In Java it kills be to do stuff like:
myfunction(new Date());
since I always want to be able to free up what I "new" like in the C++ world.
I hope you wouldn't use new in C++ in *that* situation though.
Good C++ code uses operator new very sparingly.
In the case above, there is no reason the temporary Date object needs to live in the heap,
with potentially infinite lifetime.
If you start selecting tags to make the output look the way you want it to look, you don't understand XML (and subsequently shouldn't be using DocBook).
Well, to *me* it sounded as if the grandparent understood it well enough -- he just thought it sucked.
Any sane documentation project separates the formatting from the content; because, when you need to update the look of the documentation, you don't want to spend days checking each individual document element to determine if it is the correct font, point, weight, etc.
Well, not littering your document with exact font sizes and colors is one thing,
filling it with (for the most part) useless semantic tagging is another.
And I don't believe you can produce *really* good printed text without tinkering -- you may have to
reformulate sentences to get rid of orphans, not to mention tweaking the hyphenation.
I sometimes think MediaWiki hit the sweet spot here. Although God knows it has plenty of ugly features...
and of course it's closely tied to HTML as output.
As also mentioned on this thread, TDD goes hand-in-hand with concepts like Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection and Design by Contract. The goal is to develop loosely coupled yet cohesive software framework which enforces generic constraints through contracts, generally implemented as interfaces, and upon which calling code can rely for correctness. The above mentioned techniques, among others, allow us to abstract and generalize as much of the software stack as possible, reducing specific program instances to little more than their minimal differential implementations; with clear separation of concerns, scalability and testability.
That reads to me as:
"The above mentioned techniques allow us to spend our effort creating a generic fantasy land, instead of concentrating on the problem at hand".
Oh, I'm sure it's a good thing in some cases. And if you can raise the abstraction level one notch without losing touch with the problem at hand, do it. But I've gotten burned hard too many times cleaning up failed attempts at overly general code. People build dream castles and get lost in them.
I have seen these kinds of situations happen a lot (I'm a statistician who works on computationally-intensive physical science applications), and the best solution I have seen was a BerkeleyDB setup. One group I work with had a very, very large number of ASCII data files (order of 10-100 million) in a directory tree. One of their researchers consolidated them to a BerkeleyDB, which greatly improved data management and access [...] I think the general idea of a key-value store that lets you keep your data in the original structure would work well.
A file system *is* a key-value store.
I suspect those 100,000,000 files were in fact tiny pieces of data which didn't make sense to access using normal tools (from ls to MS Word). That the conversion worked out for *you* doesn't mean that it would be useful to convert *every* set of files into a BerkeleyDB.
Especially not sets of (say) 500 files, 10GB each.
My wife lost her grandmother a few years ago... here are the things she wishes she could have gotten from her before she passed:
The story of her life : her earliest memories, what she remembers of her parents and grandparents, her brothers and sisters. [...]
Yes, but possibly that's more relevant to old people, who feel old and have started looking backwards.
Maybe the OP's wife (who is quite young and has small children) isn't interested in the past like that.
I've always found out more interesting things about my own family by listening to them talk about that kind of thing to strangers.
I've noted that too, but maybe what's really happening is that they give different pieces of
the puzzle to strangers, and it's more interesting because you know the "family" pieces already?
Great suggestion. I have one from my father. He's been gone 12 years, and one in a very long while I'll pull it out and spend some time in the past. If you do this though... be sure to store it in several layers of plastic. One won't be enough over time. 12 years and my dad's smell is just about gone.
People are different, I suppose.
Smells make me remember places and times, but not people. People don't have smells to me.
Instead I want to hear their voices, like they were in everyday situations when they were relaxed and friendly.
To some extent see their gestures too: the way they walked, smiled or (in the case of my grandmother) bent to weed the vegetable patch.
Right now I'm editing a collection of photos from my father's family, 1900--1975.
It's fortunately not just boring portraits, but mostly snapshots from daily life.
