Note that this is for a very limited test - A simple "Hello World". The idea being to test the startup time and latency only. Obviously this doesn't test the speed of database interfaces, long scripts, loops, etc. We're trying to put that right now with a sort of competition between the different scripting environment people.
For what it's worth, here's what Rasmus Lerdorf had to say about PHP4 vs mod_perl:
> keep in mind that a short test like this plays into > PHP's strengths a bit. The larger and more complex the script is, the > more the gap between mod_perl and mod_php narrows performance-wise and at > some level of complexity mod_perl overtakes mod_php. With PHP4 this point > has been moved further out to the point where the script would have to be > *extremely* complex in order for the overall end-to-end request to come > out faster in mod_perl. But you always have tradeoffs. With PHP you > trade power and performance for really complex scripts for speed on simple > stuff. That also means that the two packages can be very complimentary > and be used together to get the best of both worlds. > > -Rasmus
(Hope Rasmus doesn't mind me posting this here, but it's in the mod_perl archives anyway).
- Look for new benchmarks using more real-world stuff coming soon.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Why is font handling so bad?
on
XFree86 News
·
· Score: 3
I really don't get it. Font handling is a well understood technology, and yet XFree still falls short. Fonts (even true-type fonts) look terrible under XFree - they look _far_ superior under (for example) Solaris' X server. And I'm afraid to say it, fonts just look a lot better under MacOS or Windows. It's a real shame, because I think XFree would be a lot more usable with a decent font engine underneath - and yes, I've tried both TrueType font engines for XFree.
Anyone know of any progress being made in this area?
Also font setup is appalling. I can't believe you have to edit font.dir files for each directory - why on earth wouldn't the server do this for you? I was astonished at the amount of work it took to get a few TrueType fonts working before the perl TrueType tools came out to do some of the work for you.
I guess you could consider this a bug report.:)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
A lot of users find themselves limited by GUI's. I find it a whole lot quicker at work (on NT) to type pushd and popd to move between directories rather than use the scroll bar in Explorer, and launch an editor from the command line rather than the Start menu. But then I'm a so-called "power user" - a subset of users that this guy is neglecting in his design. So while I agree with some of his points (and do see a lot of inconsistency in Linux+X), I have to say that the article hasn't been that well thought out.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Re:The problem is more severe in Windows
on
BO2K cracked
·
· Score: 2
Not unless you have Admin rights.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Instead of asking him to just outright re-name his package he should have looked carefully at the changes, and talked about integrating the differences into 2.0. After all, there's got to be some good stuff in both packages, right? I'm assuming that given the version no's that 2.0 had some major changes and 1.2 had some minor ones? So work together.
The hardest part of OSS is the same hardest part of closed projects: People management. If you've got contributors to your project you need to realise that this is as important (if not more so) than your coding ability. That's why Linux is such a success IMHO.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
None of the "It's OK to use Linux as the Amiga's new kernel" posts have managed to address one of the key reasons for using QNX as the kernel.
Real Time
The only way to succeed in a true multimedia OS is to have deterministic timing. This allows you to create awsome effects hardware like the Video Toaster (lack of deterministic timing is why it's taken so long to see an adequate replacement for the toaster on newer OS's), and powerful media software like Scala. The sort of thing that Amiga Inc were talking about reviving. Unfortunately Linux doesn't address these problems - even with the RT-Linux patches (which are a good start). It seems to me a big waste of Amiga's time and resources to hack in real time code back into the kernel, when they had a great (possibly the best) real time OS waiting to be used.
I wait with interest to see what they come up with, but I'm not selling my Linux box down the river yet, I can't wait for the WindowMaker theme to come out that emulates the LAF...:)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
All your arguments about things coming to Linux (Flash, Director, etc) because of Amiga still don't create a compelling reason to use Linux instead of "Amiga-Linux". They do create a compelling reason to use Linux though.
My argument was about What, over and above what Linux will offer when Amiga-Linux comes out, will compell people to buy Amiga, rather than (say) Red Hat Linux? - not about what would make people choose Amiga-Linux over something other than Linux. Given that, your arguments about commercial support, multiple platforms, etc, are moot. Linux has that today.
And yes it was a waste of my time. I was Manager of the ICOA PMWG. But I'm not bitter:)
Finally, you say it's interesting because it's based on concepts newer than 2 decades. Which part? The Object model? Well, that remains to be seen - and what is an Object model if not an Object oriented API to the OS? We've had API's for decades. And Linux _is_ based on decades old technology.
