Thank you for summarizing what it is that really irks me about TFA. I know what they're trying to say about some of the quirks/limitations of HTML, but stating that HTML isn't a very good language for making web pages is like saying "English isn't a very good language for writing books in English."
Zope can do impressive things, as Plone and the Boston.com website (runs on Zope) will attest... but it is maddeningly difficult to find decent documentation; at every turn one finds stub "This section still needs to be written" pages, or "This is really sort of out of date; the preferred way to do this is with ZPT, not DTML." (Upon following the ZPT link, you get "This section still needs to be written. In the meantime, try the DTML tutorial.")
Or at least, that was the state of Zope's documentation when I was researching it about 8 months ago. It's really frustrating, because it's clearly a powerful, flexible system, but it seems like most of the docs out there only get as far as talking about how powerful and flexible it is.
That 'BASIC Training' section was the last, sad remnant of a standalone CTW magazine called 'ENTER', which was sort of like a 'Wired for Kids' publication with a much larger programming section than the 3-2-1 Contact 'BASIC Training'. Lots of great computer-related articles, and each month they would publish cool programs submitted by other kids. I always wished I was l337 enough to get one of my BASIC masterpieces in there.
I still remember how sad/betrayed I felt when I read that last issue of ENTER, in which they announced that they were going to cram the entire magazine into about 3 pages of 3-2-1 Contact.::sigh:: I still have all of my copies of ENTER kicking around somewhere (Remember the one with Sting on the cover, when Dune was coming out in the theater?), but there seems to be a surprising dearth of ENTER fan pages online.
Clutter is a novel OS X app that provides a "Browse through your pile of CD's" interface instead of the alphabetized artist/genre list provided by most MP3 players.
It's also handy for grabbing cover art from Amazon or Google Images, and copying it into iTunes.
No Kiosk mode that I know of, though - that sounds like a neat feature.
Is that the spin of the reviewer, or of the book's authors?
Granted, the shitty writing of the stanlee.net 'webisodes' probably would have guaranteed the implosion of the company sooner or later, but before that could happen Stan's cofounder and one of the company execs ran the company into the ground by way of a stock scam.
Stan Lee Media was one of the last hurrahs of the dot com era... I worked there for six months, and managed to cash out my unused vacation and leave about a month before everyone in the company got laid off (right before christmas, that was). I should have known better when I went for my interview; the office was decorated entirely with leftover junk from the failed Marvel Restaurant at Universal Citywalk from a few years before that.
Yes, 'Independence Day' was pretty much mindless enjoyment... I got as far with the 'willing suspension of disbelief thing' as
'Ok, so these aliens are invading earth pretty much for the sheer hell of it, the Fresh Prince is an ace fighter pilot, Lone Starr is the president, and they've just given Cousin Eddie control of a multi-million dollar fighter jet'
But when Jeff Goldblum plugs his Macintosh in the mothership network (good thing those aliens have compatible jacks in their spaceship control panels) and "uploads a virus" to an completely alien operating system written by a species advanced enough to have mastered interstellar travel, I'm not buying it anymore. He must have had a copy of O'Reilly's "Giger-derived Alien Scripting Language In a Nutshell" with him when he went to Area 51.
The producer commentary on the 'Back to the Future' admitted to some mildly bad science... Doc Brown's mispronunciation of the word 'Gigawatt'.
He said something to the effect that nerds everywhere wrote in and pointed out this egregious error after the first film was released, but for the sake of continuity they had to keep using the 'jiggawatt' pronunciation for the rest of the films.
The challenge for 3-D image display isn't blocking the "wrong" images from each eye, it's blocking the wrong images when they're displayed in the same space -- overlaid in a single frame.
This animated GIF technique showed up on Metafilter a couple of weeks ago, and for me it was one of those "Why the hell didn't anyone try this sooner" epiphanies for me. Yes, the constant jitter while flipping between frames gets old, but not nearly as old as straining your eyes with the 'cross-eye' viewing method.
...as long as they don't resort to Register.com/Verisign tactics like fake expiration notices and renewing domains without asking me first.
I do wonder what they have planned for this... with the addition of domain name registration to their list of products I can imagine them introducing some sort of turnkey affiliate web site product.
One thing you don't want to see when browsing domain names:
If you like this domain name, you might also be interested in...
That's a neat idea, although I guess it does lack the local community aspect that I always liked about BBSes. A google for "setting up a telnet BBS system" (without the quotes) leads directly to This page, which looks pretty helpful.
I think a much better (and ready-made) UI for an experiment like this would be a Wiki; if you really want the calendar style navigation you've got the 'RecentChanges' page, but otherwise navigation is much more organic, and from an authoring standpoint it's much more stream of conciousness; creating a new page is as simple as creating a link to it.
