with my Mac build options and my must-have.emacs code to toggle off the too large graphics icons tool bar:
(global-set-key "\C-xt" 'tool-bar-mode)
Aquamacs really is a better Mac application but I have had occasional crashes with Franz Lisp and ELI with recent builds the last few months so I will stick with the Mac app build that I did yesterday for a while.
Just an idea: also try the text mode emacs (Apple supplied or a new build), running in a Mac OS X Terminal app running under 'screen': type screen, hit a return to get past the slash screen, run Emacs, etc.: control-a c to create new screens, control-a n to skip forward to next screen, control-a p for previous screen, and for emacs user the all-important control-a a to send a control-a to emacs.
screen + console emacs is a bit old-school, but I really like the combination.
Watch the last 3 minutes: he is answering a question on multicast: why local multicast is sufficient: global UDP multicast is impossible, but not necessary; ideas for local multicast: multicast at room level, enterprise level, etc. I have always liked UDP for some applications (e.g., broadcasting distributed game or VR data), but I always used it locally.
Good point on the ease of censorship of an aletrnative Internet. Thanks.
I disagree with last second point however: I try to find good sources of information to share with people I know that contradict the spin that we see on the news. A small effect, but enough people take the effort it is effective.
I also make it a habit to frequently contact my elected representatives for both things that they do that I don't like, and even the rare compliment when they get something right:-)
Something particularly cool, starting around the 1 hour, 4 minute time index on the video: the idea of both naming data resources and versioning: when you "put something out there" on the internet, it is immutable, but you can supersede it with versioning, but older versions are still there - sort of making data on the Internet like our personal or work group subversion repositories.
I 'browsed' some of this video and book marked it for later: Van Jacobson's background is awesome.
A bit off topic, but there are two things that I want to see happen: a complete upgrade to IPv6 and the creation of an alternative 'public Internet' based on emerging long distance wifi and software that lets people volunteer to be part of this new open grid, and optionally share some bandwidth bridging the 'real' Internet.
It may seem pointless to want both higher performance (multi-casting UDP, essentially infinite IP address space) and low performance and ad-hoc systems, but please consider: the UK and USA seem to be going down the wrong path of surveillance and citizen control, the Internet may someday be viewed as something that the public just should not have because it is too free a source of information. I hope that I am wrong about this, but this unpleasant possible repressive future is a possibility.
Thanks for your comments. I spent most of my adult lifetime working in the defense industry and I also can appreciate the importance of controlling information, when necessary.
I simply do not agree with you (but that is fine - we all have the right to our own opinions) that the desire to prevent any negative news about the war in Iraq does not come down from the political operators in the Bush administration.
I like Gates much better than Rumsfeld (who, among other things was, I believe, the person who came up with the bad idea of rounding up innocent female relatives of people they wanted to interrogate to pressure prisoners). However, I also think that Gates is open to manipulation by Rove, etc.
I would like to point out to you that it is our responsibility as good citizens to keep a close view on what our elected officials do in our name.
A fair question to ask. The first thing that I thought about when I read the article was that soldiers were being kept from publicly complaining about the war.
Seriously, how far will the Bush administration go down the road of trashing basic American values? Did they sleep through civics class?
I have some very conservative friends who are so embarrassed by what "their guy" is doing that I have stopped talking about politics with them - no need to rub their noses in it. BTW, I voted for Bush in 2000 - I made a bad mistake, but I am willing to admit it.
My wife and I watched Bush on TV yesterday. It seems to me that he plain outright lied about the appropriations bill that he vetoed. He kept nattering on about the bill not funding the troups while in fact the bill in some cases provided more funds than he asked for (e.g., veteran's benefits).
Bush is so much worse than Nixon. Can he really believe that his actions our good for our country? (And the world?)
Bush is so bad he even makes the Democrats look pretty good.
I bought a N800 a week ago. At first I didn't like it but as I got used to quickly changing the zoom and toggling "optimize" mode for the web sites I use it for, I started to like it a lot - glad I bought it. This transition took several hours of use.