I say it would have been interesting if it was going to be QNX based, instead it just looks like a Linux distro with a new commercial look and API. Woo hoo. Not.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
A year ago Amiga made this big announcement about this secret chip that they were in talks with, that had 10 times the power of anything currently on the market. Later that changed into "We're evaluating different options, including the G4".
At the same time they were in talks with BeOS about using their kernel for the new OS (yes, I know this was never public knowledge, but some day someone official will leak this information to the press). Then Amiga pulled out of that deal 'cos Be asked for too much money - so QNX was picked, and announced as "the best technology available". Now even that is down the pan.
So what happened to the statements like "realtime is important to a multimedia OS". I guess it is'nt. And I guess neither is QNX Neutrino's transparent clustering technology (that would have made beowulf look hard to work with). In the meantime Amiga developers drop like flies, as the Classic update gets pushed further and further back, and the specs for it shrink.
So who is going to buy this new Linux box? Not current Linux users for sure - they're happy with what they've got (I know I am). Not current Amiga users - there's nothing to tempt them to buy the new Amiga over and above Linux. I guess they'll have a good shot at the embedded/palm/consumer market. Good luck to them.
Sad really. In all that time we haven't seen one iota of progress from them development-wise. What are they going to do with their current code? Bin it and re-write for X, instead of Photon? (yes, I know the POSIX stuff will be portable). We've seen constant changes in direction. There's no faith left. Today I read comp.sys.amiga.misc for the first time in a while and there's only about 2 people defending Amiga's actions (and only to the extent of "wait and see what they deliver"), compared to many more a year ago.
So, since the only revolutionary stuff is gone (the QNX Neutrino OS) - what's left? An unknown Object model running on top of Linux? I think I'd rather stick with Corba and what I've got right now. What a shame - I was very hopeful a year ago. What a waste of time.
Matt.
(all the above quotes are paraphrased)
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I think (last time I read) that www.qnx.com runs on QNX. I guess it's not that great under heavy load since it's slashdotted already. Anyone got the images in their cache so I don't have to wait until tomorrow to view them?
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Those aren't part of the kernel though. They just provide API's to developers, that happen to implement some basic OS services (or what NT considers basic). The _real_ kernel is NTOSKRNL.EXE which on my work system (which I think is SP4) is 927,552 bytes (the bit that provides core system services like threading, process control, etc). Big compared to 100k, and huge compared to QNX Neutrino's 20k. I didn't want to refute your point - just provide a bit of accuracy.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I doubt it. How would getting command line apps working on Wine encourage developers to work on Wine? There's not a single command line app that I can think of that there isn't a better Linux version of. Can you?
Although I'd love to see _anything_ that got Wine working better than it does now - right now it's completely useless. VMWare is going to kick it's butt all over the shop.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Most other Broadcasting companies don't have a web site/team as large as the BBC's. They might use Linux and you'd never hear about it.
The BBC Online team actively encourage the replacement of NT (the default) with Linux on your workstation if it will help your productivity. Now if only I could find that Mandrake 6.0 cd I had lying around...:)
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
The point though was to benchmark the speed of the web environments (i.e. CGI, mod_perl, php etc) not the different OS's. The different OS's were just thrown in there to see if that made a significant difference. It didn't, and I'm not sure why someone posted this to slashdot except as flamebait.
The mod_perl group is hoping to do some more extensive benchmarking to look at the speed differences in longer scripts in the different languages too - the "hello world" example is only really a valid comparison between different ways of using Perl - not of different languages - for that you need a more complex test.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I'd really like to know a) how you come to this conculsion and b) where your evidence is.
Not that I don't believe you - I just hate seing blind advocacy without any real figures behind it. You've made a blanket statement "[freeBSD], despite having a faster TCP/IP stack, linux is faster" - but I'm unconvinced. However I do run Linux and not *bsd because there are still apps that are Linux specific (e.g. Oracle and Sybase, both of which I need to run) - and I don't fancy playing about in any compatibility modes for that stuff since it's critical to me.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Frontpage 2000 (which implements all the upload stuff which you wrote about) is going to be DAV compatible, as are the new frontpage server extensions (yuck!). Unsurprisingly Apache has a mod_dav available which implements the full DAV standard, and they've even done some work with MS to get the FPSE up to scratch DAV-wise.
