1.0.8 is much better than 1.0.4. I've been struggling with GNOME compiles since the original 1.0, and my experience is that the rough spots are gone, and it's really 1.0 caliber now.
Make sure you upgrade gnome-libs to 1.0.8 and mc to 4.5.30.
Kudos to RHAD labs for getting the RPMs out so fast. Since I've already got everything I want compiled now with egcs, I won't be grabbing the RPMs, but since I'm one of the folks who've been complaining on the GNOME lists about the lack of RPM support, it's great to see these RPMs go up so fast now that Miguel and team believe they have GNOME 1.0 stabilized.
As for WindowMaker -- GNOME and WindowMaker are supposed to play nice together. I've done it myself, although I haven't tried swithing window managers from the control center. Make sure you have the latest GNOME-enabled WindowMaker (0.51.2, IIRC). Also, you'd do everyone a favor by reporting this to the GNOME bug list. As a workaround, try putting
wmaker & panel
in your.xinitrc, then starting X. GNOME should then Do The Right Thing via session management from now on (and you can replace those lines in.xinitrc with gnome-session instead).
I guess that product placement of the cube logo on the screens in "Lost In Space" is an anachronism now... or else a clever prophecy that SGI will return to its senses and bring it back.
Code Complete is an excellent book. While it didn't have many great revelations for me (I had been programming professionally for years before reading it), I found it to be full of good wisdom. (Feel free to translate that as 'it agreed with what I had already decided was good programming practice.') It contains lots of good advice on the craft of programming that is not taught in college, and I've handed it to recent grads at work whose code I'm going to have to maintain.
Of course, you are probably right that Microsoft itself doesn't heed its own author's advice... but that's no reason anyone should deprive themself of this useful reference.
There are at least two debuggers for Tcl. One is from Don Libes, and comes as part of his Expect extension (although usable separately). See the Expect home page for more info.
The other is the commercial offering from Scriptics, John Ousterhout's company.
I'm sure if you check the Tcl FAQ you can find more. Check comp.lang.tcl.announce for the weekly summary postings, it will contain a link to the FAQ.
Contrary to some posts, this was not a content-free article. So, rather than critiquing the over-academic writing style, I'm going to try to respond to the content.
We bring our built-in apparatus for seeing and perceiving to the world on a computer monitor, where we build a simulation in its image.
Stating The Obvious #1: "Look, ma, I can use my eyes and brain to look at a computer screen!"
Bogus Claim #1: What I see on the computer monitor makes up a "world."
No, Richard, what you see on the computer monitor is little glowing dots of colored phosphors. When you're using a computer, these dots are lit up in particular patterns by computer programs. When you're using a program known as a "web browser", those patterns are determined by the HTML code and graphics files stored on or generated by a computer somewhere, created by the web site designer.
That's a pretty narrow "world" there.
Chips are disappearing into every aspect of our lives - communication, transportation, physical environments, clothing, and - ultimately - ourselves.
Stating The Obvious #2: "Look, ma, there are a lot more embedded CPUs out there these days!"
Bogus Claim #2: I know the future, and it holds biochips.
"Ultimately"? Where does he get this prophetic knowledge?
This is nothing other than technological determinism. "What can be built, shall be built." Says who? If biochips happen, it will be because people first choose to research the technology, then implement it, then use it.
The imaginary gardens on my monitor often seem more real than the trees in my back yard. Most of the time I don't even notice the real trees.
This speaks volumes about Richard Thieme, but the trees in his backyard remain real regardless of whether or not he chooses to believe in them.
I suggest quite seriously that Mr. Thieme get up from his computer, walk into his back yard, and beat his head against the trunk of one of those trees, to refresh his mind on the reality of the natural world.
I will accept his claim of the "reality" of his imaginary gardens when he can serve me a tasty, nourishing, imaginary-garden-grown tomato from them.
We don't yet live in the world constructed by computers that way, but we will.
More technological determinism.
It's also patently false. None of us are going to live in any other world than the world we live in. Even Mr. Thieme, unless he figures out that tomato-growing trick, and how to relieve himself virtually in cyberspace.
Now, we may spend more and more of our time living in the world staring into computer monitors. This might be a good or a bad thing, and is certainly worth discussing rather than assuming. But it will not be a world "constructed by computers," it will be the world that has tomatoes and toilets in it, and it will be the world that either (1) just happened to coagulate out of a nebula about 4.5 billion years ago, or (2) was created by God, depending on which origin story you subscribe to.
