Beating the same drum as the rest, but it's pretty simple: don't program full-time unless you have to.
When you work two, three days a week you still have plenty of time left for your own projects, and it's not like you have 4 mouths to feed. More importantly than just having more time, you also keep the fun in programming. After 5 days of hacking, you're not likely to do any in your two days off. After 3 days of hacking, you have both time to relax and to ponder about your own projects. Not to mention double the all-nighters you can do (everyone knows your most productive hours are between 12 and 5am:)
Another tip is to take a programming job not directly related to your hobby interests, motivating yourself is then much easier. My job consists of PHP/MySQL/CMS/webmonkey stuff, while in my spare time I work on my distro, mostly C and Bash. After a dull day in the office, I often find myself hacking until the sun rises. Totally wasted the day after, but nothing a good cup of coffee doesn't cure.
The only thing I can think of that wouldn't make using XUL a total pita is to warn the users first time a site trys to use it, something like
How about just disabling the execution of remotely-retrieved XUL files from within Firefox by default? I'm surprised Firefox didn't warn before loading the spoof from the remote site, it clearly should as a minimum. However as more and more new users with the click-before-you-read syndrome try out Firefox having it disabled by default seems the only sane thing to do.
If you want to view your web applications internally using XUL, having a whitelist akin to the popup blocker seems the best way (don't bother user unless he figures out something is missing and he clicks on the disabled-window icon). For all us people just wanting to browse some HTML, automatically (or even after prompting) running XUL from a remote server is a flaw and potentially dangerous, and should be considered as such. I'm amazed this hasn't received more attention.
Personally, I like the split of GLib and GTK, but this is more from a coders point of view. For console, library or server stuff, GLib is a small useful (ubiquitous?) library that can be used without the GUI bloat of GTK. ATK and Pango have only since the 2.x versions of GTK+ been included and were external projects before, so some programs still use Pango while not using GTK+. The GNOME libraries themselves are a total mess, I'll give you that though.
Having the GTK libraries separate from eachother makes sense and broadens their usefulness. If it makes it slightly harder to build from scratch, too bad;)
The review states that ASP.NET only works on
Windows, which is incorrect. Mono brings ASP.NET
to Linux, MacOS, BSD, HP-UX, Solaris and many more.
I know this is/. but RTFA:
However, if you want to host ASP.NET with Apache, a couple of options are available that may or may not be supported by Microsoft. As a last alternative, there is Ximian's Project Mono, which is working to build an open-source module. Check www.go-mono.com for more information.
Last alternative. Guess Oracle isn't betting on Mono. Sorry Miguel.
I love PHP as much as the next guy, but that review
was done by someone that did not understand ASP.NET. [..]
A bit deceiving.
Also notice that it's filed under the section 'Open Source' and that it's writer is a consultant working at Oracle to integrate OSS. What did you expect, a fair review? PHP has been around for years doing fine and gaining mindshare, Mono is still growing up (in spite of the 1.0 release, kudos!) and ASP.net still smells of your favorite monopoly. What would I bet on, hmmm...
Credibility simply doesn't happen overnight. I do hope Mono will get the mindshare-snowball rolling, but prying ASP.NET away from Microsoft just isn't as easy as implementing an alternative. Good luck.
As long as it doesn't kill _my_ job I don't mind. Which incidently is made possible thanks to FLOSS.
Ahh, the smell of selfish capitalism. Gotta love it.
Re:Linux distributions have the same problem
on
Linux Users Are Spoiled
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The major Linux distributions that I've tried don't include a media player for fear they might get sued, don't include a NTFS driver for fear they might get sued...
Rubbish. Yes, Redhat didn't have MP3 support in their media player, but many a distro has (at least one, likely more) media players. Those same distros have a kernel that has stable NTFS read-support. I'll give you that NTFS read/write is a different story, though.
If you are the top 1% of users, then you haven't looked very hard.
Microsoft doesn't care about WINE. Windows Emulation will never get the compatibility Win32 users need, and it doesn't even matter, as the 'HTML API' is the only thing that users will care about in 5 years. RTFA.
I believe Skyrix (of opengroupware.org fame) is doing the same. Yes, they have freed their code, yes you can try out the web-based version for free, however that's not how the project (OGo) is promoted: as a free alternative to MS Exchange. It simply isn't. In order for Outlook clients to connect with OGo you need a plugin from Skyrix, who sells licenses to use them. A recent post on their mailinglist reiterates this. Not sure what the story is now with the Ximian (nah, Novell) Evo/Exchange connector being GPL'ed.