I think the PDF reader could stand improving: it does not remember where 'where you were' last in a document and navigation in full screen mode could be improved.
It works well to read GMail but if I need to send a long reply I wait until I have my laptop booted. It does not work so well for a few web sites, so I just don't keep those bookmarked on the N800. If you are thinking of buying one I suggest trying to borrow one for at least two hours of use before making up your mind. It runs Linux and you can grab a free SDK for it from the web.
I especially liked: "Every dollar a system integrator saves on license costs paid to a software firm is a dollar gained that the customer might spend on services."
My vision for the future (from an independent consultant's viewpoint) is the development of such a rich open source ecosystem that the cost of building unique applications is drastically reduced. As development projects become less expensive, companies and organizations will fund more projects because the cost to benefit ratio gets lower - and "fringe" projects start to get funded.
Hey, I actually read the article - I must be new here:-)
I am looking forward to the V3 release of GPL and LGPL. I especially like the way the new LGPL draft basically just references the V3 GPL (draft), with exceptions.
I believe that Microsoft's claims of anti-competitiveness of the new GPL is laughable. Microsoft sets a high standard for anti-competitive activities, in my opinion. Also, people and organizations who want to live, play, and build systems in the LGPL/GPL infrastructure world should be allowed to do so - Microsoft's push here seems to be desiring to remove people's freedom to pick alternative (to Microsoft) development strategies. No big surprise.
I have some influence on my customers (I am a consultant) and I use this influence to convince them to go open source on more of their projects.
I think that PG is right on: more creative work is done on OS X and Linux, but:
average people will be using Windows for a long time.
I am an independent consultant, and the open source ecosystem is great for me - I don't care if others choose Windows (unless they want to be my customers:-)
A few decades ago, "commercial off the shelf" (COTS) software was the big new thing, but for many business processes, organizations really need custom work. Building on top of open source makes custom applications more price competitive with commercial offerings that don't really do what you need.
This is yet another argument for creating a large "ecosystem" of valuable GPL3 code: lock vendors who abuse patents out of this ecosystem. Companies can still keep their intellectual property to themselves: private and proprietary data used with GPL3 code.
As a consultant, I always try to sell my customers on going open source, if it makes sense for their situation. Open source == cost savings.
I still own 5 computers used for my consulting business, but I now just use a MacBook with Parallels + Windows + Linux -- works for me for about 95% of my work. I don't even bother (usually) using my Mac as an X Window client for Linux: now, I just run Linux under Parallels, as needed. Same for Windows.
One thing: Microsoft still makes money from this arrangement (the Windows license fee) so it is not like this is a totally bad situation for them.
Being able to copy and paste between Windows and Mac applications is useful, as is an optional shared file system.
For software developers not focussed on the Windows market, this is a great setup. I use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java - all portable to many OS platforms, so I usually work on OS X.
I keep the GWT "Kitchen Sink" examples source handy to copy CSS, code, etc.
GWT is very cool, especially if you need to build one large application. I must say though, if you just need little bits of AJAX, it is trivial using other toolkits (e.g., "Java + AJAX in 18 lines" http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/2007/02/java-ajax- in-18-lines.html - my example of trivially adding AJAX support to JSP forms).
My wife has been mentioning this for years: it seems like the 'owners' have been cutting back on educational funding, industrial infrastructure, etc.
I am starting to agree with my wife, given evidence like: Bush family buying massive amounts of land in South America, Dick Cheney primarily investing his own money overseas, etc.
I believe that people with real power in the USA are "cutting loose" the middle class and lower class. I write about this in my blog a lot: the best thing to do is to invest heavily in yourself: education, personal learning, pay off debt, invest, and save.
I bought the PDF version yesterday
on
TextMate
·
· Score: 1
I use TextMate at least one hour a day so I am motivated to streamline my development process. I still can't decide whether I prefer IntelliJ + Ruby/Rails plugins or TextMate. That said, I use TextMate as a general file and project viewer and for small programs in Earlang, Ruby, and Python TextMate is hard to beat. The only thing that I don't like about TextMate is the poor support for Lisp languages, but if I really cared, I could fix that myself. TextMate is aso pretty good for Latex work, but for the Mac, I like TexShop a bit better.