So - you'll be able to do all that with Apache too - and the usual "and more.." stuff that goes with Apache too.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
ASP's are slow. See the benchmarks done by the mod_perl people on perl.apache.org. NT is notorious for slow dynamic content. Unless you write everything as ultra-optimised ISAPI dll's you'll suffer the same fate - as I've experienced to my great embarassment - gladly I've vowed to never take *that* route again...:)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I went through this when I decided to become a contractor here in the UK. I didn't have a PC at the time (just my trusty old Amiga, sold on now), so I figured it would be OK to use the (as I considered it) de-facto standard multi-platform document standard: PDF. So I created my CV in PDF format and sent it out to the agencies.
Hardly any (I can't recall 1) accepted it, and instead wanted "Word 95". Bah. So I complied. I complained, but I complied. I even wrote to a contractor magazine to say how ridiculous it was to apply for hi-tech jobs and have PDF be turned down. "Surely there are Unix sysadmins out there with no way to create a Word 95 document" I thought. But even the letter to the magazine got flamed by an old-timer for me to just "deal with it".
Well now I send out my CV in HTML, or point them to my web site. It's funny - Microsoft has actually done me a service there - with either Word or IE (or Netscape) they can always open my CV. Fine. But it's not the ultimate solution to the CV problem.
My CV is actually stored in XML. The resulting HTML is dynamically generated each time you view it (by a perl script called xmerge which does XSL-T template style operations). What I really want to be able to do is submit my CV in XML. This way both the client and the agent can extract much more detailed information that they want, or ignore that detail. Then we need some sort of search engine that can match CV's up to job postings - also created in XML. That's coming. It's the work of the XML-HR (now HRMML) group at http://www.structuredmethods.com/ to bring us that technology. Note that my CV XML DTD isn't the one used by HRMML, but one I invented myself, because it's simpler and more appropriate for contracting (IMHO). Ultimately I may merge my work with HRMML.
For more info, see my CV stuff on sergeant.org. Or mail me direct at matt@sergeant.org for more info, and details of how to post a web page providing your CV in XML and have the HTML output produced by my script off my server.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I'm interested in this too - although presumably it's no different to a laptop that you'd have in your car, although I'm guessing that most people don't actually use their laptop while moving.
My guess is that these folks use quite a bit of caching (so they can park the head when not reading a song?), and shock resistance techniques, so that the result is a pretty robust little unit.
Still, I can't imagine them lasting as long as a normal car stereo (like 15 years+) - you'll probably have to keep replacing that hard drive.
Having said all that - I think it's a risk I'd love to take. There have been many weekend drives to Scotland (I live in the south of England - Scotland is a 9 to 11 hour drive - a drive I have to make about 8 times a year) where I've gotten sooooo bored of my music. If I could put this unit on the company as part of my company car that would be so cool:)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
And yet even with xfstt (or a patched XFree with ttf support) or xfsft (I've tried them all), font rendering at small point sizes is apalling. Absolutely terrible. No worse than PS font rendering at small sizes, but come on - Windows and MacOS have been doing good quality small point size rendering for years.
I seriously hope this improves (it's all down to a good hinting engine). That and font smoothing would seriously improve my X experience.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Re:Uhm, providing a desktop environment
on
The KDE Future
·
· Score: 2
Well, there's Wings which is a UI library, although admittedly not particularly complete:)
And I heartily recommend anyone wanting to use KDE to dump KWM, and use WindowMaker instead - you'll save yourself a whole lot of RAM.
But then I dumped both Gnome and KDE - both starve your machine of RAM, and provide very little to the hardcore user.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Does anyone here know how to switch this controller to 80M/s on Linux - I can only get it to work at 40M/s on Linux 2.2.8. Not that this speed is critical - I'm not having much luck finding hard drives that'll do 80M/s, I'm just curious.
Thanks.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
"How does the free software community fight that!"
I mean, 10 microsoft employees - that's got to be over a million bucks a year to MS... That's some serious effort to fight a free operating system.
But then I relaxed - because we don't have to fight it - we just keep on using and producing quality products, and fight them on our terms - quality, stability, openness, freedom. Those are terms MS finds it very difficult to fight on.
I'm actually quite happy now that they've done this - it means they are totally serious about the free software community, and gives them more credibility than I could possibly have imagined over a year ago.
Thanks Bill.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Slashdot Mirror
OK, Joshua's gonna kill me for this, but check his stuff:
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Hello World Benchmarks
Note that this is for a very limited test - A simple "Hello World". The idea being to test the startup time and latency only. Obviously this doesn't test the speed of database interfaces, long scripts, loops, etc. We're trying to put that right now with a sort of competition between the different scripting environment people.