Now I don't mind if Skyrix tries this scheme to make an extra buck or two from their dead and burried project. What annoys me is the way they promote OGo: "Why by a groupware server as a black-box when you can get an open one for free?". Sure, the server itself is free. But if you want to replace your Exchange server it's gonna cost ya. Read their mission statement: "to integrate with [...] all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms". Carefully worded to cover up the fact that Skyrix still wants to see some cash.
Okay, maybe I shouldn't complain and instead pick up where Skyrix has stranded OGo. Could also use a rewrite from Obj-C to Python or saner. Anyone up for a new project this summer?:)
Tarentella is fun though. They have an open demo-server running the Gimp among other programs. Problem is that you can open a terminal using the Gimp, so you actually have remote shell access to their RH testsystem, which was pretty complete.
Yeah, I was bored and couldn't help it. Tarentella is slow as hell over the internet, but it certainly does seem pretty neat for on a local network... you just have to watch out who you give access to.
Most of the links are to stubs, this really isn't a massive update. Wake me when someone who knows what he's talking about adds some real (useful/readable) information on these theories.
1: knoppix is a GNU/Linux livecd distro 2: you have 2 (two) installers for putting it on a harddisk 3. there are many GNU/Linux livecds 4. it is used extensively for GNU/Linux evaluating (ie. Sun used morphix, based on knoppix, for their JDS evaluation version) 5. how can you compare something that is free with something that isn't?
It sucks he didn't even have the decency to file a few bugreports (I'm still looking for which card he actually used so we can test it in Knop/Morph and get it fixed for next releases. Audigy's have notoriously been awkward, but they work fine with alsa...)
Autodetecting hardware won't ever be 100% perfect, but without people submitting clueful bugreports, we won't be able to improve much on it. I guess that's the Windows mentality for ya: if it doesn't work, they suck and we shouldn't help them.
Oh, and it's Kanotix, not Knotix. Poor Kano, writing his name wrong while he's been doing quite a good job lately...
Good thing we can hide behind the "It's pre-1.0, stupid!"-argument. Surprised he threw Gentoo with the livecds, then again I would be surprised if he actually completed the install at all:)
Sorry to break it to ya, but MySQL, Postgres both have C API's, that other languages like PHP use in order to let em young ones (like you) do all their nifty scripting that make them feel all godlike. Get a clue.
"We are not yet at break-even," Taleyarkhan said. "That would be the ultimate. I don't know if it will ever happen, but we are hopeful that it will and don't see any clear reason why not. In the future we will attempt to scale up this system and see how far we can go."
From the ScienceDaily article, don't hold your breath just yet...
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
What people don't realize is that Qt is actually a massive foundational library...
Wow, they just described glib2+libxml2! Doesn't it surprise anyone that we'd rather reinvent the wheel than reuse someone elses code? Opensource innovation at it's best!
Yeah, I've got the karma, bring on those blowtorches...
Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public.
Isn't this the whole idea of F/OSS? Code for yourself, and if you help anyone in the process it's for the better. The motivation for F/OSS shouldn't be to code for others, but first and foremost to code for ones self: any other motivation is secondary.
Yes, do accept patches for features you yourself don't need, but F/OSS is egocentric in nature. This can be seen in larger company-backed F/OSS projects too. We shouldn't be afraid to recognize this motivation, and we surely shouldn't be afraid to defend it. For without this, F/OSS wouldn't be were it is today.
Who needs world domination? I'm perfectly happy with F/OSS as is. If you feel otherwise, don't point to others: roll up your sleeves yourself.
Yeah, I have the karma to burn, bring on those blowtorches
Well, not _exactly_ Knoppix, but we try to keep everything in sync with Knoppix, that's for sure...
We've gotten to the point where apt-get installing works from the livecd, and where debian packages on a directory on the livecd are installed at boot time, but we're a long way from per-package granularity. I'm not even sure we should go that far, as things get pretty messy with libraries et al. Being able to autobuild and autoinstall knoppix-like livecds is much more fun:-)
My biggest gripe with OOo is it's speed. It just feels slow compared to Office on Windows. The loading times are getting better, but imo OOo should be split up, like Mozilla and Firefox. Separate Word processor, Presentation tool, etc.
