Really, I am used to seeing (occasionally:-) stupid stories on Slashdot, but this is ridiculous.
Apple gives back to the BSD community. Apple mostly supports standards.
I have made a lot of money over the years because of Microsoft, but I must say that I don't like them for a few simple reasons: lack of support for standards, obfrustcated Microsoft Office file formats, putting marketing before creating simpler more reliable products...
I respect Bill Gates for his donations to charity. It makes me feel great to be able to regularly contribute small amounts of money to organizations like the Heifer Project, American Friends Service Committee, and Habitat for Humanity. But, WOW!!, I can no even imagine what it must feel like for Bill and Melinda Gates to be able to literally help millions of people instead of of a few.
But, as a corporation, I am starting to detest Microsoft.
Apple is my ace in the hole in case Linux is ever outlawed in the USA. I guess that I could live with just OS X.
I have worked through the RoR tutorial and re-implemented a simple admin web app that I originally wrote for a customer using JSPs and Tomcat. I must say that what took me 4 hours to write using JSPs and JDBC took about 30 minutes using RoR.
A big advantage that Ruby and Python have over Java is that they are dynamic languages that makes it not too difficult to write a database wrapper class that dynamically looks at database/tables meta data and generates access methods on the fly. Java Tails (using XDoclet market tags) can't really compete.
I really love the full J2EE stack for developing large scalable web applications but I am now looking at alternatives for creating smaller systems much more quickly.
BTW, I really like RoR's templating scheme: much like JSPs in syntax (JSP non-XML syntax, that is) but do to Ruby's much terser notation for enumerating collections, the the templates tend to look a little cleaner.
For Python, I really like the light weight CherryPy web application framework. I plan on checking out Python Subway also when I have some time.
-Mark
I wrote the first commercial Go playing program
on
Computer Cracks 5x5 Go
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Honinbo Warrior was coded in UCSD Pascal and really did not play that well, but my boss and a few friends talked me into running ads in some Apple II magazines and marketing it. Working on that program was a fun obsession that lasted about 1 1/2 years.
Go is such a great game. In the 1970s, I got to play exhibition games with Miss Kobyoshi (women's world champion) and Mr. Lee (national champion of South Korea). The high level of their play really blew me away - getting slaughtered was a surprisingly great experience.
The Gnu Go program plays a good game, BTW. It is best to play against human opponents, but give Gnu Go a try also. Just like studying chess, if you get into playing Go, make sure you study complete master games: studying opening, middle game, and end games in isolation just does not cut it.
(Assuming that you have good backups of your OpenOffice.org gzipped XML doc files, the source code to your programming projects, etc., etc. regularly backed up to CDRs.)
mSpace is a LGPLed project that consists of Javascript utilities to access a 3Store RDF repository (3Store is another open source project).
This project looks very useful if you already have RDF data that you would like to publish. There is a PDF paper (that I have only read the first 10 pages of) that looks good. Anyway, I might use this on a demo that I am (slowly) working on.
The people at Ubuntu start with Debian and package it for end users. I have Ubuntu on 2 of my 3 Macs (but both are dual boot) and except for having to install IBM's PowerPC Java SDK, it was just about ready to go.
Why run Linux on a Mac? I find that Linux has less to distract me from work. I like to boot OS X to edit video, etc., but for writing (OpenOffice.org) and programming (Eclipse for Java, Python, and C++) there is less fluff on Linux to distract me from my work.
Sorry if this is a little OT, but this is why I like to boot Ubuntu Linux (on my old dual G4 Mac) when I am working (design, programming, writing) and OS X for fun (editing video, pictures, reading RSS feeds, etc.)
I keep my Linux system tidy - just the tools that I need to actually do work (and FireFox to post to Slashdot:-)
I find that it also helps a lot to not check my email frequently while working.
Seriously, I would have to think a while to count the projects that I have used ISIS, JMS, etc. for. Asynchronous messaging makes architectures simpler.
ISIS supported "virtual synchrony": guaranteed order of deliver also.
Right on! CyCorps got a lot of people excited and a lot of people to invest time (like me!) - but OpenCyc seems to be going nowhere.
