damn you slashdot and your space-destroying ways...
It was only recently I discovered that if you set you posting prefs for Slashdot to "Plan Old Text" you can still use all the HTML stuff but it preserves your line breaks. I just don't get the point in HTML Formatted (my previous default and I presume still yours) since I discovered that. I don't even want to think of how many <br>s and <p>s I have needlessly typed over the years.
OS X exposes wuite a lot of its funkiness to the shell. mdfind to access the Spotlight database is nice, you can search on all kinds of metadata, everything from filename to the F-stop of a photo, but the attributes aren't very friendly to remember. It's nicer to wrap frequently used ones in a function. Here's an approximation to locate using the Spotlight database (stick it in.bashrc,.profile or whatever): function mdlocate {
if [ "$1" ]; then
mdfind "kMDItemFSName == '$1'"
fi }
That does an exact match search on the filename, if you'd prefer locate's default of a substring search, change it to:
mdfind "kMDItemFSName == '*$1*'"
But then odd things might happen if you include globs in your search terms (which you can if you quote the string). That could be solved with more code of course, but I'm happy to use the first version and add globs if I want them.
I *really* wish something in the GUI world came close to the "pull useful bits from a bunch of programs and throw them together" usefulness of CLI tools.
Automator for OS X has a pretty good stab at it. You can "pipe" together different applications to create a workflow, all by pointing and clicking. You could get all the photos you took at times iCal says you were with client X, give them a name based on the calendar entry, process them in Photoshop, wrap them up in a zip file and email it to everyone in your address book who works for FooCorp. Like AppleScript it's not only nice in theory but also works pretty well in practice because there is good support in/for third-party applications.
I've been messing with Linux for about 7 years, admined some small servers (as a volunteer for some small non-commercial entities) and have been using Linux as my main desktop since around 2002. I've never understood how to use "info" (probably due to the fact that I never "got" emacs, being a VI person), but man pages (at least on Debian) are pretty nice to use.
I never quite "got" info either, it feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut and takes longer than just searching a long man page. But Debian's man pages are often horrible because they are so strict in implementing the DFSG that they can't use the original documentation, so the man page is often a brief, inaccurate summary nobody has touched in ten years.
In a similar vein, back in the days of floppies you could have endless fun ejecting other people's disks from Sun workstations. They put it in, you eject it. They put it in, you eject it. Repeat till you get bored or it looks like they're about to do a 'who'.
OK, it's not a trick or very obscure, but it is a useful set of flags and it spells the name of an animal. Which is cool, if you need to get out more. I need to get out more.
But greeted with indifference by the vast majority of end-users.
A rapidly shrinking majority, if it's not already a minority of potential DS + WiFi users. At least here in the UK the biggest ISPs now ship pre-configured wireless routers with WPA enabled out-of-the-box. That means DS, DS Lite, and perhaps DSi owners with older games will have to have to reconfigure their router and every one of their computers and other devices to make the DS work. People are not indifferent to having to do stuff like that. Not supporting WPA in the DS has been an epic fail for Nintendo.
No - if you were a real programmer, you'd just read the API.
APIs? Real programmers don't use APIs they... oh fuck it.
Good programming isn't about bravado. It's not about doing things the hard way because it makes you feel big and tough and like a "real programmer". That's not being a "real programmer", that's an inferiority complex.
That is almost what happened, but not only did Microsoft offer a lower price ($25), they also extended the availability of XP for netbook OEMs till 2010. Microoft define a netbook as =10" screen, =1GHz processor or an Atom, and I think there is something about storage capacity too.
Ah, I see what you're getting at now. But I think you are completely wrong about what 99% of people expect from a lens. Normal people don't give a toss about resolution as long as their photos are sharp enough. Unless you're in the habit of making poster-sized prints the image from a 1.6x crop camera with a 200mm lens is indistinguishable from the image from a full-frame camera with a 320mm lens. Resolving power matters to me when I'm doing astrophotography, but when I'm not lens selection is all about how big I can make stuff in the frame. I studied optics at university and could bore you to death about the PSF of my telescopes, so I do understand what a smaller sensor really means, but when I'm in photographer mode I still think my ef-s 55-250mm on my 20d is equivalent to an 88-400mm. Because in every way it matters for taking nice photos, it is. Picking a photographic lens is about the composition it allows you to achieve, not how well it can split double stars. I suspect even normal people think bigger is better, rather than sharper is better.
I don't really see the distinction you're trying to make. A thing which would appear 1" high in a 5x7 print from a 35mm camera with a 320mm lens will appear 1" high in a 5x7 print from a 1.6x crop DSLR with a 200m lens. That's the definition of magnification which matters when you're taking photos, isn't it? It's about how far away something can be and still fill the frame.