I began using a Wiki for my own site a few weeks ago and I like it a lot better than the chronological format that seems to be the standard for "Blogs"; information becomes contextual and meaningful as crosslinks develop between pages. You don't have the compartmentalization that comes with organization by date and/or category.
As an added experiment in meaningful context, I integrated the top five Google search results as sidebar links for each and every Wiki page on my site... sometimes the links aren't really all that related to the page's topic, but most of the time they're dead on. My next plan is to include the top five referring URLs on each page as well, which should get some interesting feedback happening in combination with Google's links.
I lived in Rochester from 1992-96, and one of the only stations I ever listened to was 90.5, WBER
Granted, I've never listened to a lot of radio in general... I always thought a lot of it was crap even before ClearChannel began borging every station in sight. But WBER is an entirely independent station and as such plays a very eclectic mix of music, including local bands. --At least, that's how it was 6 years ago. I haven't listened in a while.
In other words, this is just another case of programmers indulging in a hobby and not really trying to provide users with a genuine, useful. and usable alternative to Windows.
That's right, how dare these people devote their free time to a software project that doesn't directly compete with Windows?! How dare they derive personal enjoyment from the mere act of contributing to an interesting project!
You're right! No middle ground! I hereby call for a boycott of OpenBeOS! While we're at it, let's boycott Sourceforge; there are clearly too many software projects there that aren't meant to compete directly with Microsoft products! All those projects born of niche necessity or pure personal enjoyment... all those programmers indulging in their hobbies... it makes me sick!
Not sure if these are the efforts you're referring to but they're available for some of the more widely used backends (MySQL, Postgres, DB2, ODBC).
Yes, there are arguments to be made against DB abstraction layers if you're using very specific features on one platform that might not be available on another (e.g. Postgres' foreign keys and subselects vs. Mysql's lack of them (er, last time I used MySQL anyway))
But if you're doing fairly run of the mill SQL stuff, check out the PEAR DB class or ADOdb. Either one implements a standard set of methods for interacting with databases regardless of the backend.
Leon Theremin (Lev Sergievitch Termen) actually developed his own version of television at about the same time, but it was appropriated by the Soviet government for surveillance purposes.
No, really. Read this book. Theremin was an interesting guy.
...when my immediate reaction to hearing about a new, potentially very cool bill is to wonder how long it will be before the likes of Adam Schiff tacks on a digital rights management/copy protection rider.
"Astronauts will turn to music and movies for diversion during long space flights... we must act now to prevent rampant IP theft on the space stations and deep space ships of the future!"
Silly, I know... I don't normally wear a tinfoil hat, but nothing suprises me lately.
Reading over these responses I realized what it is that bugs me most about having a reference manual in PDF or some other electronic format versus having a nice book in my lap: I don't have the screen real estate for both a document reader and whatever app it is I'm using the reference for.
The endless jumping between windows gets old real fast, especially if I need to copy a code snippet out of a document (like a PDF) that won't let me select & copy text.
But if I had a second monitor right there at eye level, I could just open up the reference doc there. No more switching between windows, and no more neck strain from constantly looking down at a book in my lap and then up at the screen.
I think a book database could be pretty interesting just as a central ISBN/publisher/year/author reference. (Yes, Google is wonderful, but you never know what context an ISBN match is going to be in; the whole point of having a central resource in consistency.) But then, my wife and I have a living room lined with bookcases, and the bookcases are starting to encroach on our hallway and bedroom too.:)
But you could do some pretty interesting stuff with an IMDB-style book database, at least for fiction. I'm picturing entries for fictional characters and locations, along with birth and death dates, even user-moderated (Wiki?) biographical sketches where available, cross-referenced by author. Instant encyclopedia of Arkham/Castle Rock... cool!
But even outside of a single author's oeuvre, there would be great cross referencing stuff you could do.
Say I read and really liked a detective novel that takes place in Los Angeles in the 1940's. It would be pretty cool to have a reliable database where I could plug in the ISBN of the book I just read, and get a cross-referenced list of other books set in the same time/place/genre - without the busy, sales-oriented "You might also like" mess you get from a site like Amazon.
Maybe include a user comments section, if there's some sort of meta-moderation available - point-missing/inane/poorly written Amazon user reviews instantly send me into a blind rage:)
-Oh, and you could do automated metasearches with the new Google API, too:)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for summarizing what it is that really irks me about TFA. I know what they're trying to say about some of the quirks/limitations of HTML, but stating that HTML isn't a very good language for making web pages is like saying "English isn't a very good language for writing books in English."