So far, I find the book to be very worthwhile.
BTW, I also bought the "beta book" PDF for Pragmatic's new Erlang book - that also looks excellent.
I work out of a home office and until a life-threatening medical problem last December, I was definitely an 'integrator', never really being off line. BTW, my problem (DVT followed by two large pulmonary embolisms) was almost certainly caused or made worse by a few month work spree - too much time at my desk. I have since set strict boundaries: I set a "get up and walk around" timer on my laptop, place limits on "billable time" each day and even some limits on time for learning new technologies (although my 2/3 time for paid work and about 1/3 time learning ne things ration has stayed about the same).
Anyway, transitioning from an 'integrator' to a 'separator' has been a good thing for me. People do need down time.
At the end of the day, I believe that productivity is about quality work time, not quantity.
I recently read a critique of "weak" SW (the "lower case semantic web") techniques like microformats, etc. The idea was that we need a high level metadata standard.
Contrary to this opinion:
I recently wrote in my my AI blog about my expectations that the SW will develop from the bottom up. I also wrote about this 3 years ago (PDF "Jumpstarting the Semantic Web", skip to page 3).
So, I partially agree with Stephen Downes that cooperation is unlikely, but the SW in some form will happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a blog entry yesterday: http://markwatson.com/blog/
.emacs code to toggle off the too large graphics icons tool bar:
with my Mac build options and my must-have
(global-set-key "\C-xt" 'tool-bar-mode)
Aquamacs really is a better Mac application but I have had occasional crashes with Franz Lisp and ELI with recent builds the last few months so I will stick with the Mac app build that I did yesterday for a while.
Just an idea: also try the text mode emacs (Apple supplied or a new build), running in a Mac OS X Terminal app running under 'screen': type screen, hit a return to get past the slash screen, run Emacs, etc.: control-a c to create new screens, control-a n to skip forward to next screen, control-a p for previous screen, and for emacs user the all-important control-a a to send a control-a to emacs.
screen + console emacs is a bit old-school, but I really like the combination.
Enjoying your job at Microsoft?
Seriously, making Apache 2 and GPLv3 licensing compatible is a very good thing.
Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page
Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.
Watch the last 3 minutes: he is answering a question on multicast: why local multicast is sufficient: global UDP multicast is impossible, but not necessary; ideas for local multicast: multicast at room level, enterprise level, etc. I have always liked UDP for some applications (e.g., broadcasting distributed game or VR data), but I always used it locally.
Good point on the ease of censorship of an aletrnative Internet. Thanks.
:-)
I disagree with last second point however: I try to find good sources of information to share with people I know that contradict the spin that we see on the news. A small effect, but enough people take the effort it is effective.
I also make it a habit to frequently contact my elected representatives for both things that they do that I don't like, and even the rare compliment when they get something right
Something particularly cool, starting around the 1 hour, 4 minute time index on the video: the idea of both naming data resources and versioning: when you "put something out there" on the internet, it is immutable, but you can supersede it with versioning, but older versions are still there - sort of making data on the Internet like our personal or work group subversion repositories.
I 'browsed' some of this video and book marked it for later: Van Jacobson's background is awesome.
A bit off topic, but there are two things that I want to see happen: a complete upgrade to IPv6 and the creation of an alternative 'public Internet' based on emerging long distance wifi and software that lets people volunteer to be part of this new open grid, and optionally share some bandwidth bridging the 'real' Internet.
It may seem pointless to want both higher performance (multi-casting UDP, essentially infinite IP address space) and low performance and ad-hoc systems, but please consider: the UK and USA seem to be going down the wrong path of surveillance and citizen control, the Internet may someday be viewed as something that the public just should not have because it is too free a source of information. I hope that I am wrong about this, but this unpleasant possible repressive future is a possibility.