The world created and disclosed by computing is becoming an essential dimension of who we believe ourselves to be. And who, therefore, we are.
Translation: Theime believes the internet is becoming an essential part of who he is. And he thinks that, because he believes it, it is so.
Of course, this overlooks the possibility that Theime might be mistaken about what is essential, or that it might be possible to be wrong about ourselves. Now, for a (hypothetical) new-agey, middle-aged journalist/writer this shouldn't be surprising. From a Christian priest, this is not quite blasphemy, but is definately apostasy. The essential dimension of who we are is found in our relationship with God, not in our relationship with a myriad of web pages. Either he's forgotten what he learned in seminary, or he should ask for his money back.
Most of us who love online life remember the first time we tumbled into the rabbit hole, falling headlong into a domain as magical as Alice's underground. I remember downloading the first browser around ten o'clock at night. When I next looked up it was four in the morning.
Stating The Obvious #3: "Look, the internet is an addictive time-waster!"
Yes, I loose track of time too when I'm surfing the internet or just this close to getting a program to work. Maybe I'm just dull, but I fail to see a cosmic significance in this fact.
That knowledge engine rearranged data into forms that coupled effortlessly with my perceptual apparatus. It was a world of digital symbols filled with projections of my self as it moved among them, thinking it was leaving the room and extending itself "out there." The exploration was really, of course, inside the consensual space we agree to hallucinate together.
Methinks he doth read Neuromancer too much.
I hate to break this to him, but a book is a collection of digital symbols that "couples effortlessly with the perceptual apparatus," and allows me to leave the room and extend myself "out there."
What is it about this domain that compels such a response? What seduces us to stay up all night, fooling around for hours as we build communal worlds or play with these symbols, using them as levers to turn gears in the "real" world?
Last I checked, while there is that hot tub in Ypsilanti, Michigan connected to the Web, there are very few levers turning gears in the "real" (why quoted?) world. Unless you mean psychological hot buttons that can be pushed. It seems quite a stretch to call email, Usenet postings,/. comments, or even a personal website "levers to turn gears."
(Levers don't turn gears anyway, gears or pulleys turn gears...)
McMoneagle discovered that the world is not what he thought it was. He had to reinvent continuously the images he used as maps of reality as his psychic adventures exploded the consensual reality he had been taught to believe.
Statement Of The (Hopefully) Obvious #4: "The map is not the territory."
Anyone who is continually learning, who is growing in life, experiences the same "remapping" of reality as McMoneagle. Our maps get exploded as we learn that Mommy and Daddy aren't perfect, that there is no Santa Claus, that there are otherwise normal-seeming folks who believe in supply-side economics, etc.
What does this have to do with being online? Sure, this process can happen while you're logged on. It also happens when you're not, if you're living with your eyes open and your mind and spirit engaged.
The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer.
Horsefeathers.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for the entire look, feel, and content of the Web to change between now and the next time I log in. I understand the physicists also claim it's theoretically possible for all of the atoms of the chair I'm sittin in to tunnel Somewhere Else and for me to fall through it to the floor. I'm not worried much about either possibility.
Why? Well, why does every major browser have a bookmark feature? Could it be that there's enough stability in this online "world" that "landmarks" don't become obsolete every time?
I notice that Slashdot looks pretty much the same every time I visit, except for this week with Rob making so many changes. Even so, I expect (and am generally right) to find an article on "Changes to Slashdot" when the look and feel changes, to clue everyone in.
If everything I saw online became obsolete the second I turned my computer off, I'd throw it (or at least the modem) into the dumpster immediately, and stop wasting my time.
McMoneagle has difficulty talking about "reality" with people who have not experienced what he has. He has to build a modular interface that somehow connects both his experience and the experience of someone who has never gone diving.
Statement Of The Obvious #5: "People who have different life experiences will experience a 'communications gap' that needs to be bridged."
In the same way, building a computer interface that lets ordinary users couple with the many levels of the digital world is more than "usability." It is participation in a revolutionary act of mutual transformation.
Yes, but transformation into what?
McMoneagle's description of exploring the deeper waters of consciousness is a template for learning how to move with clear intentionality among the nested levels of symbols that fold into one another in the digital world.
This is simply backwards.
The "digital world" is, in general, a simplification of the real world. Anyone who can move with "clear intentionality" offline should be able to do so online as well. And I don't see much "nested symbolism" online -- symbols are generally a single level of indirection, with a one-to-one correspondance to what they represent. Consider "icons" (a word ripped from its religious root and stripped of most of its meaning). "Icons" are simply pushbuttons with pictographs. Contrast this with religious icons, which do contain "nested levels of symbols that fold into one another."