I was sceptical when I heard of (then) Phoenix, but you can see that the improvements just come a lot faster when you have people focusing on one separate tool instead of on a whole suite. Tried it once, havn't looked back since.
Afaik, there are ways to improve the GPS signal, Differential GPS for instance which uses dual receivers. It's reasonably expensive and also has drawbacks, but I wonder why the US military hasn't stopped it by now (didn't they encrypt it for it's accuracy afterall?). Nasa uses it too, with an accuracy of 20cm.
Have had a Morphix Game-iso for nearly a year now, always was the least-used one. Game livecds are great for the kids or for some quick fun, but rebooting is just too much effort for a quick game.
Included UT2003 and Q3A demos too, Enemy Territory in the last one, was planning UT2004 demo for this one. To be honest even I don't use them much, as you really want a lot of RAM or swap if you want to start ET. Livecds should be small and fast, you don't want to wait a minute for ET to load from cdrom every time:)
Slashdot Mirror
When you work two, three days a week you still have plenty of time left for your own projects, and it's not like you have 4 mouths to feed. More importantly than just having more time, you also keep the fun in programming. After 5 days of hacking, you're not likely to do any in your two days off. After 3 days of hacking, you have both time to relax and to ponder about your own projects. Not to mention double the all-nighters you can do (everyone knows your most productive hours are between 12 and 5am :)
Another tip is to take a programming job not directly related to your hobby interests, motivating yourself is then much easier. My job consists of PHP/MySQL/CMS/webmonkey stuff, while in my spare time I work on my distro, mostly C and Bash. After a dull day in the office, I often find myself hacking until the sun rises. Totally wasted the day after, but nothing a good cup of coffee doesn't cure.
you also have the freedom to just ignore everyone else and act pig-headed.
If you want to view your web applications internally using XUL, having a whitelist akin to the popup blocker seems the best way (don't bother user unless he figures out something is missing and he clicks on the disabled-window icon). For all us people just wanting to browse some HTML, automatically (or even after prompting) running XUL from a remote server is a flaw and potentially dangerous, and should be considered as such. I'm amazed this hasn't received more attention.
Personally, I like the split of GLib and GTK, but this is more from a coders point of view. For console, library or server stuff, GLib is a small useful (ubiquitous?) library that can be used without the GUI bloat of GTK. ATK and Pango have only since the 2.x versions of GTK+ been included and were external projects before, so some programs still use Pango while not using GTK+. The GNOME libraries themselves are a total mess, I'll give you that though.
;)
Having the GTK libraries separate from eachother makes sense and broadens their usefulness. If it makes it slightly harder to build from scratch, too bad
apt-get install ttf-bitstream-vera, and you have purty fonts. Most distros I know use them, they are fairly common (also in BSD land, I presume)
:)
Debian hasn't switched to X.org yet, but has committed itself to do so. I believe mandrake still uses XFree86 by default too.
Wait, that was a troll, wasn't it?
Credibility simply doesn't happen overnight. I do hope Mono will get the mindshare-snowball rolling, but prying ASP.NET away from Microsoft just isn't as easy as implementing an alternative. Good luck.
Ahh, the smell of selfish capitalism. Gotta love it.
If you are the top 1% of users, then you haven't looked very hard.
www.gtk.org/api
It really doesn't get much more easier than that. But my hunch is that you've yet to code a single line of C + GTK+.
Yes, I'm a troll, bring it on.
Microsoft doesn't care about WINE. Windows Emulation will never get the compatibility Win32 users need, and it doesn't even matter, as the 'HTML API' is the only thing that users will care about in 5 years. RTFA.
/., never mind...
Oh wait, this is
I believe Skyrix (of opengroupware.org fame) is doing the same. Yes, they have freed their code, yes you can try out the web-based version for free, however that's not how the project (OGo) is promoted: as a free alternative to MS Exchange. It simply isn't. In order for Outlook clients to connect with OGo you need a plugin from Skyrix, who sells licenses to use them. A recent post on their mailinglist reiterates this. Not sure what the story is now with the Ximian (nah, Novell) Evo/Exchange connector being GPL'ed.