That said, kudos to DARPA for funding so much AI research. I was on a DARPA advisory panel for a year in 1998 (neural network tools) - lots of fun and interesting because of the other people on my panel.
The author of the review, Craig Reynolds, is also very well known in the field of game AI. His Game AI web page is a fun resource.
BTW, definitely the most fun job I ever had was doing game/VR AI for Nintendo and Disney while at Angel Studios. I *really* recommend trying to work in the field for a while because it pulls together so many things: creativity, working with non-computer science team members, lots of interesting CS problems to be solved, etc.
Common Lisp is fast and efficient for numeric calculations (*) - I have used it for large neural network training runs, FFTs (I found a library -did not write it myself), etc.
While Java and Python are the languages that I most frequently use, CL is a powerful tool - try it!
Actually, this book sounds like a good idea - cover deployment issues like database installation and configuration with Java, tips for deployment, etc.
I usually do my development on OS X (except for new JDK 5 coding - use my Mac as an X display for a Linux box -- annoying that Apple is slow getting JDK 5 out except for in a $500 developer's preview). Anyway, I do most of my deployment on Linux, and the ease of this depends on which hosting company I am renting a server from. For example, is a usable (i.e., PostgreSQL) database installed, easy to administer, etc. I have not read the reviewed book, but hopefully a lot of practical issues are addressed.
One interesting thing about the Linux platform is that now all new distros have RPMs (or equivalent) for installing runtime and developer support for GNU GCJ.
I find GCJ to be very interesting (a bit of a nuisance to run on OS X) because not only is it a way to run Free Software (GPL) on Linux, but it also makes it possible to take large Java applications like Lucene, compile them natively, and then use the compiled code in Python, C++, Ruby, etc. programs. Very cool, really.
If Linux was my development platform, GCJ would be a much more important tool for me - it would be great if Apple installed GCJ runtime libraries by default (yes, they are large). While Java is not as productive a language for many programming projects as Python, Ruby, etc., Java is a great language and platform for many types of projects; having GCJ runtime installed by default on OS X, Linux, and Windows (well:-) would make Java a more suitable language for small applications and utilities. This would get around Sun's lame Linux/Java licensing issues also.
For Python, CherryPy is another simple framework
on
Rolling With Ruby On Rails
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I played with Rails and liked it, but I am now trying to cut down on the number of programming languages that I use (trying hard to just use Java, Python, and Common Lisp) and even though it was fun working through a Ruby tutorial, I think that I am going to give Ruby a pass, at least for now.
For Python, I have been experimenting with CherryPy which is a fairly low level web application framework, but is easy to use for publishing web services using XML-RPC, generating dynamic HTML (it does not have a template language but works with a few Python HTML template packages), etc.
Anyway, CherryPy "seems just about right" - light weight and easy to use - definitely does not have the capability of Rails though.
This paper might be too long for some teenage attention spans:-)... but good advice.
Whenever I talk to people of high school or college age, I always advise to *not* go into a field just to make money. There is nothing wrong with making money, but most successful (definition: happy people, people who help others and have a good social network, etc.) people dosomething that they have some passion for. My advice (which I love to give:-) is to go for lower paying careers that you really like. I sort of practice what I preach: for the last 30 years working as a software developer, I have averaged about 32 hours of work a week - I love what I do, but I have always needed lots of sailing time, beach time, hiking time, etc. Until the last 6 years when I have mostly worked as a consultant except I have for the most part worked at corporations in a "full time" job, but always made the deal to work just 32 hours and get 80% of my pay (but full fringe benefits). Always worked for me.
In this new economy where workers in the US *must* compete globally for value given to employers for each dollar earned, I think that it is more important than ever to have work that you have some real passion for and to strive to be in the top 5% of what you do.
BTW, after programming professionally for more than 30 years, I still love it!
At that time, I was getting into hypertext tools and Xanadu looked good, but if I remember correctly, no code. A very bright sysadmin at PacBell (Karl Wabe) showed me the original WWW stuff at CERN - basically a lot of physics papers linked together. The browser was text based (lynx like). Very cool.