Still, when I look at them I miss their voices and gestures.
Just a few seconds of a noisy tape recording would be enough.
8: A special hard disk just for/tmp. If one thinks about it, this type of HDD is absolutely perfect for the/tmp filesystem in the classic sense of it being zeroed out on reboot.
Not really. You expect/tmp to *exist but be empty* after reboot.
With such a disk you'd at least have to repartition and mkfs somewhere early in the boot sequence.
I see all kinds of problems.
But my point stands. In HTML, there is a way to denote a paragraph: the
tag. There is no way to specify a single sentence, however, and sentences are rendered separated by one space (no matter how many spaces you try to put between them). If there was a problem with this, typesetters would be up in arms, just like how graphic designers complain about not having precise control over typographic features like leading and line spacing. But nobody complains, because a single space between sentences has been the typographic convention for as long as anyone remembers. You see single spaces not just in HTML, but in books, magazines, newspapers, and everywhere else, too. If it all looks "crowded" to you, you must have a hard time reading.
I suspect this might be like the constant noise from a fan -- you don't notice how it bothered you until it goes silent. Really good typography just feels more pleasant by removing tiny annoyances which you don't consciously notice. (Don't know if it's true for this extra long space though.)
Of course, the question is really moot. LaTeX ignores whitespace and just does what it thinks is right. I am willing to trust LaTeX.
Doesn't LaTeX look for., ?, !, : and , in your text and insert extra space after them --
so you have to escape them if you use them for some other purpose? That's uncool too.
It is inherently better. If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
Even half-decent teachers don't spend their lectured silently copying text from a piece of paper onto a blackboard.
They talk and write at the same time, and adjust the lecture to the reactions of the students, collect questions, put questions, etc.
I bet that's easier done with a blackboard than a laptop and Powerpoint.
Drivers usually come with the kernel, and Debian trades new drivers and other features for a stable environment. Ubuntu simply ships a more recent kernel, at the expense of less testing.
Or, Ubuntu shipped non-free drivers and documented the hardware as supported without mentioning that clearly enough.
I *think* Ubuntu does such things. Debian sure doesn't.
Most of my career has been in telecom/datacom companies, and perl is the preferred language for testing and infrastructure.
Me too, but Python (and a proprietary language which shall be unnamed) are preferred here.
There's some Perl in vital places, but it's mostly written by old farts like me.
What is this world coming to when sadistic cliche-ridden trash become the top selling e-books?
I would have thought people with ebook readers would read better written novels.
There has been a massive marketing campaign by Amazon and big chain bookstores to sell Larsson's books so that might explain it.
I heard from someone who walked into Borders and got pitched Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by an employee before he even opened his mouth.
My impression too is that the books suck (never read them, but I think mom did).
But the books sold in.se when the author was just a dead not well-known anti-fascist journalist.
I don't think there's a conspiracy behind it.
Lots of people like books like these.
I _do_ think it was a good marketing strategy to rename them with a common naming scheme, and probably helped bring the books to the attention of more people, which is good.
Ironically, it's also the same naming scheme applied in Sweden to
*all* movies starring Goldie Hawn in the 70s and early 80s...
BTW, weren't also all movies starring Dudley Moore renamed "The dude who..."?
Except the ones starring Goldie Hawn *and* Dudley Moore; I believe Goldie took precedence.
With very few exceptions, video games are *popular* culture, which means it's disposable.
Things like The Beatles' music are popular culture too... are we morally obliged to destroy all copies of Revolver and Sgt Pepper?
Should we only keep opera, self-referential poetry and sculptures made from human feces?
Frequent changes make you more secure against ex-employees and people who use them in cybercafes.
More safe in the sense "Well, if the bad guys got hold of a password, at least they only had four weeks/a few months to steal company secrets, corrupt stored information, install backdoors, snoop for more passwords, and crack neighboring systems!".
