There are conditionals built into some of the triggers. For example, it can look for tweets containing a string.
I'm already finding it useful. I wanted a Facebook page and a Twitter feed to update every time a blog gets updated. Using ittt gives me more control than Facebook built in feed -> note mechanism, and polls more frequently.
I could roll my own of course, but why bother when this is here and it works. I thought about the security aspects and decided it was OK given my use case.
Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax.
Languages that differ only in syntax are a bit boring.
The Pragmatic Programmer suggests you learn a new language every year. Not to the extent that you're fully proficient in it and know the APIs inside out, but to the extent that you grasp the core concepts. To be worth learning, the language should have new concepts -- but that's pretty common.
Often a little tinkering in a language with some new paradigms, or just a shift in emphasis, can help you improve your programming style in whatever language you use for "real work". For example, a bit of time in Haskell or Closure, will have you using the functional features of Javascript or Ruby more. Playing with Io will clean up the way you think of Javascript prototypes.
I know it's a bit pedantic to distinguish between the DOM and Javascript, but I think it's important to do so here.
One of the ways "Javascript: The Good Parts" made JS look OK, was to exclude the DOM from the book altogether. Most people seem to agree that the DOM is a bit of a mess. One of the things that makes jQuery popular is that it wraps the DOM's methods with something altogether more usable and consistent across browsers.
Your image rollovers example, for example, to me seems all about the DOM and little to do with Javascript itself.
XMLHttpRequest ("the most basic feature that led to AJAX") shouldn't be viewed as a language feature; it's an object prototype provided by the browser. (There's no XMLHttpRequest in node.js -- except as a third-party module)
This is important because if Dart uses the old DOM API, then it's inherited one of the worst aspects of what it seeks to replace. If Google comes up with something new to replace DOM, then it would seem churlish not to provide Javascript bindings to that -- but that would make a whole new language seem superfluous.
Of course, maybe they could use some trickery and have the language compiled to.js (in addition to having its own VM) just so legacy browsers can still load a dart app and run it as js.
It's interesting that this should come about when Javascript seems (to me) to be undergoing quite a surge.
The community has carved out a set of practices that makes Javascript pretty satisfying to work in -- Crockford's efforts, the require/export conventions etc.
Callback oriented programming habits learned in the browser with jQuery (etc.) have shown that Javascript lends itself quite well to that style of programming. Underscore has promoted a functional style.
Node.js seems to be more popular than forebears such as Twisted, presumably because of all those JS-in-the-browser programmers who can apply their callback habits to Node.
CoffeeScript is there for people who want a more expressive syntax.... and just as people are coming around to the idea that JS isn't that bad after all, Google says "nah, it's irredeemable"
There's nothing wrong with doing production in the third world.
The greatest favour you could do those countries is to take your business there, treat your staff properly, do your manufacturing and raw materials sourcing in an ethical and environmentally responsible way.
That's how to improve conditions for the people in those countries.
What's wrong, is to outsource parts of your business to those parts of the world, and adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude to unethical practices.
FWIW I'd pay a £50 premium for an Android smartphone with some kind of assurance that the supply chain met some ethical standard or other (cf fairtrade coffee). I'm pretty sure they could achieve it for much less.
There are lots of faulty fluorescent bulbs out there (mostly strip lights) that flicker like mad. They trigger migraines in lots of people. No craziness there.
Main available energy resources are wood, crude oil, natural gas, and animal fat.
Of course, efficiently burning wood from properly managed forestry, is green energy. The tree you grow to replace the one you burned, fixes equivalent CO2 to that which you released in the burning.
The same could be said of animal fat, I suppose, depending on the energy sources used in rearing the animal.
Try your snowsuit at -40 degrees. Temperatures where if you chuck a mugful of freshly boiled water in the air, it's frozen before it hits the ground.
Granted, it only gets that low a few times a year in Fairbanks, but I'd personally be trying to stay indoors as much as possible even at, say, 30 below.
I bet the Eskimos (as you're encouraged to call them in Alaska) stay indoors as much as they can in those temperatures. Hunt on dry land in the summer; hunt on the sea ice in spring until it thaws. Store stuff and bed down for winter. (This is based on hazy recollections of a guided tour of Barrow -- in the summer)
Firstly - don't expect high school kids to know what "panacea".
Secondly - don't teach kids that they should go looking for panacaea.
Solar power is no help to Alaskans in the winter. In the summer though, many homes and businesses could run on their own solar panels. It wouldn't eliminate their reliance on fossil fuels -- but it would reduce it.
Do the boxed solar projects actually require real sun in order to be educational? I mean, would the principles be evident to the students if you shone an electric light at solar panels indoors?
There's an awful lot of sunlight in Alaska during the summer, and the students should have long enough memories to know that.