Thanks for your comments. I spent most of my adult lifetime working in the defense industry and I also can appreciate the importance of controlling information, when necessary.
I simply do not agree with you (but that is fine - we all have the right to our own opinions) that the desire to prevent any negative news about the war in Iraq does not come down from the political operators in the Bush administration.
I like Gates much better than Rumsfeld (who, among other things was, I believe, the person who came up with the bad idea of rounding up innocent female relatives of people they wanted to interrogate to pressure prisoners). However, I also think that Gates is open to manipulation by Rove, etc.
I would like to point out to you that it is our responsibility as good citizens to keep a close view on what our elected officials do in our name.
A fair question to ask. The first thing that I thought about when I read the article was that soldiers were being kept from publicly complaining about the war.
Seriously, how far will the Bush administration go down the road of trashing basic American values? Did they sleep through civics class?
I have some very conservative friends who are so embarrassed by what "their guy" is doing that I have stopped talking about politics with them - no need to rub their noses in it. BTW, I voted for Bush in 2000 - I made a bad mistake, but I am willing to admit it.
My wife and I watched Bush on TV yesterday. It seems to me that he plain outright lied about the appropriations bill that he vetoed. He kept nattering on about the bill not funding the troups while in fact the bill in some cases provided more funds than he asked for (e.g., veteran's benefits).
Bush is so much worse than Nixon. Can he really believe that his actions our good for our country? (And the world?)
Bush is so bad he even makes the Democrats look pretty good.
I locally back up my GMail, Flickr and Picaso photos, Google documents, my blogs, del.icio.us bookmarks - easy to do.
I have to admit that I don't back up my settings for my Google home page, but I think that it would take about 90 seconds to recreate.
Online web applications are a great resource, but users should take the responsibility for their own stuff.
I bought a N800 a week ago. At first I didn't like it but as I got used to quickly changing the zoom and toggling "optimize" mode for the web sites I use it for, I started to like it a lot - glad I bought it. This transition took several hours of use.
I think the PDF reader could stand improving: it does not remember where 'where you were' last in a document and navigation in full screen mode could be improved.
It works well to read GMail but if I need to send a long reply I wait until I have my laptop booted. It does not work so well for a few web sites, so I just don't keep those bookmarked on the N800. If you are thinking of buying one I suggest trying to borrow one for at least two hours of use before making up your mind. It runs Linux and you can grab a free SDK for it from the web.
I especially liked: "Every dollar a system integrator saves on license costs paid to a software firm is a dollar gained that the customer might spend on services."
My vision for the future (from an independent consultant's viewpoint) is the development of such a rich open source ecosystem that the cost of building unique applications is drastically reduced. As development projects become less expensive, companies and organizations will fund more projects because the cost to benefit ratio gets lower - and "fringe" projects start to get funded.
Hey, I actually read the article - I must be new here :-)
I am looking forward to the V3 release of GPL and LGPL. I especially like the way the new LGPL draft basically just references the V3 GPL (draft), with exceptions.
I believe that Microsoft's claims of anti-competitiveness of the new GPL is laughable. Microsoft sets a high standard for anti-competitive activities, in my opinion. Also, people and organizations who want to live, play, and build systems in the LGPL/GPL infrastructure world should be allowed to do so - Microsoft's push here seems to be desiring to remove people's freedom to pick alternative (to Microsoft) development strategies. No big surprise.
I have some influence on my customers (I am a consultant) and I use this influence to convince them to go open source on more of their projects.
I think that PG is right on: more creative work is done on OS X and Linux, but:
:-)
average people will be using Windows for a long time.
I am an independent consultant, and the open source ecosystem is great for me - I don't care if others choose Windows (unless they want to be my customers
A few decades ago, "commercial off the shelf" (COTS) software was the big new thing, but for many business processes, organizations really need custom work. Building on top of open source makes custom applications more price competitive with commercial offerings that don't really do what you need.
I find it "not right" to have two indexes maintained for the same files on the same computer.
:-)
Unless Google Desktop uses the Spotlight APIs and thus the same indices, I think that I will pass.