I have yet to see anything online that begins to approach the "exploring the deeper waters of consciousness" and "nested levels of symbolism" that is inherent in the Christian liturgy. Something that Thieme claims to have passing familiary with. I suspect the same is true of other human, offline systems of symbols that exist, but I'll leave it to those more familiar with those traditions to make the comparisons.
Remote viewing is a function of the intentionality of the viewer, not the so-called "physical" world. Nor is a computer network fully defined by chips, switches or code; the network is defined above all by the intentionality of the users.
If McMoneagle is more than a crank or deluded, then his remote viewing, though directed by "intentionality," must eventually ground itself in something outside of his intention. Otherwise, what's he viewing besides his own imagination?
Same thing with a network. First, the technological infrastructure must be there, and second, there must be real content out there, put into place by real people, or else all I am doing as a user of the network, no matter what my "intentionality," is staring at my navel. Or perhaps some other part of my anatomy.
We define ourselves as a spectrum of possibilities, choose one, and do it. The symbols we think we use as tools disappear, the nested levels built of those symbols collapse, and we see in that moment our responsibility for what we are building instead of pretending we're merely technicians or just along for the ride.
Up to the last paragraph, the iron determinism of technological advance and of a "new reality" has been trumpeted, and now all of a sudden we are supposed to see our "responsibility"?
This is nothing more than the television broadcasters' defense of "TV shows are crap because the public demands crap," dressed up in academic language and techno-mysticism and applied to the Internet.
Sorry, I'm neither impressed nor overcome with an longing to leave the real world for the virtual. In fact, planting a real garden sounds even better right now. And I'm even more eager for Sunday to get here -- it's Palm Sunday, and the nested levels of symbols are wonderful.
... and, while I am not terribly impressed with Katz's insights into life and the world ("sexbots" was a piece of thoughtless drivel), I don't mind seeing one author's experiences with the publishing industry. Who knows, maybe it'll come in useful someday when I write a book and need to know how to hype it on the Internet.:^)
Slashdot Mirror
1.0.8 is much better than 1.0.4. I've been struggling with GNOME compiles since the original 1.0, and my experience is that the rough spots are gone, and it's really 1.0 caliber now.
Make sure you upgrade gnome-libs to 1.0.8 and mc to 4.5.30.
Kudos to RHAD labs for getting the RPMs out so fast. Since I've already got everything I want compiled now with egcs, I won't be grabbing the RPMs, but since I'm one of the folks who've been complaining on the GNOME lists about the lack of RPM support, it's great to see these RPMs go up so fast now that Miguel and team believe they have GNOME 1.0 stabilized.
As for WindowMaker -- GNOME and WindowMaker are supposed to play nice together. I've done it myself, although I haven't tried swithing window managers from the control center. Make sure you have the latest GNOME-enabled WindowMaker (0.51.2, IIRC). Also, you'd do everyone a favor by reporting this to the GNOME bug list. As a workaround, try putting
wmaker &panel
in your .xinitrc, then starting X. GNOME should then Do The Right Thing via session management from now on (and you can replace those lines in .xinitrc with gnome-session instead).
I guess that product placement of the cube logo on the screens in "Lost In Space" is an anachronism now ... or else a clever prophecy that SGI will return to its senses and bring it back.
I'll take that with a salt block, thank you.
Code Complete is an excellent book. While it didn't have many great revelations for me (I had been programming professionally for years before reading it), I found it to be full of good wisdom. (Feel free to translate that as 'it agreed with what I had already decided was good programming practice.') It contains lots of good advice on the craft of programming that is not taught in college, and I've handed it to recent grads at work whose code I'm going to have to maintain.
Of course, you are probably right that Microsoft itself doesn't heed its own author's advice ... but that's no reason anyone should deprive themself of this useful reference.
There are at least two debuggers for Tcl. One is from Don Libes, and comes as part of his Expect extension (although usable separately). See the Expect home page for more info.
The other is the commercial offering from Scriptics, John Ousterhout's company.
I'm sure if you check the Tcl FAQ you can find more. Check comp.lang.tcl.announce for the weekly summary postings, it will contain a link to the FAQ.
Contrary to some posts, this was not a content-free article. So, rather than critiquing the over-academic writing style, I'm going to try to respond to the content.
We bring our built-in apparatus for seeing and perceiving to the world on a computer monitor, where we build a simulation in its image.