The future is here. I can already watch TV on my Nokia 6120 with 3 here in the UK. I pay £10 for 3GB per month. For £2 I could add unlimited TV. For a few quid extra I could have unlimited streaming from a Slingbox.
I don't find you suck even if some sales people are somewhat clueless (like the ones that keep insisting a less than full frame dSLR somehow magically turns a 200mm lens into the equivalent reach of a 320mm)at least most are helpful.
Erm, that thing about the lenses is true. If you have a 1.6x sensor (like Canon consumer DSLRs) a 200mm lens will give you the same FOV ("zoom") as a 320mm lens does in a full-frame DSLR. It's not magic, it's basic geometry.
But now netbooks appear, and there are some compelling reasons why they could displace cell phones as the one device everyone owns and carries. I suppose their two big problems are battery life and size.
A lot of people are saying that netbooks with become the portable convergence device of the future. I can only assume they have never actually seen a netbook in the flesh. They are small compared to a laptop, but they are huge compared to a PDA or cellphone. You wouldn't want to lug one around all day just to read the odd email, browse some news while you waiting for a bus or update your Facebook status. The reason netbooks won't become the one device everybody carries is simple: you cannot fit a screen and keyboard large enough to be used like a laptop in your pocket. Until we have folding screens and keyboards a fraction of their current size it just will not happen. Pocket size is the limiting factor in what people are willing to carry. If it doesn't fit in a pocket sometimes you're going to have to leave it at home, which for your mobile communications device is unacceptable. For women who always carry handbags the size limitations are similar - it has to fit in the tiny going-out bag.
BInding a single device to a 2-year contract is nuts. Especially a device as limited as a cell phone or netbook.
Who says they tie it to a single device? In the UK, many of the free laptops come with a USB dongle, there's no reason you couldn't use that in another machine. Even if a netbook came with a built-in HSDPA card I wouldn't be surprised if you could just put the SIM in a different device. Why would the network care if you use a Thinkpad instead of the Eee they supplied, or a phone you bought on eBay instead of the one they supplied?
This kind of thing is old hat in the UK, it's been going on for a while with wired broadband and is now common with HSDPA networks. here is one list of offers. They're not all netbooks, you can get proper laptops with a 3G contract these days.
Slashdot Mirror
It was only recently I discovered that if you set you posting prefs for Slashdot to "Plan Old Text" you can still use all the HTML stuff but it preserves your line breaks. I just don't get the point in HTML Formatted (my previous default and I presume still yours) since I discovered that. I don't even want to think of how many <br>s and <p>s I have needlessly typed over the years.
OS X exposes wuite a lot of its funkiness to the shell. mdfind to access the Spotlight database is nice, you can search on all kinds of metadata, everything from filename to the F-stop of a photo, but the attributes aren't very friendly to remember. It's nicer to wrap frequently used ones in a function. Here's an approximation to locate using the Spotlight database (stick it in .bashrc, .profile or whatever):
function mdlocate {
if [ "$1" ]; then
mdfind "kMDItemFSName == '$1'"
fi
}
That does an exact match search on the filename, if you'd prefer locate's default of a substring search, change it to:
mdfind "kMDItemFSName == '*$1*'"
But then odd things might happen if you include globs in your search terms (which you can if you quote the string). That could be solved with more code of course, but I'm happy to use the first version and add globs if I want them.
$ nano --nowrap
or perhaps
$ nano --fill 80
if you want it to wrap at a fixed width instead of the crazy 8 columns from the edge default (equivalent to "--fill -8").
It's a simple editor, but you can bend it to your will a little.
$ man nano
$ man nanorc
$ nano --nowrap ~/.nanorc
Tab filename completion is more than just a convenience, it's also a very useful sanity check.
Automator for OS X has a pretty good stab at it. You can "pipe" together different applications to create a workflow, all by pointing and clicking. You could get all the photos you took at times iCal says you were with client X, give them a name based on the calendar entry, process them in Photoshop, wrap them up in a zip file and email it to everyone in your address book who works for FooCorp. Like AppleScript it's not only nice in theory but also works pretty well in practice because there is good support in/for third-party applications.
I like that. Nicer than the way I've been doing it:
/mnt/usb/Music/Artist/Album/
$ history | grep Album
377 xmms2 radd
$ !377
At least it's nicer if you're sure you'll get the right match first time.
For remote sessions from a machine you sleep or reboot a lot.
"Newer" is a relative term, its use does not imply either of its operands are new in absolute terms.