For what it's worth, here's what Rasmus Lerdorf had to say about PHP4 vs mod_perl:
> keep in mind that a short test like this plays into
> PHP's strengths a bit. The larger and more complex the script is, the
> more the gap between mod_perl and mod_php narrows performance-wise and at
> some level of complexity mod_perl overtakes mod_php. With PHP4 this point
> has been moved further out to the point where the script would have to be
> *extremely* complex in order for the overall end-to-end request to come
> out faster in mod_perl. But you always have tradeoffs. With PHP you
> trade power and performance for really complex scripts for speed on simple
> stuff. That also means that the two packages can be very complimentary
> and be used together to get the best of both worlds.
>
> -Rasmus
(Hope Rasmus doesn't mind me posting this here, but it's in the mod_perl archives anyway).
- Look for new benchmarks using more real-world stuff coming soon.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I really don't get it. Font handling is a well understood technology, and yet XFree still falls short. Fonts (even true-type fonts) look terrible under XFree - they look _far_ superior under (for example) Solaris' X server. And I'm afraid to say it, fonts just look a lot better under MacOS or Windows. It's a real shame, because I think XFree would be a lot more usable with a decent font engine underneath - and yes, I've tried both TrueType font engines for XFree.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Anyone know of any progress being made in this area?
Also font setup is appalling. I can't believe you have to edit font.dir files for each directory - why on earth wouldn't the server do this for you? I was astonished at the amount of work it took to get a few TrueType fonts working before the perl TrueType tools came out to do some of the work for you.
I guess you could consider this a bug report.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
"Why can't there be a GUI and a CLI".
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Exactly.
A lot of users find themselves limited by GUI's. I find it a whole lot quicker at work (on NT) to type pushd and popd to move between directories rather than use the scroll bar in Explorer, and launch an editor from the command line rather than the Start menu. But then I'm a so-called "power user" - a subset of users that this guy is neglecting in his design. So while I agree with some of his points (and do see a lot of inconsistency in Linux+X), I have to say that the article hasn't been that well thought out.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Not unless you have Admin rights.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Instead of asking him to just outright re-name his package he should have looked carefully at the changes, and talked about integrating the differences into 2.0. After all, there's got to be some good stuff in both packages, right? I'm assuming that given the version no's that 2.0 had some major changes and 1.2 had some minor ones? So work together.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The hardest part of OSS is the same hardest part of closed projects: People management. If you've got contributors to your project you need to realise that this is as important (if not more so) than your coding ability. That's why Linux is such a success IMHO.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
None of the "It's OK to use Linux as the Amiga's new kernel" posts have managed to address one of the key reasons for using QNX as the kernel.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Real Time
The only way to succeed in a true multimedia OS is to have deterministic timing. This allows you to create awsome effects hardware like the Video Toaster (lack of deterministic timing is why it's taken so long to see an adequate replacement for the toaster on newer OS's), and powerful media software like Scala. The sort of thing that Amiga Inc were talking about reviving. Unfortunately Linux doesn't address these problems - even with the RT-Linux patches (which are a good start). It seems to me a big waste of Amiga's time and resources to hack in real time code back into the kernel, when they had a great (possibly the best) real time OS waiting to be used.
I wait with interest to see what they come up with, but I'm not selling my Linux box down the river yet, I can't wait for the WindowMaker theme to come out that emulates the LAF...
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
All your arguments about things coming to Linux (Flash, Director, etc) because of Amiga still don't create a compelling reason to use Linux instead of "Amiga-Linux". They do create a compelling reason to use Linux though.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
My argument was about What, over and above what Linux will offer when Amiga-Linux comes out, will compell people to buy Amiga, rather than (say) Red Hat Linux? - not about what would make people choose Amiga-Linux over something other than Linux. Given that, your arguments about commercial support, multiple platforms, etc, are moot. Linux has that today.
And yes it was a waste of my time. I was Manager of the ICOA PMWG. But I'm not bitter
Finally, you say it's interesting because it's based on concepts newer than 2 decades. Which part? The Object model? Well, that remains to be seen - and what is an Object model if not an Object oriented API to the OS? We've had API's for decades. And Linux _is_ based on decades old technology.
I say it would have been interesting if it was going to be QNX based, instead it just looks like a Linux distro with a new commercial look and API. Woo hoo. Not.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
A year ago Amiga made this big announcement about this secret chip that they were in talks with, that had 10 times the power of anything currently on the market. Later that changed into "We're evaluating different options, including the G4".