I worked for the Post Office, the arm that does the delivery part in the UK. The blame on the UK government is a bit unfounded.
From what I understand, the government has definitely crapped on the postal service as a whole.
The point is that the end-to-end process of providing mail collection and delivery to a whole country has many sub-processes, some of which are cheap and easy, some of which are expensive and difficult. The government obliged the Royal Mail to open up every step to competition, but also obliged the Royal Mail to continue to provide every service at a capped price.
Hence, private enterprise stepped in an grabbed all the profitable aspects -- easy things like collecting bulk mail; sorting etc. -- while leaving the Royal Mail to keep doing the difficult stuff at a loss -- like driving to remote Scottish farms to deliver a single envelope.
Hmm, I remember a holiday being similarly affected, when I returned to our villa to find the wind had torn about 100 pages of Northern Lights out of the book, and strewn them around the garden.
Lust for reference, you have actually tried it haven't you?
My experience was different. I gave a few demo games a go on a wee lil netbook. Worked a treat. I was very impressed with the graphics quality and lack of lag.
Fool! Your direct experience is no substitute for a blowhard's knowledge of the speed of light.
Are you referring some of the poorer versions of BASIC out there? BBC BASIC allowed variable names of any length, and named procedures, so you didn't need to use GOSUB.
Or are you saying that in order to work in 40 character lines, you have to use short variable names?
If Linus can work in 80 chars with 8 char indents, then anyone can work in 40 chars with, say, 2 char indents. Running out of width is a sign that you need to decompose your functions.
However, it's good to have a *really* low spec minimum requirement, and composite TV (or even RF!) is known to be good enough for 40x25 text. The BBC Micro's Mode 7 (teletext) was very readable indeed over RF.
Coding in a 40 char window is likely to have a good influence on coding style.
Slashdot Mirror
There are conditionals built into some of the triggers. For example, it can look for tweets containing a string.
I'm already finding it useful. I wanted a Facebook page and a Twitter feed to update every time a blog gets updated. Using ittt gives me more control than Facebook built in feed -> note mechanism, and polls more frequently.
I could roll my own of course, but why bother when this is here and it works. I thought about the security aspects and decided it was OK given my use case.
Surely a space is the *easiest* character to print.
Languages are easy. It's a couple of hours to grasp the syntax.
Languages that differ only in syntax are a bit boring.
The Pragmatic Programmer suggests you learn a new language every year. Not to the extent that you're fully proficient in it and know the APIs inside out, but to the extent that you grasp the core concepts. To be worth learning, the language should have new concepts -- but that's pretty common.
Often a little tinkering in a language with some new paradigms, or just a shift in emphasis, can help you improve your programming style in whatever language you use for "real work". For example, a bit of time in Haskell or Closure, will have you using the functional features of Javascript or Ruby more. Playing with Io will clean up the way you think of Javascript prototypes.
... until you need to deal with half a cent.
Or apply 1.3% interest to an account balance of $100.34 ...
I know it's a bit pedantic to distinguish between the DOM and Javascript, but I think it's important to do so here.
One of the ways "Javascript: The Good Parts" made JS look OK, was to exclude the DOM from the book altogether. Most people seem to agree that the DOM is a bit of a mess.
One of the things that makes jQuery popular is that it wraps the DOM's methods with something altogether more usable and consistent across browsers.
Your image rollovers example, for example, to me seems all about the DOM and little to do with Javascript itself.
XMLHttpRequest ("the most basic feature that led to AJAX") shouldn't be viewed as a language feature; it's an object prototype provided by the browser. (There's no XMLHttpRequest in node.js -- except as a third-party module)
This is important because if Dart uses the old DOM API, then it's inherited one of the worst aspects of what it seeks to replace.
If Google comes up with something new to replace DOM, then it would seem churlish not to provide Javascript bindings to that -- but that would make a whole new language seem superfluous.
Of course, maybe they could use some trickery and have the language compiled to .js (in addition to having its own VM) just so legacy browsers can still load a dart app and run it as js.
This is exactly what they are doing.
... and node.js makes a virtue of single-threadedness. Maybe that's something to hold onto.
It's interesting that this should come about when Javascript seems (to me) to be undergoing quite a surge.
The community has carved out a set of practices that makes Javascript pretty satisfying to work in -- Crockford's efforts, the require/export conventions etc.
Callback oriented programming habits learned in the browser with jQuery (etc.) have shown that Javascript lends itself quite well to that style of programming. Underscore has promoted a functional style.
Node.js seems to be more popular than forebears such as Twisted, presumably because of all those JS-in-the-browser programmers who can apply their callback habits to Node.
CoffeeScript is there for people who want a more expressive syntax. ... and just as people are coming around to the idea that JS isn't that bad after all, Google says "nah, it's irredeemable"
There's nothing wrong with doing production in the third world.