Stating The Obvious #1: "Look, ma, I can use my eyes and brain to look at a computer screen!"
Bogus Claim #1: What I see on the computer monitor makes up a "world."
No, Richard, what you see on the computer monitor is little glowing dots of colored phosphors. When you're using a computer, these dots are lit up in particular patterns by computer programs. When you're using a program known as a "web browser", those patterns are determined by the HTML code and graphics files stored on or generated by a computer somewhere, created by the web site designer.
That's a pretty narrow "world" there.
Chips are disappearing into every aspect of our lives - communication, transportation, physical environments, clothing, and - ultimately - ourselves.
Stating The Obvious #2: "Look, ma, there are a lot more embedded CPUs out there these days!"
Bogus Claim #2: I know the future, and it holds biochips.
"Ultimately"? Where does he get this prophetic knowledge?
This is nothing other than technological determinism. "What can be built, shall be built." Says who? If biochips happen, it will be because people first choose to research the technology, then implement it, then use it.
The imaginary gardens on my monitor often seem more real than the trees in my back yard. Most of the time I don't even notice the real trees.
This speaks volumes about Richard Thieme, but the trees in his backyard remain real regardless of whether or not he chooses to believe in them.
I suggest quite seriously that Mr. Thieme get up from his computer, walk into his back yard, and beat his head against the trunk of one of those trees, to refresh his mind on the reality of the natural world.
I will accept his claim of the "reality" of his imaginary gardens when he can serve me a tasty, nourishing, imaginary-garden-grown tomato from them.
We don't yet live in the world constructed by computers that way, but we will.
More technological determinism.
It's also patently false. None of us are going to live in any other world than the world we live in. Even Mr. Thieme, unless he figures out that tomato-growing trick, and how to relieve himself virtually in cyberspace.
Now, we may spend more and more of our time living in the world staring into computer monitors. This might be a good or a bad thing, and is certainly worth discussing rather than assuming. But it will not be a world "constructed by computers," it will be the world that has tomatoes and toilets in it, and it will be the world that either (1) just happened to coagulate out of a nebula about 4.5 billion years ago, or (2) was created by God, depending on which origin story you subscribe to.
The world created and disclosed by computing is becoming an essential dimension of who we believe ourselves to be. And who, therefore, we are.
Translation: Theime believes the internet is becoming an essential part of who he is. And he thinks that, because he believes it, it is so.
Of course, this overlooks the possibility that Theime might be mistaken about what is essential, or that it might be possible to be wrong about ourselves. Now, for a (hypothetical) new-agey, middle-aged journalist/writer this shouldn't be surprising. From a Christian priest, this is not quite blasphemy, but is definately apostasy. The essential dimension of who we are is found in our relationship with God, not in our relationship with a myriad of web pages. Either he's forgotten what he learned in seminary, or he should ask for his money back.
Most of us who love online life remember the first time we tumbled into the rabbit hole, falling headlong into a domain as magical as Alice's underground. I remember downloading the first browser around ten o'clock at night. When I next looked up it was four in the morning.
Stating The Obvious #3: "Look, the internet is an addictive time-waster!"
Yes, I loose track of time too when I'm surfing the internet or just this close to getting a program to work. Maybe I'm just dull, but I fail to see a cosmic significance in this fact.
That knowledge engine rearranged data into forms that coupled effortlessly with my perceptual apparatus. It was a world of digital symbols filled with projections of my self as it moved among them, thinking it was leaving the room and extending itself "out there." The exploration was really, of course, inside the consensual space we agree to hallucinate together.
Methinks he doth read Neuromancer too much.
I hate to break this to him, but a book is a collection of digital symbols that "couples effortlessly with the perceptual apparatus," and allows me to leave the room and extend myself "out there."
What is it about this domain that compels such a response? What seduces us to stay up all night, fooling around for hours as we build communal worlds or play with these symbols, using them as levers to turn gears in the "real" world?
Last I checked, while there is that hot tub in Ypsilanti, Michigan connected to the Web, there are very few levers turning gears in the "real" (why quoted?) world. Unless you mean psychological hot buttons that can be pushed. It seems quite a stretch to call email, Usenet postings, /. comments, or even a personal website "levers to turn gears."
(Levers don't turn gears anyway, gears or pulleys turn gears ...)
McMoneagle discovered that the world is not what he thought it was. He had to reinvent continuously the images he used as maps of reality as his psychic adventures exploded the consensual reality he had been taught to believe.
Statement Of The (Hopefully) Obvious #4: "The map is not the territory."
