I knew Push as an undergrad; his girlfriend then is a good friend of mine. He got me reading Minsky, and I have some very fond memories of a genuinely nice guy. I am very sad to read of his death, and that I had lost touch to a degree where this was how I found out.
All three proposals look like complete crap in my usual viewing environment, which is about 6 inches wide. Using the full width and small fonts, it's a comfortable measure to read; the current/. front page has a newspaper look in this view. The three proposals use way too much space for the left and right columns, leaving one word per line for the actual content, overlapping the ads and navigation, and in one case spilling down off the styled area at the bottom.
When was the last time Congress allowed itself to be bound by Article I, Section 8? 95% of the US Code and nearly all of the Federal Register is in violation of that section. Thanks, FDR!
I had a nearly-ideal opportunity; my employer was closing, and our sole customer needed a development department. I knew their offer was a panic reaction, and wouldn't last, so I offered to consult (non-exclusively) for a few months. That allowed me to launch my independent consulting career, which lasted a little over four years.
My problem, however, is that I'm not good at sales: cold-calling, lead-tracking, pavement-pounding. Once in contact, I could generally make a sale, and deliver solid work for good prices, but it was only enough work to break even after rent and taxes. When things temporarily slowed down, I didn't have much cushion.
I'm very glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again without a bigger operating buffer or a sales partner. You really need to combine technical and sales skills to succeed.
The War on Piracy will be as successful as the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs (not to mention the War on Poverty and previously, the War on Rum). This means that we can start to see big money for the pirates, as well as turf wars and violence. Yay! Thanks, Mr. Bush!
Leland Yee doesn't need to worry about re-election. He is an incumbent Democrat in a district that is overwhelmingly Democratic. There are a Republican and a Libertarian running against him, but he is unopposed in the primary.
Welcome to San Francisco. In partisan races here, the Democratic primary is the real election.
Now this is interesting... I am running against Leland Yee in the 2004 election. Campaign Web site isn't up yet, since I'm not officially on the ballot yet (though the filing fee has been paid), but if you are interested in helping me fight "for the children" anti-freedom legislation like this, write me at maden04@maden.org.
This is definitely a problem. I used to support the CIA as a customer, and though the users were only identified by first name, we had home addresses for a few because they sometimes wanted us to ship stuff in a hurry and not have it slowed down by inspections.
So does anybody know of a good reference work out there which actually has some worthwhile analysis on stuff like this?
Check out To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski (Amazon). It's not a reference work per se; it's written for the layman, but it's very good.
For a couple of cool demos of the kind of multilingual Web pages that Ken Whistler is talking about, see the announcement for the Tenth Unicode Conference or "I don't know, I only work here." Both of these pages demonstrate Han unification, in which the same code points tagged as different languages get different visual presentation in a compliant browser.
I used "ash", the Adventure Shell, six years ago or so. This is just a retread. (Although given ash's lack of maintenance, possibly a needed one.)
Re:Is this a good first book on XML?
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 1
Well, I'm currently reviewing O'Reilly's
Learning XML, but I'd still say that Inside XML still seems to be a better book for beginners.
That's too bad to hear. I contributed to Learning XML (actually, I tried to write it, before finding out that I can't write a book and hold a full-time job at the same time, so I am very grateful to Erik Ray for picking it up). My original goal was that it be a beginners' book, though focused more on document creators than on programmers. I haven't seen the actual book yet, so I can't evaluate that statement.
Steven Holzner's first book, XML Complete, was terrible. It came out before XML itself was complete, and was (like this one) a Java tutorial, with a lot of examples relying on a particular version of the MSXML engine (which was out of date about a month after the book hit shelves). Additionally, he is a full-time technical author with limited time to research subjects; take his book with a grain of salt.
I had a nice chat with Neal Stephenson about using an ebook production system (DynaText, then from Electronic Book Technologies), but it was a full-out high-end SGML production system, and it was a little overkill (especially in the pricing).
To be fair, Knuth didn't really design Computer Modern; he digitized it from the Monotype face that had been used to set the first to volumes of TAoCP; he wanted the third volume to look like the first two. He also, as I understand it, didn't take ink squash into account; the outlines of Computer Modern are the outlines of the metal type, not the outlines of the ink shapes produced by them. That's why CM looks kind of spindly.
I agree with the suggestions that maybe Steve Jobs didn't have a real effect on networking in the '90s, and that e-commerce(tm) really couldn't have taken off without Larry Wall's Perl.
However, XML is increasingly an important part of the networking world, and wouldn't have happened without Jon Bosak getting pissed off at the lack of ability to use SGML on the Web. The W3C does not get credit for that, as is listed under TimBL's entry; Jon was given a working group to shut him up from complaining, and XML wasn't co-opted by the W3C until it began to get a lot of press. Arguably, the integrity of the effort started going down at that point...
At this job and a previous one, all incoming snailmail is opened by the secretary and stamped as received with today's date before delivery to the addressee. I don't know if they actually read it, but I certainly wouldn't want a Playboy or even a Maxim subscription coming to the office, certainly.