[...] potatoes are one of those stupid easy crops to grow... if you do it on soil. Basically all you need to do is plow your field once a year and otherwise leave it the hell alone, weeds and all. Weeds mulch. Potatoes grow.
The phrase "Irish Potatoe Famine" comes to mind.
Without fungicides, you can still get a disappointingly small harvest.
Commercial growers use a *lot* of fungicides, and since they are illegal here in.se for
non-professionals, the rest of us can only keep our fingers crossed and hope for a dry summer.
It doesn't matter a damn what you use to serve the stuff; what matters is that the data is stored in something preservable and long-lasting like XML, otherwise you'll be back here in a few years. By all means use PHP and MySQL to make it available, but don't confuse the mechanisms used to serve the information with the file format in which it is stored under the hood.
You captured the main point in by refer/BibTeX posting better than I did. Thanks.
More than once I've had to salvage important data from obsolete database file formats.
One instance was rare bird sightings in my area in the 1980s -- they had been painfully typed
in over the years, but by 2005 they were sitting in RapidFile format on a half-dead 286 in someone's
basement. People generally don't think about data preservation these days.
Another betefit of using text file formats (surely the only preservable ones, if you think in decades)
is that they are easily handled by version control tools, thus easy to author in a distributed effort,
easy to audit for changes, and so on.
It seems to me that your core problem is data preservation for long periods of time; if you can
save that 1930--present data, you don't want to lose it again.
You should go for a plaintext file format, and be aware that you *are* using a file format.
There are file formats for this. Probably there are XML languages if you like that kind of thing,
but either of two older ones would serve you well I think: the refer(1) format for bibliographic databases,
and the BibTeX format. At least the latter is still in use and you can download such indices for various
journals -- see the Wikipedia BibTeX entry.
When you have fixed the file format, *then* you can decide on indexing strategies and software. Probably
you'll find that someone has already done that for your file format. Mike Lesk did it for refer back in
the 1970s...
Slashdot Mirror
You've obviously never used an Amiga. Comparing even the old A500 to MS-DOS is like comparing a samurai sword to a caveman's stone axe.
I hope you wouldn't use new in C++ in *that* situation though. Good C++ code uses operator new very sparingly. In the case above, there is no reason the temporary Date object needs to live in the heap, with potentially infinite lifetime.
I can't recall any iris scanner in the original story ...
Well, to *me* it sounded as if the grandparent understood it well enough -- he just thought it sucked.
Well, not littering your document with exact font sizes and colors is one thing, filling it with (for the most part) useless semantic tagging is another. And I don't believe you can produce *really* good printed text without tinkering -- you may have to reformulate sentences to get rid of orphans, not to mention tweaking the hyphenation.
I sometimes think MediaWiki hit the sweet spot here. Although God knows it has plenty of ugly features ...
and of course it's closely tied to HTML as output.
That reads to me as: "The above mentioned techniques allow us to spend our effort creating a generic fantasy land, instead of concentrating on the problem at hand".
Oh, I'm sure it's a good thing in some cases. And if you can raise the abstraction level one notch without losing touch with the problem at hand, do it. But I've gotten burned hard too many times cleaning up failed attempts at overly general code. People build dream castles and get lost in them.
A file system *is* a key-value store.
I suspect those 100,000,000 files were in fact tiny pieces of data which didn't make sense to access using normal tools (from ls to MS Word). That the conversion worked out for *you* doesn't mean that it would be useful to convert *every* set of files into a BerkeleyDB. Especially not sets of (say) 500 files, 10GB each.
Yes, but possibly that's more relevant to old people, who feel old and have started looking backwards. Maybe the OP's wife (who is quite young and has small children) isn't interested in the past like that.
I've noted that too, but maybe what's really happening is that they give different pieces of the puzzle to strangers, and it's more interesting because you know the "family" pieces already?
People are different, I suppose. Smells make me remember places and times, but not people. People don't have smells to me.
Instead I want to hear their voices, like they were in everyday situations when they were relaxed and friendly. To some extent see their gestures too: the way they walked, smiled or (in the case of my grandmother) bent to weed the vegetable patch.