,hacker Perl another Just)'
At the same time they were in talks with BeOS about using their kernel for the new OS (yes, I know this was never public knowledge, but some day someone official will leak this information to the press). Then Amiga pulled out of that deal 'cos Be asked for too much money - so QNX was picked, and announced as "the best technology available". Now even that is down the pan.
So what happened to the statements like "realtime is important to a multimedia OS". I guess it is'nt. And I guess neither is QNX Neutrino's transparent clustering technology (that would have made beowulf look hard to work with). In the meantime Amiga developers drop like flies, as the Classic update gets pushed further and further back, and the specs for it shrink.
So who is going to buy this new Linux box? Not current Linux users for sure - they're happy with what they've got (I know I am). Not current Amiga users - there's nothing to tempt them to buy the new Amiga over and above Linux. I guess they'll have a good shot at the embedded/palm/consumer market. Good luck to them.
Sad really. In all that time we haven't seen one iota of progress from them development-wise. What are they going to do with their current code? Bin it and re-write for X, instead of Photon? (yes, I know the POSIX stuff will be portable). We've seen constant changes in direction. There's no faith left. Today I read comp.sys.amiga.misc for the first time in a while and there's only about 2 people defending Amiga's actions (and only to the extent of "wait and see what they deliver"), compared to many more a year ago.
So, since the only revolutionary stuff is gone (the QNX Neutrino OS) - what's left? An unknown Object model running on top of Linux? I think I'd rather stick with Corba and what I've got right now. What a shame - I was very hopeful a year ago. What a waste of time.
Matt.
(all the above quotes are paraphrased)
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I think (last time I read) that www.qnx.com runs on QNX. I guess it's not that great under heavy load since it's slashdotted already. Anyone got the images in their cache so I don't have to wait until tomorrow to view them?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Those aren't part of the kernel though. They just provide API's to developers, that happen to implement some basic OS services (or what NT considers basic). The _real_ kernel is NTOSKRNL.EXE which on my work system (which I think is SP4) is 927,552 bytes (the bit that provides core system services like threading, process control, etc). Big compared to 100k, and huge compared to QNX Neutrino's 20k. I didn't want to refute your point - just provide a bit of accuracy.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I doubt it. How would getting command line apps working on Wine encourage developers to work on Wine? There's not a single command line app that I can think of that there isn't a better Linux version of. Can you?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Although I'd love to see _anything_ that got Wine working better than it does now - right now it's completely useless. VMWare is going to kick it's butt all over the shop.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Most other Broadcasting companies don't have a web site/team as large as the BBC's. They might use Linux and you'd never hear about it.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The BBC Online team actively encourage the replacement of NT (the default) with Linux on your workstation if it will help your productivity. Now if only I could find that Mandrake 6.0 cd I had lying around...
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
The point though was to benchmark the speed of the web environments (i.e. CGI, mod_perl, php etc) not the different OS's. The different OS's were just thrown in there to see if that made a significant difference. It didn't, and I'm not sure why someone posted this to slashdot except as flamebait.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The mod_perl group is hoping to do some more extensive benchmarking to look at the speed differences in longer scripts in the different languages too - the "hello world" example is only really a valid comparison between different ways of using Perl - not of different languages - for that you need a more complex test.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I'd really like to know a) how you come to this conculsion and b) where your evidence is.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Not that I don't believe you - I just hate seing blind advocacy without any real figures behind it. You've made a blanket statement "[freeBSD], despite having a faster TCP/IP stack, linux is faster" - but I'm unconvinced. However I do run Linux and not *bsd because there are still apps that are Linux specific (e.g. Oracle and Sybase, both of which I need to run) - and I don't fancy playing about in any compatibility modes for that stuff since it's critical to me.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Frontpage 2000 (which implements all the upload stuff which you wrote about) is going to be DAV compatible, as are the new frontpage server extensions (yuck!). Unsurprisingly Apache has a mod_dav available which implements the full DAV standard, and they've even done some work with MS to get the FPSE up to scratch DAV-wise.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
So - you'll be able to do all that with Apache too - and the usual "and more.." stuff that goes with Apache too.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
ASP's are slow. See the benchmarks done by the mod_perl people on perl.apache.org. NT is notorious for slow dynamic content. Unless you write everything as ultra-optimised ISAPI dll's you'll suffer the same fate - as I've experienced to my great embarassment - gladly I've vowed to never take *that* route again... :)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I went through this when I decided to become a contractor here in the UK. I didn't have a PC at the time (just my trusty old Amiga, sold on now), so I figured it would be OK to use the (as I considered it) de-facto standard multi-platform document standard: PDF. So I created my CV in PDF format and sent it out to the agencies.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Hardly any (I can't recall 1) accepted it, and instead wanted "Word 95". Bah. So I complied. I complained, but I complied. I even wrote to a contractor magazine to say how ridiculous it was to apply for hi-tech jobs and have PDF be turned down. "Surely there are Unix sysadmins out there with no way to create a Word 95 document" I thought. But even the letter to the magazine got flamed by an old-timer for me to just "deal with it".