The CDs called Foo in a Nutshell, Deluxe Edition (Foo = {Webmaster, Java}) used JHLsearch, available from a fellow named (I think) John Leach who lives in Italy. I can't find a URL right now.
The subsequent CDs used ASTAware's NetResults. I wasn't really happy with their engine or their grasp of Web standards. Just before I left, we were starting to look into JObjects, which I'd had good recommendations for, but I don't know what became of that.
In short though, if you provide HTML content, the users will be able to use technology of their choice to search the CD. Most users will expect you to provide the tools, but that either means platform-proprietary tools or something based in Java. And even with Java, you'll probably need to provide a VM for the most common platforms, just in case.
Hmm...you might actually support the 4 billion people in the world who never heard of ascii...
but said
(Although there is a UTF-8 variant I don't know much about - I think its basically unicode for the most popular/common languages)
In fact, UTF-8 is hell for the most popular and common languages. For ASCII (Unicode characters 0-127 (U+0000 - U+007F)), UTF-8 means one byte per character. For ISO Latin 1 (U+0080 - U+00FF), UTF-8 means two bytes per character. For all other characters (except surrogates), UTF-8 means three bytes per character. That means that for ideographic languages (the most popular languages), as well as eastern European and non-Latin-alphabetic languages, UTF-8 is 150% of the size of UTF-16 - clearly a non-starter. For western European languages, or text primarily made of such languages, UTF-8 is a clear win, since accented characters aren't the majority.
Another reason to pick UTF-8 is that it's network friendly and backwards-compatible with ASCII. Characters without the eighth bit set mean exactly what older systems expect them to mean, and all non-ASCII characters have the eighth bit set. The drawback is that the network has to be 8-bit-safe, which SMTP (for example) isn't. UTF-8 is also safe from "helpful" gateways that do e.g. line-end normalization. UTF-16 can be completely hosed by such gateways. For 7-bit-only channels, you can use UTF-7 (which is a somewhat nasty 7-bit encoding), or just bang the entire thing (in UTF-8 or UTF-16) into quoted-printable form.
UTF-16 is two-byte objects, like UCS-2. Most UTF-16 characters are a single object. The difference is that in UTF-16 you can use "surrogate pairs" - two objects - to refer to characters outside the basic multilanguage plane (BMP). UCS-2 simply doesn't permit references outside the BMP.
UCS-4 gives access to the entire 31-bit ISO 10646 character set, but it's fairly inefficient since most planes in that range haven't even been assigned yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew Push as an undergrad; his girlfriend then is a good friend of mine. He got me reading Minsky, and I have some very fond memories of a genuinely nice guy. I am very sad to read of his death, and that I had lost touch to a degree where this was how I found out.
All three proposals look like complete crap in my usual viewing environment, which is about 6 inches wide. Using the full width and small fonts, it's a comfortable measure to read; the current /. front page has a newspaper look in this view. The three proposals use way too much space for the left and right columns, leaving one word per line for the actual content, overlapping the ads and navigation, and in one case spilling down off the styled area at the bottom.
Cash on hand. (This Forbes article was the latest numbers I could find, from 2005.)
When was the last time Congress allowed itself to be bound by Article I, Section 8? 95% of the US Code and nearly all of the Federal Register is in violation of that section. Thanks, FDR!
I had a nearly-ideal opportunity; my employer was closing, and our sole customer needed a development department. I knew their offer was a panic reaction, and wouldn't last, so I offered to consult (non-exclusively) for a few months. That allowed me to launch my independent consulting career, which lasted a little over four years.
My problem, however, is that I'm not good at sales: cold-calling, lead-tracking, pavement-pounding. Once in contact, I could generally make a sale, and deliver solid work for good prices, but it was only enough work to break even after rent and taxes. When things temporarily slowed down, I didn't have much cushion.
I'm very glad I did it, but I wouldn't do it again without a bigger operating buffer or a sales partner. You really need to combine technical and sales skills to succeed.
The War on Piracy will be as successful as the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs (not to mention the War on Poverty and previously, the War on Rum). This means that we can start to see big money for the pirates, as well as turf wars and violence. Yay! Thanks, Mr. Bush!
Leland Yee doesn't need to worry about re-election. He is an incumbent Democrat in a district that is overwhelmingly Democratic. There are a Republican and a Libertarian running against him, but he is unopposed in the primary.
Welcome to San Francisco. In partisan races here, the Democratic primary is the real election.
Yes. However, I don't have a campaign account set up yet; I can put people on a mailing list for when things get rolling.
For the curious, the tale of the dot-com in question can be found here, including mine and Rob's stories.
Now this is interesting... I am running against Leland Yee in the 2004 election. Campaign Web site isn't up yet, since I'm not officially on the ballot yet (though the filing fee has been paid), but if you are interested in helping me fight "for the children" anti-freedom legislation like this, write me at maden04@maden.org.
This is definitely a problem. I used to support the CIA as a customer, and though the users were only identified by first name, we had home addresses for a few because they sometimes wanted us to ship stuff in a hurry and not have it slowed down by inspections.
Many more nerdly songs, including festive holiday-related ones, are collected in The Internet Songbook .