I never quite "got" info either, it feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut and takes longer than just searching a long man page. But Debian's man pages are often horrible because they are so strict in implementing the DFSG that they can't use the original documentation, so the man page is often a brief, inaccurate summary nobody has touched in ten years.
You have . in your path?
In a similar vein, back in the days of floppies you could have endless fun ejecting other people's disks from Sun workstations. They put it in, you eject it. They put it in, you eject it. Repeat till you get bored or it looks like they're about to do a 'who'.
du -cks
OK, it's not a trick or very obscure, but it is a useful set of flags and it spells the name of an animal. Which is cool, if you need to get out more. I need to get out more.
A rapidly shrinking majority, if it's not already a minority of potential DS + WiFi users. At least here in the UK the biggest ISPs now ship pre-configured wireless routers with WPA enabled out-of-the-box. That means DS, DS Lite, and perhaps DSi owners with older games will have to have to reconfigure their router and every one of their computers and other devices to make the DS work. People are not indifferent to having to do stuff like that. Not supporting WPA in the DS has been an epic fail for Nintendo.
APIs? Real programmers don't use APIs they... oh fuck it.
Good programming isn't about bravado. It's not about doing things the hard way because it makes you feel big and tough and like a "real programmer". That's not being a "real programmer", that's an inferiority complex.
That is almost what happened, but not only did Microsoft offer a lower price ($25), they also extended the availability of XP for netbook OEMs till 2010. Microoft define a netbook as =10" screen, =1GHz processor or an Atom, and I think there is something about storage capacity too.
Linux Eees come with Xandros, not Xubuntu.
True, but you get a larger SSD with the Linux machines (20 GB vs 12 GB for the XP models).
Ah, I see what you're getting at now. But I think you are completely wrong about what 99% of people expect from a lens. Normal people don't give a toss about resolution as long as their photos are sharp enough. Unless you're in the habit of making poster-sized prints the image from a 1.6x crop camera with a 200mm lens is indistinguishable from the image from a full-frame camera with a 320mm lens. Resolving power matters to me when I'm doing astrophotography, but when I'm not lens selection is all about how big I can make stuff in the frame. I studied optics at university and could bore you to death about the PSF of my telescopes, so I do understand what a smaller sensor really means, but when I'm in photographer mode I still think my ef-s 55-250mm on my 20d is equivalent to an 88-400mm. Because in every way it matters for taking nice photos, it is. Picking a photographic lens is about the composition it allows you to achieve, not how well it can split double stars. I suspect even normal people think bigger is better, rather than sharper is better.
*sigh* I was twisting your words intentionally to make a point.
I don't really see the distinction you're trying to make. A thing which would appear 1" high in a 5x7 print from a 35mm camera with a 320mm lens will appear 1" high in a 5x7 print from a 1.6x crop DSLR with a 200m lens. That's the definition of magnification which matters when you're taking photos, isn't it? It's about how far away something can be and still fill the frame.
The future is here. I can already watch TV on my Nokia 6120 with 3 here in the UK. I pay £10 for 3GB per month. For £2 I could add unlimited TV. For a few quid extra I could have unlimited streaming from a Slingbox.
Erm, that thing about the lenses is true. If you have a 1.6x sensor (like Canon consumer DSLRs) a 200mm lens will give you the same FOV ("zoom") as a 320mm lens does in a full-frame DSLR. It's not magic, it's basic geometry.
A lot of people are saying that netbooks with become the portable convergence device of the future. I can only assume they have never actually seen a netbook in the flesh. They are small compared to a laptop, but they are huge compared to a PDA or cellphone. You wouldn't want to lug one around all day just to read the odd email, browse some news while you waiting for a bus or update your Facebook status. The reason netbooks won't become the one device everybody carries is simple: you cannot fit a screen and keyboard large enough to be used like a laptop in your pocket. Until we have folding screens and keyboards a fraction of their current size it just will not happen. Pocket size is the limiting factor in what people are willing to carry. If it doesn't fit in a pocket sometimes you're going to have to leave it at home, which for your mobile communications device is unacceptable. For women who always carry handbags the size limitations are similar - it has to fit in the tiny going-out bag.
Who says they tie it to a single device? In the UK, many of the free laptops come with a USB dongle, there's no reason you couldn't use that in another machine. Even if a netbook came with a built-in HSDPA card I wouldn't be surprised if you could just put the SIM in a different device. Why would the network care if you use a Thinkpad instead of the Eee they supplied, or a phone you bought on eBay instead of the one they supplied?
This kind of thing is old hat in the UK, it's been going on for a while with wired broadband and is now common with HSDPA networks. here is one list of offers. They're not all netbooks, you can get proper laptops with a 3G contract these days.