Now I don't mind if Skyrix tries this scheme to make an extra buck or two from their dead and burried project. What annoys me is the way they promote OGo: "Why by a groupware server as a black-box when you can get an open one for free?". Sure, the server itself is free. But if you want to replace your Exchange server it's gonna cost ya. Read their mission statement: "to integrate with [...] all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms". Carefully worded to cover up the fact that Skyrix still wants to see some cash.
Okay, maybe I shouldn't complain and instead pick up where Skyrix has stranded OGo. Could also use a rewrite from Obj-C to Python or saner. Anyone up for a new project this summer? :)
Yeah, that's rig... OI!
Yeah, I was bored and couldn't help it. Tarentella is slow as hell over the internet, but it certainly does seem pretty neat for on a local network... you just have to watch out who you give access to.
Most of the links are to stubs, this really isn't a massive update. Wake me when someone who knows what he's talking about adds some real (useful/readable) information on these theories.
1: knoppix is a GNU/Linux livecd distro
2: you have 2 (two) installers for putting it on a harddisk
3. there are many GNU/Linux livecds
4. it is used extensively for GNU/Linux evaluating (ie. Sun used morphix, based on knoppix, for their JDS evaluation version)
5. how can you compare something that is free with something that isn't?
in short, your humble opinion plain sucks. Sorry.
It sucks he didn't even have the decency to file a few bugreports (I'm still looking for which card he actually used so we can test it in Knop/Morph and get it fixed for next releases. Audigy's have notoriously been awkward, but they work fine with alsa...)
:)
Autodetecting hardware won't ever be 100% perfect, but without people submitting clueful bugreports, we won't be able to improve much on it. I guess that's the Windows mentality for ya: if it doesn't work, they suck and we shouldn't help them.
Oh, and it's Kanotix, not Knotix. Poor Kano, writing his name wrong while he's been doing quite a good job lately...
Good thing we can hide behind the "It's pre-1.0, stupid!"-argument. Surprised he threw Gentoo with the livecds, then again I would be surprised if he actually completed the install at all
Sorry to break it to ya, but MySQL, Postgres both have C API's, that other languages like PHP use in order to let em young ones (like you) do all their nifty scripting that make them feel all godlike. Get a clue.
Wow, they just described glib2+libxml2! Doesn't it surprise anyone that we'd rather reinvent the wheel than reuse someone elses code? Opensource innovation at it's best!
Yeah, I've got the karma, bring on those blowtorches...
Isn't this the whole idea of F/OSS? Code for yourself, and if you help anyone in the process it's for the better. The motivation for F/OSS shouldn't be to code for others, but first and foremost to code for ones self: any other motivation is secondary.
Yes, do accept patches for features you yourself don't need, but F/OSS is egocentric in nature. This can be seen in larger company-backed F/OSS projects too. We shouldn't be afraid to recognize this motivation, and we surely shouldn't be afraid to defend it. For without this, F/OSS wouldn't be were it is today.
Who needs world domination? I'm perfectly happy with F/OSS as is. If you feel otherwise, don't point to others: roll up your sleeves yourself.
Yeah, I have the karma to burn, bring on those blowtorches
Well, not _exactly_ Knoppix, but we try to keep everything in sync with Knoppix, that's for sure...
:-)
We've gotten to the point where apt-get installing works from the livecd, and where debian packages on a directory on the livecd are installed at boot time, but we're a long way from per-package granularity. I'm not even sure we should go that far, as things get pretty messy with libraries et al. Being able to autobuild and autoinstall knoppix-like livecds is much more fun
The marketing guys wrote it, nuff said.
My biggest gripe with OOo is it's speed. It just feels slow compared to Office on Windows. The loading times are getting better, but imo OOo should be split up, like Mozilla and Firefox. Separate Word processor, Presentation tool, etc.
I was sceptical when I heard of (then) Phoenix, but you can see that the improvements just come a lot faster when you have people focusing on one separate tool instead of on a whole suite. Tried it once, havn't looked back since.
Any ideas?
Have had a Morphix Game-iso for nearly a year now, always was the least-used one. Game livecds are great for the kids or for some quick fun, but rebooting is just too much effort for a quick game.
:)
Included UT2003 and Q3A demos too, Enemy Territory in the last one, was planning UT2004 demo for this one. To be honest even I don't use them much, as you really want a lot of RAM or swap if you want to start ET. Livecds should be small and fast, you don't want to wait a minute for ET to load from cdrom every time