Zope can do impressive things, as Plone and the Boston.com website (runs on Zope) will attest... but it is maddeningly difficult to find decent documentation; at every turn one finds stub "This section still needs to be written" pages, or "This is really sort of out of date; the preferred way to do this is with ZPT, not DTML." (Upon following the ZPT link, you get "This section still needs to be written. In the meantime, try the DTML tutorial.")
Or at least, that was the state of Zope's documentation when I was researching it about 8 months ago. It's really frustrating, because it's clearly a powerful, flexible system, but it seems like most of the docs out there only get as far as talking about how powerful and flexible it is.
Perhaps This site will enlighten you. Sheesh.
That 'BASIC Training' section was the last, sad remnant of a standalone CTW magazine called 'ENTER', which was sort of like a 'Wired for Kids' publication with a much larger programming section than the 3-2-1 Contact 'BASIC Training'. Lots of great computer-related articles, and each month they would publish cool programs submitted by other kids. I always wished I was l337 enough to get one of my BASIC masterpieces in there.
::sigh:: I still have all of my copies of ENTER kicking around somewhere (Remember the one with Sting on the cover, when Dune was coming out in the theater?), but there seems to be a surprising dearth of ENTER fan pages online.
I still remember how sad/betrayed I felt when I read that last issue of ENTER, in which they announced that they were going to cram the entire magazine into about 3 pages of 3-2-1 Contact.
Clutter is a novel OS X app that provides a "Browse through your pile of CD's" interface instead of the alphabetized artist/genre list provided by most MP3 players.
It's also handy for grabbing cover art from Amazon or Google Images, and copying it into iTunes.
No Kiosk mode that I know of, though - that sounds like a neat feature.
-Andy
Is that the spin of the reviewer, or of the book's authors?
Granted, the shitty writing of the stanlee.net 'webisodes' probably would have guaranteed the implosion of the company sooner or later, but before that could happen Stan's cofounder and one of the company execs ran the company into the ground by way of a stock scam.
Stan Lee Media was one of the last hurrahs of the dot com era... I worked there for six months, and managed to cash out my unused vacation and leave about a month before everyone in the company got laid off (right before christmas, that was). I should have known better when I went for my interview; the office was decorated entirely with leftover junk from the failed Marvel Restaurant at Universal Citywalk from a few years before that.
Yes, 'Independence Day' was pretty much mindless enjoyment... I got as far with the 'willing suspension of disbelief thing' as
'Ok, so these aliens are invading earth pretty much for the sheer hell of it, the Fresh Prince is an ace fighter pilot, Lone Starr is the president, and they've just given Cousin Eddie control of a multi-million dollar fighter jet'
But when Jeff Goldblum plugs his Macintosh in the mothership network (good thing those aliens have compatible jacks in their spaceship control panels) and "uploads a virus" to an completely alien operating system written by a species advanced enough to have mastered interstellar travel, I'm not buying it anymore. He must have had a copy of O'Reilly's "Giger-derived Alien Scripting Language In a Nutshell" with him when he went to Area 51.
The producer commentary on the 'Back to the Future' admitted to some mildly bad science... Doc Brown's mispronunciation of the word 'Gigawatt'.
He said something to the effect that nerds everywhere wrote in and pointed out this egregious error after the first film was released, but for the sake of continuity they had to keep using the 'jiggawatt' pronunciation for the rest of the films.
This animated GIF technique showed up on Metafilter a couple of weeks ago, and for me it was one of those "Why the hell didn't anyone try this sooner" epiphanies for me. Yes, the constant jitter while flipping between frames gets old, but not nearly as old as straining your eyes with the 'cross-eye' viewing method.
For his next feat he's going to eat Chichester Cathedral.
I do wonder what they have planned for this... with the addition of domain name registration to their list of products I can imagine them introducing some sort of turnkey affiliate web site product.
One thing you don't want to see when browsing domain names:
Who hears the Comic Book Store Guy in my head as I read all of these Lorne Greene corrections?
Worst. Remake. Ever.
That's a neat idea, although I guess it does lack the local community aspect that I always liked about BBSes. A google for "setting up a telnet BBS system" (without the quotes) leads directly to This page, which looks pretty helpful.
-Andy
--------------
http://andy.greyledge.net
Free PHP software and Clawhammer Banjo OGGs
I think a much better (and ready-made) UI for an experiment like this would be a Wiki; if you really want the calendar style navigation you've got the 'RecentChanges' page, but otherwise navigation is much more organic, and from an authoring standpoint it's much more stream of conciousness; creating a new page is as simple as creating a link to it.