The great thing about the WWW early on was that software was available - it was shortly seeing the CERN system that our sysadmin at SAIC installed the CERN web server, and those of us who wanted it went crazy with our personal pages. When a graphical web browser was released from the Univ. of IL, then things really went crazy.
Anyway, my point is that (as far as I remember) I could get Xanadu design documents but no software (apologies if my recollection is wrong - it was a long time ago!) Who knows what would have happened if in the 1980s the Xanadu project released free reference software. Xanadu is very different that the WWW (more like a wiki) but perhaps people would be using both systems today.
I hate how much effort it is to even pull plain text out of Word and Powerpoint documents.
I just finished up work on a commercial Java text mining package and I spent far too long on code to read Word and Powerpoint files while handling PDF, OpenOffice.org, and AbiWord was fairly simple.
I do have a word (no pun intended:-) of advice for organizations who must use Microsoft office: OpenOffice.org has a batch processing option to recursively search nested directories for Word documents and write out fairly equivalent OpenOffice.org Writer documents (that use a very nice XML format). If I had a company with thousands of Word documents on my servers, I would have an automatic "save to OpenOffice.org, then archive" backup strategy and not have my long term Document store backups in native Word format.
It is not going to happen, but I would love to see pressure from user groups and governments force Microsoft to use the OASIS open XML based document formats. If Microsoft really wanted to give maximum value to their customers, then they would do this on their own (yes, just wishful thinking).
I just sent them a small donation to perhaps cover my own bandwidth costs for the next year or so. When I have time, I would like trying to download the version of their database that only contains most recent edits (i.e., not all edit histories). A lot of the articles have good categories attached to them so I would like to do a machine learning run to build a categorizer (but this took me several days to do with the Reuters corpus, so I may not get to this for a while).
Thanks for all your work! (I just sent you a small donation, BTW).
I find NeoOffice/J to be quite stable enough for writing (although I have written 2 of my last 3 books using OOo because then I was developing mostly on Linux).
Best regards, Mark
Re:It cuts both ways: I work for a company in Indi
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you! I should have either made that an unordered list of put 3 first.
-Mark
Re:It cuts both ways: I work for a company in Indi
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
re: "I am curious. Why would it be cost-effective for them to do that? Even in Arizona's backwoods the cost of living is far higher than in India."
I probably cost them what 5 software engineers in India would. The company has a few people in the US, but I am the only programmer (here or in India - most of the staff have MBAs). I do work hard:-) I also have lots of experinence, which helps me get things down quickly (so some benefit to them for paying more). My main point of contact is in the US - which also helps.
re: "...I don't get what the US does "special" anymore that justifies our high-cost of living..."
Bingo! You have that right, unfortunately:-(
For my part, I spend lots of time on "self education" and I have a lot of confidence that this will keep the work coming in. Basically, I love the work I do, and I don't want to change careers.
Best regards, Mark
It cuts both ways: I work for a company in India
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Since I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona, almost all of my work is telecommuting. For the last 8 months, I have been working for company in India and it has been working out fairly well. Sure, I don't get the same pay as I did when I worked in an office in San Diego, but flexible hours so I can spend more time with family and friends makes the whole thing work for me.
With the US economy heading south (foreign central banks finally seems to be dropping the dollar) I think that it is time for us in the US to realign our priorities:
1. avoid debt like the plague - unless you need to literally borrow to feed your family 2. consider doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend on "self education" to stay globally competitive 3. learn to totally appreciate non-material things like love of family and friends
I think that by and large things will be OK here in the US as long as people adapt to a sliding material life style. (It would also help a lot if everyone tried harder to conserve petroleum products! The patriotic thing to do is to try to help reduce the trade deficit.)
I use Google Groups all the time - never did search by date so I don't care about that. I like the new UI.
I used to go to a lot of trouble handling NNTP feeds; since Google Groups was released I don't bother.
A little bit OT: Is it just me, or are some things getting simpler? GMail and Google Groups cuts down my 'overhead time'. The switch from Linux (well, sometimes Windows 2000) to Mac OS X saves me a lot of admin hours each month. The quality and productivity of coding tools (e.g., IntelliJ and LispWorks) is going through the roof: everything seems to be getting easier:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Right on - I also downloaded Slackware over a 2400 baud modem.