That said, I always considered Google Desktop as a must have Windows utility so I might change my mind
This is yet another argument for creating a large "ecosystem" of valuable GPL3 code: lock vendors who abuse patents out of this ecosystem. Companies can still keep their intellectual property to themselves: private and proprietary data used with GPL3 code.
As a consultant, I always try to sell my customers on going open source, if it makes sense for their situation. Open source == cost savings.
I still own 5 computers used for my consulting business, but I now just use a MacBook with Parallels + Windows + Linux -- works for me for about 95% of my work. I don't even bother (usually) using my Mac as an X Window client for Linux: now, I just run Linux under Parallels, as needed. Same for Windows.
One thing: Microsoft still makes money from this arrangement (the Windows license fee) so it is not like this is a totally bad situation for them.
Being able to copy and paste between Windows and Mac applications is useful, as is an optional shared file system.
For software developers not focussed on the Windows market, this is a great setup. I use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java - all portable to many OS platforms, so I usually work on OS X.
I thought about buying a GWT book, but the general documentation at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/ made it simple to build and modify projects.
h tml (using command line tools).
- in-18-lines.html - my example of trivially adding AJAX support to JSP forms).
See for yourself, use the section "Creating an Application from Scratch (without Eclipse)" at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/gettingstarted.
I keep the GWT "Kitchen Sink" examples source handy to copy CSS, code, etc.
GWT is very cool, especially if you need to build one large application. I must say though, if you just need little bits of AJAX, it is trivial using other toolkits (e.g., "Java + AJAX in 18 lines" http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/2007/02/java-ajax
Please pardon a link to my own blog: http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/search/label/econo my
but it is relevant.
My wife has been mentioning this for years: it seems like the 'owners' have been cutting back on educational funding, industrial infrastructure, etc.
I am starting to agree with my wife, given evidence like: Bush family buying massive amounts of land in South America, Dick Cheney primarily investing his own money overseas, etc.
I believe that people with real power in the USA are "cutting loose" the middle class and lower class. I write about this in my blog a lot: the best thing to do is to invest heavily in yourself: education, personal learning, pay off debt, invest, and save.
I use TextMate at least one hour a day so I am motivated to streamline my development process. I still can't decide whether I prefer IntelliJ + Ruby/Rails plugins or TextMate. That said, I use TextMate as a general file and project viewer and for small programs in Earlang, Ruby, and Python TextMate is hard to beat. The only thing that I don't like about TextMate is the poor support for Lisp languages, but if I really cared, I could fix that myself. TextMate is aso pretty good for Latex work, but for the Mac, I like TexShop a bit better.
So far, I find the book to be very worthwhile.
BTW, I also bought the "beta book" PDF for Pragmatic's new Erlang book - that also looks excellent.
"2/3 time for paid work and about 1/3 time learning ne things ration" --> "2/3 time for paid work and about 1/3 time learning new things ratio"
:-)
must learn to preview
I work out of a home office and until a life-threatening medical problem last December, I was definitely an 'integrator', never really being off line. BTW, my problem (DVT followed by two large pulmonary embolisms) was almost certainly caused or made worse by a few month work spree - too much time at my desk. I have since set strict boundaries: I set a "get up and walk around" timer on my laptop, place limits on "billable time" each day and even some limits on time for learning new technologies (although my 2/3 time for paid work and about 1/3 time learning ne things ration has stayed about the same).
Anyway, transitioning from an 'integrator' to a 'separator' has been a good thing for me. People do need down time.
At the end of the day, I believe that productivity is about quality work time, not quantity.
I recently read a critique of "weak" SW (the "lower case semantic web") techniques like microformats, etc. The idea was that we need a high level metadata standard.
Contrary to this opinion:
I recently wrote in my my AI blog about my expectations that the SW will develop from the bottom up. I also wrote about this 3 years ago (PDF "Jumpstarting the Semantic Web", skip to page 3).
So, I partially agree with Stephen Downes that cooperation is unlikely, but the SW in some form will happen.