house, and can even go four or so houses in any direction
I'm seeing similar results with my new Averatec 3220. It's even better than my D-Link DWL-650+ card, which was previously the best I'd found. Having it on depletes battery life quite a bit faster though.
Now if I can just get Linux working on the damn Averatec...
he's not Finnished yet.
three weeks after I bought it.[...]650 bucks and 11 days later...
Shouldn't the warranty cover that? Sounds like something that should be covered.
Remember, its not your job to add to the company value, its YOUR job to do what they say
That's ridiculous. It's every person's job to add to the company value. If you don't feel you are contributing, you need to make it known. If what you think you should be doing is different than what your superiors think you should be doing, you have to communicate those differences--once they understand your reasoning, they're likely to agree. Sometimes this takes a while. But there may be a point where a profound philosophical disagreement (or stubborness) prevents them from seeing it your way. Ever. In that case, you need to leave and find someplace where you add value and the value is also known to others. I would never recommend your shut-up-and-put-up advice, especially when you feel you are not contributing to the company value.
Incidentally, in the wake of this story I noticed that he's been promoting something called "Fischerandom Chess" in which the first row pieces are places semi-randomly
Yes, I play this way. I put all my pawns on their row in random order.
Oops, noticed this reply a little bit late.
I'm always amused that you have to break out of Perl into C to parse HTML and XML. And even more amused that it doesn't bother the Perl fanatics. What's wrong with this picture?
Nothing at all. Most of the Perl fanatics I know operate on the Principle of Least Effort. If a hand-optimized C program is available that does exactly what you want, use it! That's why we have Inline::C and XS. That's why Perl has the `backtick` operator.
I really should upload my XML/SGML/HTML parser to CPAN. It's all in Perl, and uses HTML::Element as the representation.
Sounds cool. I'd like to see it.
It's written for robustness, not speed;
Hmm... yet you were complaining about inefficiency...
it can parse ill-formed XML/SGML/HTML, producing good trees for the valid parts. This is necessary to parse the material that appears in SEC filings.
Very interesting. Tag-based balanced text parsing (like HTML/XML) is very difficult when you have to recover from sloppyness that makes it invalid.
I have had incredibly good luck with XML::LibXML's recover() option. I use it to parse arbitrary web sites (yes it can do HTML too), many very broken, and so far it has been able to create a DOM from them all (knock on wood). I love being able to use XPath to extract stuff from HTML. Makes virtually all extractions one-liners.
In fact I proposed a Perl Lightning Talk on using XML::LibXML to parse HTML at OSCON 2004. Don't yet know if it has been accepted, but if not, I'll still give it at the Perl CFTs (community forum talks).
Is that kneejerk sarcasm because you work there? Or do you have blind faith in all things Google? Or do you think all innovation comes from "warehouses full of Ph.D's"?
Sorry, but that's the kind of attitude I would expect from someone working for a software company in Redmond.
I happen to agree with the grandparent-post. The image search could be enhanced by taking it beyond surrounding-word analysis, perhaps by using a wavelet-decomposition index or other method of indexing by actual image contents. Perhaps you could refine your search by seeing your picture in the center of a block of nine similar pictures, where choosing one on the perimeter will move it to the center and you repeat until you find what you want. If you've ever used Photoshop's "Variations" tool you know what I'm talking about. This is just one hastily conceived example. There are a myriad other ways it could be improved.
Sounds like you don't need MS Word. So why do you use it? Sounds like maybe the free WordPad is more the right tool for you.
LISP is a good match for operating on HTML and XML ... Perl, PHP, and Java don't do trees well. You have to hammer the tree into an object paradigm, which doesn't help all that much.
I'm sorry, but DOM is a standard tree representation. DOM works well in this regard, and it is a fairly standard API across most languages. You should never have to build your own data structures.
Perl's representation of a tree is rather inefficient, too. I do considerable parsing of large documents into trees in Perl.
I do too, and I know it doesn't have to be inefficient. How are you currently doing it? If absolute efficiency is what you want, use a stream-based API like SAX, TokeParser, etc. If a tree-based approach is what you want (such as for conveniences like XPath queries) use XML::LibXML, which uses libxml, the most efficient and fastest parser available. It is written in C, and is fast, fast, fast. There are language bindings for not only Perl, but PHP, Python, Ruby, and many other languages.
I'm a Fedora user with a gripe about installing software on linux ... I'm too long in the windows universe perhaps, but I still like RPM. Now if only it had a GUI.
Just about every Linux distro except Fedora has a standard graphical installer. If that is important to you, I think you may have chosen the wrong distro.
But if you decide to use Fedora anyway, you should be using yum, which is a layer on top of rpm that automatically resolves dependencies. yum is much easier to use than rpm.
Good to know. I'll check it out when I'm at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention there later this month.
The main problem I see with complicated A/V systems is that each device stores its own state and the remote is completely unaware of what state each device is in.
Actually, most devices accept "discrete codes" which are separate non-toggle (i.e. ON-only and OFF-only) codes. The problem is that most manufacturer remotes only have toggle buttons, I guess to save space on the remote.
However, many of the sophisticated remotes allow you to download discrete codes for your equipment. Read a recent post of mine where I outline my solution using a Pronto Neo.
God, I hate it when the Microsoft marketing machine gets otherwise intelligent people to wax prophetic about vapourware that is 2-3 years away.
When you compare future products to current products, they look better. Always. Don't get caught in that trap.