Check out To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski (Amazon). It's not a reference work per se; it's written for the layman, but it's very good.
For a couple of cool demos of the kind of multilingual Web pages that Ken Whistler is talking about, see the announcement for the Tenth Unicode Conference or "I don't know, I only work here." Both of these pages demonstrate Han unification, in which the same code points tagged as different languages get different visual presentation in a compliant browser.
I used "ash", the Adventure Shell, six years ago or so. This is just a retread. (Although given ash's lack of maintenance, possibly a needed one.)
That's too bad to hear. I contributed to Learning XML (actually, I tried to write it, before finding out that I can't write a book and hold a full-time job at the same time, so I am very grateful to Erik Ray for picking it up). My original goal was that it be a beginners' book, though focused more on document creators than on programmers. I haven't seen the actual book yet, so I can't evaluate that statement.
Steven Holzner's first book, XML Complete, was terrible. It came out before XML itself was complete, and was (like this one) a Java tutorial, with a lot of examples relying on a particular version of the MSXML engine (which was out of date about a month after the book hit shelves). Additionally, he is a full-time technical author with limited time to research subjects; take his book with a grain of salt.
Why the reference to the November 1996 Working Draft? Try the Recommendation instead.
... is The LaTeX Web Companion (ISBN 0201433117) by Michel Goosens and Sebastian Rahtz.
I had a nice chat with Neal Stephenson about using an ebook production system (DynaText, then from Electronic Book Technologies), but it was a full-out high-end SGML production system, and it was a little overkill (especially in the pricing).
To be fair, Knuth didn't really design Computer Modern; he digitized it from the Monotype face that had been used to set the first to volumes of TAoCP; he wanted the third volume to look like the first two. He also, as I understand it, didn't take ink squash into account; the outlines of Computer Modern are the outlines of the metal type, not the outlines of the ink shapes produced by them. That's why CM looks kind of spindly.
I agree with the suggestions that maybe Steve Jobs didn't have a real effect on networking in the '90s, and that e-commerce(tm) really couldn't have taken off without Larry Wall's Perl.
However, XML is increasingly an important part of the networking world, and wouldn't have happened without Jon Bosak getting pissed off at the lack of ability to use SGML on the Web. The W3C does not get credit for that, as is listed under TimBL's entry; Jon was given a working group to shut him up from complaining, and XML wasn't co-opted by the W3C until it began to get a lot of press. Arguably, the integrity of the effort started going down at that point...
At this job and a previous one, all incoming snailmail is opened by the secretary and stamped as received with today's date before delivery to the addressee. I don't know if they actually read it, but I certainly wouldn't want a Playboy or even a Maxim subscription coming to the office, certainly.
The CDs called Foo in a Nutshell, Deluxe Edition (Foo = {Webmaster, Java}) used JHLsearch, available from a fellow named (I think) John Leach who lives in Italy. I can't find a URL right now.
The subsequent CDs used ASTAware's NetResults. I wasn't really happy with their engine or their grasp of Web standards. Just before I left, we were starting to look into JObjects, which I'd had good recommendations for, but I don't know what became of that.
In short though, if you provide HTML content, the users will be able to use technology of their choice to search the CD. Most users will expect you to provide the tools, but that either means platform-proprietary tools or something based in Java. And even with Java, you'll probably need to provide a VM for the most common platforms, just in case.
You correctly observered
but said
In fact, UTF-8 is hell for the most popular and common languages. For ASCII (Unicode characters 0-127 (U+0000 - U+007F)), UTF-8 means one byte per character. For ISO Latin 1 (U+0080 - U+00FF), UTF-8 means two bytes per character. For all other characters (except surrogates), UTF-8 means three bytes per character. That means that for ideographic languages (the most popular languages), as well as eastern European and non-Latin-alphabetic languages, UTF-8 is 150% of the size of UTF-16 - clearly a non-starter. For western European languages, or text primarily made of such languages, UTF-8 is a clear win, since accented characters aren't the majority.
Another reason to pick UTF-8 is that it's network friendly and backwards-compatible with ASCII. Characters without the eighth bit set mean exactly what older systems expect them to mean, and all non-ASCII characters have the eighth bit set. The drawback is that the network has to be 8-bit-safe, which SMTP (for example) isn't. UTF-8 is also safe from "helpful" gateways that do e.g. line-end normalization. UTF-16 can be completely hosed by such gateways. For 7-bit-only channels, you can use UTF-7 (which is a somewhat nasty 7-bit encoding), or just bang the entire thing (in UTF-8 or UTF-16) into quoted-printable form.
UTF-16 is two-byte objects, like UCS-2. Most UTF-16 characters are a single object. The difference is that in UTF-16 you can use "surrogate pairs" - two objects - to refer to characters outside the basic multilanguage plane (BMP). UCS-2 simply doesn't permit references outside the BMP.
UCS-4 gives access to the entire 31-bit ISO 10646 character set, but it's fairly inefficient since most planes in that range haven't even been assigned yet.
See appendix C of The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0 for details, or the Unicode Consortium's Web site.
(Why doesn't /. allow use of the <cite> element?)