:-)
At work we had been paying about $1500 per seat for SCO Unix to run on PCs, then I discovered that I liked Slackware better
-Mark
Really, I am used to seeing (occasionally :-) stupid stories on Slashdot, but this is ridiculous.
Apple gives back to the BSD community. Apple mostly supports standards.
I have made a lot of money over the years because of Microsoft, but I must say that I don't like them for a few simple reasons: lack of support for standards, obfrustcated Microsoft Office file formats, putting marketing before creating simpler more reliable products...
I respect Bill Gates for his donations to charity. It makes me feel great to be able to regularly contribute small amounts of money to organizations like the Heifer Project, American Friends Service Committee, and Habitat for Humanity. But, WOW!!, I can no even imagine what it must feel like for Bill and Melinda Gates to be able to literally help millions of people instead of of a few.
But, as a corporation, I am starting to detest Microsoft.
Apple is my ace in the hole in case Linux is ever outlawed in the USA. I guess that I could live with just OS X.
I have worked through the RoR tutorial and re-implemented a simple admin web app that I originally wrote for a customer using JSPs and Tomcat. I must say that what took me 4 hours to write using JSPs and JDBC took about 30 minutes using RoR.
A big advantage that Ruby and Python have over Java is that they are dynamic languages that makes it not too difficult to write a database wrapper class that dynamically looks at database/tables meta data and generates access methods on the fly. Java Tails (using XDoclet market tags) can't really compete.
I really love the full J2EE stack for developing large scalable web applications but I am now looking at alternatives for creating smaller systems much more quickly.
BTW, I really like RoR's templating scheme: much like JSPs in syntax (JSP non-XML syntax, that is) but do to Ruby's much terser notation for enumerating collections, the the templates tend to look a little cleaner.
For Python, I really like the light weight CherryPy web application framework. I plan on checking out Python Subway also when I have some time.
-Mark
Honinbo Warrior was coded in UCSD Pascal and really did not play that well, but my boss and a few friends talked me into running ads in some Apple II magazines and marketing it. Working on that program was a fun obsession that lasted about 1 1/2 years.
Go is such a great game. In the 1970s, I got to play exhibition games with Miss Kobyoshi (women's world champion) and Mr. Lee (national champion of South Korea). The high level of their play really blew me away - getting slaughtered was a surprisingly great experience.
The Gnu Go program plays a good game, BTW. It is best to play against human opponents, but give Gnu Go a try also. Just like studying chess, if you get into playing Go, make sure you study complete master games: studying opening, middle game, and end games in isolation just does not cut it.
Nuff said.
(Assuming that you have good backups of your OpenOffice.org gzipped XML doc files, the source code to your programming projects, etc., etc. regularly backed up to CDRs.)
mSpace is a LGPLed project that consists of Javascript utilities to access a 3Store RDF repository (3Store is another open source project).
This project looks very useful if you already have RDF data that you would like to publish. There is a PDF paper (that I have only read the first 10 pages of) that looks good. Anyway, I might use this on a demo that I am (slowly) working on.
The people at Ubuntu start with Debian and package it for end users. I have Ubuntu on 2 of my 3 Macs (but both are dual boot) and except for having to install IBM's PowerPC Java SDK, it was just about ready to go.
Why run Linux on a Mac? I find that Linux has less to distract me from work. I like to boot OS X to edit video, etc., but for writing (OpenOffice.org) and programming (Eclipse for Java, Python, and C++) there is less fluff on Linux to distract me from my work.
Anyone runing on a dual core architecture should definitely need 2 GPLs :-)
Sorry if this is a little OT, but this is why I like to boot Ubuntu Linux (on my old dual G4 Mac) when I am working (design, programming, writing) and OS X for fun (editing video, pictures, reading RSS feeds, etc.)
:-)
I keep my Linux system tidy - just the tools that I need to actually do work (and FireFox to post to Slashdot
I find that it also helps a lot to not check my email frequently while working.
... the glue that holds the worlds together.
Seriously, I would have to think a while to count the projects that I have used ISIS, JMS, etc. for. Asynchronous messaging makes architectures simpler.