Right now I'm editing a collection of photos from my father's family, 1900--1975. It's fortunately not just boring portraits, but mostly snapshots from daily life. Still, when I look at them I miss their voices and gestures. Just a few seconds of a noisy tape recording would be enough.
Not really. You expect /tmp to *exist but be empty* after reboot.
With such a disk you'd at least have to repartition and mkfs somewhere early in the boot sequence.
I see all kinds of problems.
I suspect this might be like the constant noise from a fan -- you don't notice how it bothered you until it goes silent. Really good typography just feels more pleasant by removing tiny annoyances which you don't consciously notice. (Don't know if it's true for this extra long space though.)
Doesn't LaTeX look for ., ?, !, : and , in your text and insert extra space after them --
so you have to escape them if you use them for some other purpose? That's uncool too.
I end my sentences with a newline, and then let the formatter (usually troff or a web browser these days) render it in whatever way it finds best.
Even half-decent teachers don't spend their lectured silently copying text from a piece of paper onto a blackboard. They talk and write at the same time, and adjust the lecture to the reactions of the students, collect questions, put questions, etc. I bet that's easier done with a blackboard than a laptop and Powerpoint.
Or, Ubuntu shipped non-free drivers and documented the hardware as supported without mentioning that clearly enough. I *think* Ubuntu does such things. Debian sure doesn't.
OpenZoom requires Flash, as I found out after wasting five minutes on their web site. Thanks!
There were no browsers in 1990, but I see what your point.
Me too, but Python (and a proprietary language which shall be unnamed) are preferred here. There's some Perl in vital places, but it's mostly written by old farts like me.
My impression too is that the books suck (never read them, but I think mom did). But the books sold in .se when the author was just a dead not well-known anti-fascist journalist.
I don't think there's a conspiracy behind it.
Lots of people like books like these.
Ironically, it's also the same naming scheme applied in Sweden to *all* movies starring Goldie Hawn in the 70s and early 80s ...
BTW, weren't also all movies starring Dudley Moore renamed "The dude who ..."?
Except the ones starring Goldie Hawn *and* Dudley Moore; I believe Goldie took precedence.
Things like The Beatles' music are popular culture too ... are we morally obliged to destroy all copies of Revolver and Sgt Pepper?
Should we only keep opera, self-referential poetry and sculptures made from human feces?
You're probably thinking of cracking. Hacking, in the sense "creative programming", may have been part of it.
More safe in the sense "Well, if the bad guys got hold of a password, at least they only had four weeks/a few months to steal company secrets, corrupt stored information, install backdoors, snoop for more passwords, and crack neighboring systems!".
The phrase "Irish Potatoe Famine" comes to mind. Without fungicides, you can still get a disappointingly small harvest. Commercial growers use a *lot* of fungicides, and since they are illegal here in .se for
non-professionals, the rest of us can only keep our fingers crossed and hope for a dry summer.
You captured the main point in by refer/BibTeX posting better than I did. Thanks.
More than once I've had to salvage important data from obsolete database file formats. One instance was rare bird sightings in my area in the 1980s -- they had been painfully typed in over the years, but by 2005 they were sitting in RapidFile format on a half-dead 286 in someone's basement. People generally don't think about data preservation these days.
Another betefit of using text file formats (surely the only preservable ones, if you think in decades) is that they are easily handled by version control tools, thus easy to author in a distributed effort, easy to audit for changes, and so on.
There are file formats for this. Probably there are XML languages if you like that kind of thing, but either of two older ones would serve you well I think: the refer(1) format for bibliographic databases, and the BibTeX format. At least the latter is still in use and you can download such indices for various journals -- see the Wikipedia BibTeX entry.
When you have fixed the file format, *then* you can decide on indexing strategies and software. Probably you'll find that someone has already done that for your file format. Mike Lesk did it for refer back in the 1970s ...