That's an easy one. Swap everything but the HD. Use those parts to repair the next laptop. :-)
Of course XML is going to be hard to represent in a relational database. Unless your tables are ( id, object text) and you pull out your XML and parse it.
This is completely false. If you had RTFA, it is mentioned that the relational model can represent hierarchies (and thus XML) just fine. It is SQL that is deficient for this purpose.
Also, it makes no sense to call XML "object-oriented," which is a programming language term[semi-OO? LOL]. XML is a syntactic hierarchy that can be used to represent "objects", just as it can be used to represent other types of data.
Last, just about every major database now supports XML as a native datatype, meaning you don't have to pull out XML documents and parse them.
You mean like this?
And before everyone suggests CURRENT PRODUCTS, don't - because I've tried them all.
Have you really tried the computer-programmable ones? The philips pronto series (all of 'em) support downloaded IR codes. There are libraries of discrete codes (ie. non toggle, ON means ON) for just about every manufacturer you can think of.
Personally, I use the Pronto Neo. I like it for many reasons. A fully programmable touchscreen--I created custom graphics for it. I like that it has a decent amount of hard buttons too. Every button (both hard and virtual) can send IR codes, navigate/change "screens", start timers, and remote-specific things (turn on/off the backlight), or have a macro that does many or all of the above. I downloaded discrete codes for all my stuff. The System Off button turns everything off, period.
My wife loves it. She is greeted by simple icons. If she wants to watch TV, she touches the TV picture and then the TV, cable box, and receiver turn on, and she sees the network logos for her favorite channels. There are tabs for other channel logos (including a Kids tab that my kids use), and a tab that leads to a number pad for direct channel input.
If she wants to watch a DVD, it's similar. Push the DVD logo, push the "play" button. Which, by the way, slowly dims the lights down to 10% thanks to this and IR codes that I downloaded for it. The pause button ramps the lights up to 50% (for bathroom breaks).
Another little trick, I use the above IR-to-X10 gateway to turn on my PS/2 when someone touches the Game icon, thanks to an appliance module. Otherwise, it would be a pain becuase the PS/2 has a hard power switch on the back, and I have it mounted in a built-in cabinet with no room to reach behind it.
I also have a Music tab, which has buttons labeled "Jazz", "Ambient", etc. so you can turn on music without having to know what digital cable channel they're on. And, I don't even have to open the cabinets to turn all this stuff on or off, thanks to an IR repeater I have tucked in the surrounding bookshelves.
The complexity is MIND boggling. I will give ALL OF MY MONEY to someone who can fix the problem.
My 6-year old can fully operate my setup. If there's something specific you'd want to do with your setup, let me know and I'll tell you how to do it with the Pronto Neo (or the more expensive Prontos). No need to give me all your money.
I can provide screen shots of my setup if you want.
SuSE 9.1? Tell me, how has SuSE improved since 8.2 when it comes to HW support? I remember 8.2 out-of-the-box was a BITCH to get working on SuSE.
A co-worker is a big SuSE fan, and gave me a stack of 9.1 CDs right at the point where I was ready to install Linux on my laptop. It mis-detected my display and I had to reinstall, specifying generic VESA drivers to get it to work. The sound didn't work either, probably another misdetection. I like the look-and-feel of SuSE, and YaST is nice, but I was otherwise unimpressed.
And Fedora Core 2? The one that kills Windows? No thanks.
You're either exaggerating for effect, or were misinformed. There is a bug with 2.6 + grub (SuSE 9.1 and Mandrake 10 exhibit this problem too) where a resized Windows partition will no longer boot (but be otherwise intact). It only happens on some drive geometry/BIOS combinations, and only if you reduce the size of your Windows partition. You can easily fix this with a Windows install disk, or prevent it altogether by using Knoppix or a pre-2.6 distro (or even PartitionMagic, etc) to repartition your disk before installing. It's not a big deal.
Of all the distros I've tried, Fedora is my favorite so far. Then again, I mostly have experience using it as a server, not a desktop.
Why generic display drivers? It's an S3 UniChrome - AFAIK, it's usually well supported under Linux.
I noticed the unichrome project recently. I'll try the drivers there.
The WiFi is Broadcom, could be better, but it can work.
Yeah, some people have got it to work with NDISwrapper + the Windows drivers, though it seems more people have failed than succeeded. It seems that people who tried DriverLoader got it to work, but that's a commercial product.
The flash drive? Probably a 2.6 problem
Yes it is. SuSE 9.0 automatically mounts usb disks. In FC1 I got them to work. There's some conflict with ACPI and usb devices in kernel 2.6.
I'm considering the 3220H1, but I'm not going to run SuSE or FC2, that's for sure.
To each his own. I've never tried a debian-based distro, so that's next for me. Maybe I'll try Mandrake 10 if I'm not happy with Debian. I can always fall back to Fedora as a last resort, because I'm familiar with it and have been happy with it.
Sharp do indeed make a good subnotebook, as do other vendors. I won't run Windows any more, and I'm *not sure* I could manage to successfully put Linux on one of these systems and have all the ports work properly and the graphics catered for correctly.
I found this out the hard way. My current laptop is an Averatec (3220H1). So far I've tried Suse 9.1 and FC2. I've had trouble getting all the hardware to work on it. So far I've had to settle for generic display drivers, no Wifi, and no USB flash drives (though this may have to do with the 2.6 kernel, not the hardware).
Linux was much a much smoother install on my previous machine, a Sony VAIO.