ISIS supported "virtual synchrony": guaranteed order of deliver also.
Dude - seriously funny! Really!
I am pretty sick of OSI after the CDDL fiasco (just blogged about it:my 'Brown Nosing' entry). Anyway, have a good day!
Right on! CyCorps got a lot of people excited and a lot of people to invest time (like me!) - but OpenCyc seems to be going nowhere.
That said, kudos to DARPA for funding so much AI research. I was on a DARPA advisory panel for a year in 1998 (neural network tools) - lots of fun and interesting because of the other people on my panel.
BTW, definitely the most fun job I ever had was doing game/VR AI for Nintendo and Disney while at Angel Studios. I *really* recommend trying to work in the field for a while because it pulls together so many things: creativity, working with non-computer science team members, lots of interesting CS problems to be solved, etc.
-Mark
Common Lisp is fast and efficient for numeric calculations (*) - I have used it for large neural network training runs, FFTs (I found a library -did not write it myself), etc.
While Java and Python are the languages that I most frequently use, CL is a powerful tool - try it!
(*) with compiler type directives
Actually, this book sounds like a good idea - cover deployment issues like database installation and configuration with Java, tips for deployment, etc.
:-) would make Java a more suitable language for small applications and utilities. This would get around Sun's lame Linux/Java licensing issues also.
I usually do my development on OS X (except for new JDK 5 coding - use my Mac as an X display for a Linux box -- annoying that Apple is slow getting JDK 5 out except for in a $500 developer's preview). Anyway, I do most of my deployment on Linux, and the ease of this depends on which hosting company I am renting a server from. For example, is a usable (i.e., PostgreSQL) database installed, easy to administer, etc. I have not read the reviewed book, but hopefully a lot of practical issues are addressed.
One interesting thing about the Linux platform is that now all new distros have RPMs (or equivalent) for installing runtime and developer support for GNU GCJ.
I find GCJ to be very interesting (a bit of a nuisance to run on OS X) because not only is it a way to run Free Software (GPL) on Linux, but it also makes it possible to take large Java applications like Lucene, compile them natively, and then use the compiled code in Python, C++, Ruby, etc. programs. Very cool, really.
If Linux was my development platform, GCJ would be a much more important tool for me - it would be great if Apple installed GCJ runtime libraries by default (yes, they are large). While Java is not as productive a language for many programming projects as Python, Ruby, etc., Java is a great language and platform for many types of projects; having GCJ runtime installed by default on OS X, Linux, and Windows (well
For Python, I have been experimenting with CherryPy which is a fairly low level web application framework, but is easy to use for publishing web services using XML-RPC, generating dynamic HTML (it does not have a template language but works with a few Python HTML template packages), etc.
Anyway, CherryPy "seems just about right" - light weight and easy to use - definitely does not have the capability of Rails though.
This paper might be too long for some teenage attention spans :-) ... but good advice.
:-) is to go for lower paying careers that you really like. I sort of practice what I preach: for the last 30 years working as a software developer, I have averaged about 32 hours of work a week - I love what I do, but I have always needed lots of sailing time, beach time, hiking time, etc. Until the last 6 years when I have mostly worked as a consultant except I have for the most part worked at corporations in a "full time" job, but always made the deal to work just 32 hours and get 80% of my pay (but full fringe benefits). Always worked for me.
Whenever I talk to people of high school or college age, I always advise to *not* go into a field just to make money. There is nothing wrong with making money, but most successful (definition: happy people, people who help others and have a good social network, etc.) people dosomething that they have some passion for. My advice (which I love to give
In this new economy where workers in the US *must* compete globally for value given to employers for each dollar earned, I think that it is more important than ever to have work that you have some real passion for and to strive to be in the top 5% of what you do.
BTW, after programming professionally for more than 30 years, I still love it!
-Mark
I think that it was in the late 1980s - not sure.
At that time, I was getting into hypertext tools and Xanadu looked good, but if I remember correctly, no code. A very bright sysadmin at PacBell (Karl Wabe) showed me the original WWW stuff at CERN - basically a lot of physics papers linked together. The browser was text based (lynx like). Very cool.