Anyone who is continually learning, who is growing in life, experiences the same "remapping" of reality as McMoneagle. Our maps get exploded as we learn that Mommy and Daddy aren't perfect, that there is no Santa Claus, that there are otherwise normal-seeming folks who believe in supply-side economics, etc.
What does this have to do with being online? Sure, this process can happen while you're logged on. It also happens when you're not, if you're living with your eyes open and your mind and spirit engaged.
The images of the world we internalize from life online also become obsolete each time we turn off the computer.
Horsefeathers.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for the entire look, feel, and content of the Web to change between now and the next time I log in. I understand the physicists also claim it's theoretically possible for all of the atoms of the chair I'm sittin in to tunnel Somewhere Else and for me to fall through it to the floor. I'm not worried much about either possibility.
Why? Well, why does every major browser have a bookmark feature? Could it be that there's enough stability in this online "world" that "landmarks" don't become obsolete every time?
I notice that Slashdot looks pretty much the same every time I visit, except for this week with Rob making so many changes. Even so, I expect (and am generally right) to find an article on "Changes to Slashdot" when the look and feel changes, to clue everyone in.
If everything I saw online became obsolete the second I turned my computer off, I'd throw it (or at least the modem) into the dumpster immediately, and stop wasting my time.
McMoneagle has difficulty talking about "reality" with people who have not experienced what he has. He has to build a modular interface that somehow connects both his experience and the experience of someone who has never gone diving.
Statement Of The Obvious #5: "People who have different life experiences will experience a 'communications gap' that needs to be bridged."
In the same way, building a computer interface that lets ordinary users couple with the many levels of the digital world is more than "usability." It is participation in a revolutionary act of mutual transformation.
Yes, but transformation into what?
McMoneagle's description of exploring the deeper waters of consciousness is a template for learning how to move with clear intentionality among the nested levels of symbols that fold into one another in the digital world.
This is simply backwards.
The "digital world" is, in general, a simplification of the real world. Anyone who can move with "clear intentionality" offline should be able to do so online as well. And I don't see much "nested symbolism" online -- symbols are generally a single level of indirection, with a one-to-one correspondance to what they represent. Consider "icons" (a word ripped from its religious root and stripped of most of its meaning). "Icons" are simply pushbuttons with pictographs. Contrast this with religious icons, which do contain "nested levels of symbols that fold into one another."
I have yet to see anything online that begins to approach the "exploring the deeper waters of consciousness" and "nested levels of symbolism" that is inherent in the Christian liturgy. Something that Thieme claims to have passing familiary with. I suspect the same is true of other human, offline systems of symbols that exist, but I'll leave it to those more familiar with those traditions to make the comparisons.
Remote viewing is a function of the intentionality of the viewer, not the so-called "physical" world. Nor is a computer network fully defined by chips, switches or code; the network is defined above all by the intentionality of the users.
If McMoneagle is more than a crank or deluded, then his remote viewing, though directed by "intentionality," must eventually ground itself in something outside of his intention. Otherwise, what's he viewing besides his own imagination?
Same thing with a network. First, the technological infrastructure must be there, and second, there must be real content out there, put into place by real people, or else all I am doing as a user of the network, no matter what my "intentionality," is staring at my navel. Or perhaps some other part of my anatomy.
We define ourselves as a spectrum of possibilities, choose one, and do it. The symbols we think we use as tools disappear, the nested levels built of those symbols collapse, and we see in that moment our responsibility for what we are building instead of pretending we're merely technicians or just along for the ride.
Up to the last paragraph, the iron determinism of technological advance and of a "new reality" has been trumpeted, and now all of a sudden we are supposed to see our "responsibility"?
This is nothing more than the television broadcasters' defense of "TV shows are crap because the public demands crap," dressed up in academic language and techno-mysticism and applied to the Internet.
Sorry, I'm neither impressed nor overcome with an longing to leave the real world for the virtual. In fact, planting a real garden sounds even better right now. And I'm even more eager for Sunday to get here -- it's Palm Sunday, and the nested levels of symbols are wonderful.
... and, while I am not terribly impressed with :^)
Katz's insights into life and the world ("sexbots"
was a piece of thoughtless drivel), I don't mind
seeing one author's experiences with the
publishing industry. Who knows, maybe it'll
come in useful someday when I write a
book and need to know how to hype it on the
Internet.
Check http://www.freeciv.org/ -- yesterday it
was announced that the GTK+/GNOME client would
be part of the upcoming stable 1.8.x releases.