I began using a Wiki for my own site a few weeks ago and I like it a lot better than the chronological format that seems to be the standard for "Blogs"; information becomes contextual and meaningful as crosslinks develop between pages. You don't have the compartmentalization that comes with organization by date and/or category.
As an added experiment in meaningful context, I integrated the top five Google search results as sidebar links for each and every Wiki page on my site... sometimes the links aren't really all that related to the page's topic, but most of the time they're dead on. My next plan is to include the top five referring URLs on each page as well, which should get some interesting feedback happening in combination with Google's links.
I lived in Rochester from 1992-96, and one of the only stations I ever listened to was 90.5, WBER
Granted, I've never listened to a lot of radio in general... I always thought a lot of it was crap even before ClearChannel began borging every station in sight. But WBER is an entirely independent station and as such plays a very eclectic mix of music, including local bands. --At least, that's how it was 6 years ago. I haven't listened in a while.
You're right! No middle ground! I hereby call for a boycott of OpenBeOS! While we're at it, let's boycott Sourceforge; there are clearly too many software projects there that aren't meant to compete directly with Microsoft products! All those projects born of niche necessity or pure personal enjoyment... all those programmers indulging in their hobbies... it makes me sick!
In other news, Angus Podgorney just received an order for 48,000,000 kilts from the planet Skyron.
Not sure if these are the efforts you're referring to but they're available for some of the more widely used backends (MySQL, Postgres, DB2, ODBC).
Yes, there are arguments to be made against DB abstraction layers if you're using very specific features on one platform that might not be available on another (e.g. Postgres' foreign keys and subselects vs. Mysql's lack of them (er, last time I used MySQL anyway))
But if you're doing fairly run of the mill SQL stuff, check out the PEAR DB class or ADOdb. Either one implements a standard set of methods for interacting with databases regardless of the backend.
Leon Theremin (Lev Sergievitch Termen) actually developed his own version of television at about the same time, but it was appropriated by the Soviet government for surveillance purposes.
No, really. Read this book. Theremin was an interesting guy.
...when my immediate reaction to hearing about a new, potentially very cool bill is to wonder how long it will be before the likes of Adam Schiff tacks on a digital rights management/copy protection rider.
"Astronauts will turn to music and movies for diversion during long space flights... we must act now to prevent rampant IP theft on the space stations and deep space ships of the future!"
Silly, I know... I don't normally wear a tinfoil hat, but nothing suprises me lately.
Well, I don't think you could actually steal cars in 'Quake Rally', but I'd settle for driving around with a rocket launcher strapped to the roof.
::boom::
::boom::
"Get off the fscking phone, SUV-driving soccer-mom!"
"Use your turn signal, Mercedes-boy!"
Reading over these responses I realized what it is that bugs me most about having a reference manual in PDF or some other electronic format versus having a nice book in my lap: I don't have the screen real estate for both a document reader and whatever app it is I'm using the reference for.
The endless jumping between windows gets old real fast, especially if I need to copy a code snippet out of a document (like a PDF) that won't let me select & copy text.
But if I had a second monitor right there at eye level, I could just open up the reference doc there. No more switching between windows, and no more neck strain from constantly looking down at a book in my lap and then up at the screen.
I think a book database could be pretty interesting just as a central ISBN/publisher/year/author reference. (Yes, Google is wonderful, but you never know what context an ISBN match is going to be in; the whole point of having a central resource in consistency.) But then, my wife and I have a living room lined with bookcases, and the bookcases are starting to encroach on our hallway and bedroom too. :)
:)
:)
But you could do some pretty interesting stuff with an IMDB-style book database, at least for fiction. I'm picturing entries for fictional characters and locations, along with birth and death dates, even user-moderated (Wiki?) biographical sketches where available, cross-referenced by author. Instant encyclopedia of Arkham/Castle Rock... cool!
But even outside of a single author's oeuvre, there would be great cross referencing stuff you could do.
Say I read and really liked a detective novel that takes place in Los Angeles in the 1940's.
It would be pretty cool to have a reliable database where I could plug in the ISBN of the book I just read, and get a cross-referenced list of other books set in the same time/place/genre - without the busy, sales-oriented "You might also like" mess you get from a site like Amazon.
Maybe include a user comments section, if there's some sort of meta-moderation available - point-missing/inane/poorly written Amazon user reviews instantly send me into a blind rage
-Oh, and you could do automated metasearches with the new Google API, too
Ok, if we're going to measure capacity in terms of Human Genomes, I want to know how many Jelly Donut Units per hour it takes to power this thing.
"From the intensity of the flame we can deduce that this was a particularly delicious donut."