The great thing about the WWW early on was that software was available - it was shortly seeing the CERN system that our sysadmin at SAIC installed the CERN web server, and those of us who wanted it went crazy with our personal pages. When a graphical web browser was released from the Univ. of IL, then things really went crazy.
Anyway, my point is that (as far as I remember) I could get Xanadu design documents but no software (apologies if my recollection is wrong - it was a long time ago!) Who knows what would have happened if in the 1980s the Xanadu project released free reference software. Xanadu is very different that the WWW (more like a wiki) but perhaps people would be using both systems today.
I hate how much effort it is to even pull plain text out of Word and Powerpoint documents.
:-) of advice for organizations who must use Microsoft office: OpenOffice.org has a batch processing option to recursively search nested directories for Word documents and write out fairly equivalent OpenOffice.org Writer documents (that use a very nice XML format). If I had a company with thousands of Word documents on my servers, I would have an automatic "save to OpenOffice.org, then archive" backup strategy and not have my long term Document store backups in native Word format.
I just finished up work on a commercial Java text mining package and I spent far too long on code to read Word and Powerpoint files while handling PDF, OpenOffice.org, and AbiWord was fairly simple.
I do have a word (no pun intended
It is not going to happen, but I would love to see pressure from user groups and governments force Microsoft to use the OASIS open XML based document formats. If Microsoft really wanted to give maximum value to their customers, then they would do this on their own (yes, just wishful thinking).
I just sent them a small donation to perhaps cover my own bandwidth costs for the next year or so. When I have time, I would like trying to download the version of their database that only contains most recent edits (i.e., not all edit histories). A lot of the articles have good categories attached to them so I would like to do a machine learning run to build a categorizer (but this took me several days to do with the Reuters corpus, so I may not get to this for a while).
Thanks for all your work! (I just sent you a small donation, BTW).
I find NeoOffice/J to be quite stable enough for writing (although I have written 2 of my last 3 books using OOo because then I was developing mostly on Linux).
Best regards,
Mark
I agree with you! I should have either made that an unordered list of put 3 first.
-Mark
re: "I am curious. Why would it be cost-effective for them to do that? Even in Arizona's backwoods the cost of living is far higher than in India."
:-) I also have lots of experinence, which helps me get things down quickly (so some benefit to them for paying more). My main point of contact is in the US - which also helps.
:-(
I probably cost them what 5 software engineers in India would. The company has a few people in the US, but I am the only programmer (here or in India - most of the staff have MBAs). I do work hard
re: "...I don't get what the US does "special" anymore that justifies our high-cost of living..."
Bingo! You have that right, unfortunately
For my part, I spend lots of time on "self education" and I have a lot of confidence that this will keep the work coming in. Basically, I love the work I do, and I don't want to change careers.
Best regards,
Mark
Since I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona, almost all of my work is telecommuting. For the last 8 months, I have been working for company in India and it has been working out fairly well. Sure, I don't get the same pay as I did when I worked in an office in San Diego, but flexible hours so I can spend more time with family and friends makes the whole thing work for me.
With the US economy heading south (foreign central banks finally seems to be dropping the dollar) I think that it is time for us in the US to realign our priorities:
1. avoid debt like the plague - unless you need to literally borrow to feed your family
2. consider doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend on "self education" to stay globally competitive
3. learn to totally appreciate non-material things like love of family and friends
I think that by and large things will be OK here in the US as long as people adapt to a sliding material life style. (It would also help a lot if everyone tried harder to conserve petroleum products! The patriotic thing to do is to try to help reduce the trade deficit.)
-Mark
I use Google Groups all the time - never did search by date so I don't care about that. I like the new UI.
:-)
I used to go to a lot of trouble handling NNTP feeds; since Google Groups was released I don't bother.
A little bit OT: Is it just me, or are some things getting simpler? GMail and Google Groups cuts down my 'overhead time'. The switch from Linux (well, sometimes Windows 2000) to Mac OS X saves me a lot of admin hours each month. The quality and productivity of coding tools (e.g., IntelliJ and LispWorks) is going through the roof: everything seems to be getting easier