Well now I send out my CV in HTML, or point them to my web site. It's funny - Microsoft has actually done me a service there - with either Word or IE (or Netscape) they can always open my CV. Fine. But it's not the ultimate solution to the CV problem.
My CV is actually stored in XML. The resulting HTML is dynamically generated each time you view it (by a perl script called xmerge which does XSL-T template style operations). What I really want to be able to do is submit my CV in XML. This way both the client and the agent can extract much more detailed information that they want, or ignore that detail. Then we need some sort of search engine that can match CV's up to job postings - also created in XML. That's coming. It's the work of the XML-HR (now HRMML) group at http://www.structuredmethods.com/ to bring us that technology. Note that my CV XML DTD isn't the one used by HRMML, but one I invented myself, because it's simpler and more appropriate for contracting (IMHO). Ultimately I may merge my work with HRMML.
For more info, see my CV stuff on sergeant.org. Or mail me direct at matt@sergeant.org for more info, and details of how to post a web page providing your CV in XML and have the HTML output produced by my script off my server.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
This is completely off topic, so feel free to moderate away...
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
I just got my July issue of Web Techniques, and on "The Last Page" by Dale Dougherty it says:
The profiles of so-called geeks that emerged after the Littleton massacre irritated Jon Katz, who runs Slashdot.org, a vibrant "geek" site.
Well, I thought it was kinda funny anyway...
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I'm interested in this too - although presumably it's no different to a laptop that you'd have in your car, although I'm guessing that most people don't actually use their laptop while moving.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
My guess is that these folks use quite a bit of caching (so they can park the head when not reading a song?), and shock resistance techniques, so that the result is a pretty robust little unit.
Still, I can't imagine them lasting as long as a normal car stereo (like 15 years+) - you'll probably have to keep replacing that hard drive.
Having said all that - I think it's a risk I'd love to take. There have been many weekend drives to Scotland (I live in the south of England - Scotland is a 9 to 11 hour drive - a drive I have to make about 8 times a year) where I've gotten sooooo bored of my music. If I could put this unit on the company as part of my company car that would be so cool
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Can you right click a function or any word in emacs and have netscape search all your documentation for that keyword?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
And can you have it open up a tree based code browser, and browse the call stack of your code without running it?
There are lots of cool things IDE's do that you find very useful in large projects, or in projects that you're thrown into to try and maintain.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
And yet even with xfstt (or a patched XFree with ttf support) or xfsft (I've tried them all), font rendering at small point sizes is apalling. Absolutely terrible. No worse than PS font rendering at small sizes, but come on - Windows and MacOS have been doing good quality small point size rendering for years.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
I seriously hope this improves (it's all down to a good hinting engine). That and font smoothing would seriously improve my X experience.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Well, there's Wings which is a UI library, although admittedly not particularly complete :)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
And I heartily recommend anyone wanting to use KDE to dump KWM, and use WindowMaker instead - you'll save yourself a whole lot of RAM.
But then I dumped both Gnome and KDE - both starve your machine of RAM, and provide very little to the hardcore user.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Does anyone here know how to switch this controller to 80M/s on Linux - I can only get it to work at 40M/s on Linux 2.2.8. Not that this speed is critical - I'm not having much luck finding hard drives that'll do 80M/s, I'm just curious.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Thanks.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
OMG the irony of an interview with RMS in realplayer format is just killing me... I hope others see the humour as much as I do... :)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
My first thought when I read this was:
,hacker Perl another Just)'
"How does the free software community fight that!"
I mean, 10 microsoft employees - that's got to be over a million bucks a year to MS... That's some serious effort to fight a free operating system.
But then I relaxed - because we don't have to fight it - we just keep on using and producing quality products, and fight them on our terms - quality, stability, openness, freedom. Those are terms MS finds it very difficult to fight on.
I'm actually quite happy now that they've done this - it means they are totally serious about the free software community, and gives them more credibility than I could possibly have imagined over a year ago.
Thanks Bill.
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