The greatest favour you could do those countries is to take your business there, treat your staff properly, do your manufacturing and raw materials sourcing in an ethical and environmentally responsible way.
That's how to improve conditions for the people in those countries.
What's wrong, is to outsource parts of your business to those parts of the world, and adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude to unethical practices.
FWIW I'd pay a £50 premium for an Android smartphone with some kind of assurance that the supply chain met some ethical standard or other (cf fairtrade coffee). I'm pretty sure they could achieve it for much less.
There are lots of faulty fluorescent bulbs out there (mostly strip lights) that flicker like mad. They trigger migraines in lots of people. No craziness there.
I meant to say that IN FAIRBANKS it routinely goes way below. That's where 2F is the average *high* in January. -13 is the average low.
As you say, it's warmer in Anchorage.
I assumed since the OP is flying around, he'd be in the wild north. (Although Anchorage is hardly Manhattan :) )
Anchorage is quite a way south though. It routinely goes way below 2F is the average *high* in January. -13 is the average low.
Lovely in summer though!
Main available energy resources are wood, crude oil, natural gas, and animal fat.
Of course, efficiently burning wood from properly managed forestry, is green energy. The tree you grow to replace the one you burned, fixes equivalent CO2 to that which you released in the burning.
The same could be said of animal fat, I suppose, depending on the energy sources used in rearing the animal.
Try your snowsuit at -40 degrees. Temperatures where if you chuck a mugful of freshly boiled water in the air, it's frozen before it hits the ground.
Granted, it only gets that low a few times a year in Fairbanks, but I'd personally be trying to stay indoors as much as possible even at, say, 30 below.
I bet the Eskimos (as you're encouraged to call them in Alaska) stay indoors as much as they can in those temperatures. Hunt on dry land in the summer; hunt on the sea ice in spring until it thaws. Store stuff and bed down for winter. (This is based on hazy recollections of a guided tour of Barrow -- in the summer)
Firstly - don't expect high school kids to know what "panacea".
Secondly - don't teach kids that they should go looking for panacaea.
Solar power is no help to Alaskans in the winter. In the summer though, many homes and businesses could run on their own solar panels. It wouldn't eliminate their reliance on fossil fuels -- but it would reduce it.
Obviously you could pack up a small turbine and multimeter and take it outside and show the kids the power generation.
The kind of temperatures you'd be talking in the winter, I wouldn't want to take kids outside any more than I had to.
There's an awful lot of sunlight in Alaska in the summer.
Plenty of Alaskan settlements are nowhere near the sea, so tidal power wouldn't seem relevant everywhere.
Do the boxed solar projects actually require real sun in order to be educational? I mean, would the principles be evident to the students if you shone an electric light at solar panels indoors?
There's an awful lot of sunlight in Alaska during the summer, and the students should have long enough memories to know that.
I worked for the Post Office, the arm that does the delivery part in the UK. The blame on the UK government is a bit unfounded.
From what I understand, the government has definitely crapped on the postal service as a whole.
The point is that the end-to-end process of providing mail collection and delivery to a whole country has many sub-processes, some of which are cheap and easy, some of which are expensive and difficult. The government obliged the Royal Mail to open up every step to competition, but also obliged the Royal Mail to continue to provide every service at a capped price.
Hence, private enterprise stepped in an grabbed all the profitable aspects -- easy things like collecting bulk mail; sorting etc. -- while leaving the Royal Mail to keep doing the difficult stuff at a loss -- like driving to remote Scottish farms to deliver a single envelope.
Hmm, I remember a holiday being similarly affected, when I returned to our villa to find the wind had torn about 100 pages of Northern Lights out of the book, and strewn them around the garden.
Lust for reference, you have actually tried it haven't you?
My experience was different. I gave a few demo games a go on a wee lil netbook. Worked a treat. I was very impressed with the graphics quality and lack of lag.
Fool! Your direct experience is no substitute for a blowhard's knowledge of the speed of light.
Replying to self:
Just to be clear -- I'm not suggesting kids today should be learning in BASIC. Ruby or Python would be good candidates.
Are you referring some of the poorer versions of BASIC out there? BBC BASIC allowed variable names of any length, and named procedures, so you didn't need to use GOSUB.
Or are you saying that in order to work in 40 character lines, you have to use short variable names?
If Linus can work in 80 chars with 8 char indents, then anyone can work in 40 chars with, say, 2 char indents. Running out of width is a sign that you need to decompose your functions.
Nah. There's something about having holes to poke wires into that makes Arduino compelling.
Or daunting, depending on your experience and prejudices.
However, it's good to have a *really* low spec minimum requirement, and composite TV (or even RF!) is known to be good enough for 40x25 text. The BBC Micro's Mode 7 (teletext) was very readable indeed over RF.
Coding in a 40 char window is likely to have a good influence on coding style.