What are the best places to find information about this sort of thing? In another few weeks, I would really like to set up a dial-in/firewall box to allow 4 different locations to share a WAN through ISDN connections, with occasional regular modem dial-in if I can manage it.
I don't expect any problems setting up the firewall part, but the ISDN part is really bothering me. I've considered using a pair of routers (Netgear, Ascend, etc), a pair of ISDN "modem"s (Impact IQ), or an internal card (Spellcaster). I've had extensive problems with cheap unattended routers in the past, and trying to run 256Kbps through serial ports bothers me. On the other hand, I can't find *anyone* who sell the frigging cards. Lots of *manufacturers*, yes, but no pricing or sales info unless I call (and that only worked for Spellcaster, nobody else has called back). Plus, the cards appear to be twice as expensive as the routers and "modem"s, which makes no sense to me.
This would make a great HOWTO, I think. If I manage it, I'll write one.
1. "Voting Parties": Vote coercion/buying is possible if a binding vote can be submitted from anyplace that isn't guaranteed private.
2. "Hacking/Spoofing Votes": Someone could crack the security of the system, and alter votes or submit votes for other people.
One possible solution: Don't make the online votes binding. Still require a voter to show up at a polling station and verify their choice. They could submit multiple votes, if they liked, and then check off the one they really meant while in guaranteed privacy. If their real choice was altered or removed, or if they were flooded with fake votes, or if they just didn't or couldn't vote online, they could re-vote while at the station.
If they still have to go to the station, why bother allow online submission? To make things easier. In the (hopefully) normal case, you would simply go in to sign off on your single submitted vote. You could take as much time as you wanted to make your decision. If the system allowed, say, preferential ranking, you wouldn't have to memorize your choices. The voting "interface" could provide ample data and handholding. Changed your mind? Vote again, and choose that vote at the station.
It's not "whitespace-sensitive", it just cares about consistent indentation. Apart from that, you can play with whitespace all you want.
The only place I've seen Python code get munged this way is on Slashdot, since you can't PRE, and I was able to whip up a Python script to get around that problem very easily.
Of course, if you need an excuse to limit your toolbox, calling it "whitespace-sensitive" is as good as any.
The significant scarce Net resource is eyeballs. Other people's attention. An audience/community.
That's why Yahoo and Amazon have such stunning stock prices, and why the Slashdot effect exists. Domain name scarcity is only a corollary - after all, you could always register y79grh0.com, or even do without! All you really need is an IP address, unless you care about people finding and remembering your site. Net "real estate" is exactly as valuable as the number of people who will visit it regularly.
Bandwidth and host capacity are considerations, of course, but only if you're popular, which ought to pay the necessary bills through ads, etc. There's no direct analogy to gentrification of neighborhoods driving people out, since the costs of becoming a "high-rent district" are directly coupled to income opportunity.
I realize that this is obvious to a lot of you, but Jon and others seemed distracted by the bogus idea of spacial scarcity (congestion/real estate).
Obvious problems with relative ratings (moderators add or subtract points from a score) have been mentioned by others. Absolute ratings (moderators vote for a rating in some scale) have advantages which haven't been mentioned, though. If each moderator rates articles on a scale from -3 to +3 (say), then it is possible to
1) Filter/sort articles based not only on some average score, but on the actual distribution of scores. High sigma (lots of -3 and lots of +3) may indicate an interesting but controversial post, while a cluster at zero indicates that nobody cared much about the post at all. Lots of geeks here; Many of us might enjoy dinking our personal "interest formula":~)
2) Maintain a vector of weights for how well my tastes line up with each moderator, by allowing me to rate posts myself and adjusting the weighting of each moderator by the difference between my choice and theirs.
I've been using the predecessor of its ZServer component (called Bobo ) for quite a while. It's an excellent way to do fairly sophisticated CGI in a very nice language (Python) without a lot of fuss. Right now I'm gearing up to move everything over to full Zope, which I expect will make my life a great deal easier, what with the web-based management, sessions, database connectors, and pre-built application components.
There seems to be a deep, peculiar mental dividing line among programmers which is highlighted by the contrasts of Perl and Python. The two languages are actually very similar; Both are free, widely ported, easily expandable and embeddable. Both have good standard libraries, powerful dynamic built-in datatypes and OO features.
Perl has C-ish syntax, with extensive use of non-alphanumeric characters. Python has more Pascal-ish syntax, apart from the use of indentation for blocks. This is where the divide shows itself; On the one hand there are programmers (such as myself) who find Perl and C very ugly and hard to read, while Python seems totally clear and natural. On the other hand, there are programmers who find Perl to be clear and natural, and Python's indentation too weird to be endured.
No amount of advocacy is going to convince coders on either side of this line to switch. It's completely a matter of taste. If having both seems like unnecessary division or duplication of effort, remember that "there's more than one way to do it".
Taste shouldn't lead to disinformation, though. I'm rather annoyed by those people who don't merely dislike Python's syntactic indentation, but start (incorrectly) comparing it to COBOL or moaning about how fragile the whitespace is and how tabs and spaces don't mix well. For anyone who uses Python regularly, these are non-problems; We simply don't mix tabs and spaces, and don't use tools which muck up leading whitespace. The only trouble I've *ever* had was in posting code to Slashdot, and a quick script elsewhere in this thread fixed that.
I was led astray by the behavior of Netscape and IE; Sorry. Here's another go:
slashpost.py ''' Here's a little script which formats indented code for posting on Slashdot (where <PRE> doesn't work). It is being used on itself, via:
python slashpost.py slashpost.py
Far shorter and less simple-minded than my first shot at this. ''' import cgi, fileinput from string import expandtabs, replace
for line in fileinput.input(): if fileinput.isfirstline(): print '<STRONG>'+fileinput.filename()+'</STRONG><BR>' # Trim newline, convert tabs to spaces, escape &s and <s if line[-1]=='\n': line = line[:-1] line = cgi.escape(expandtabs(line, 8)) # Make hard spaces and line breaks print replace(line, '', ' ')+'<BR>'
Slashdot Mirror
What are the best places to find information about this sort of thing? In another few weeks, I would really like to set up a dial-in/firewall box to allow 4 different locations to share a WAN through ISDN connections, with occasional regular modem dial-in if I can manage it.
I don't expect any problems setting up the firewall part, but the ISDN part is really bothering me. I've considered using a pair of routers (Netgear, Ascend, etc), a pair of ISDN "modem"s (Impact IQ), or an internal card (Spellcaster). I've had extensive problems with cheap unattended routers in the past, and trying to run 256Kbps through serial ports bothers me. On the other hand, I can't find *anyone* who sell the frigging cards. Lots of *manufacturers*, yes, but no pricing or sales info unless I call (and that only worked for Spellcaster, nobody else has called back). Plus, the cards appear to be twice as expensive as the routers and "modem"s, which makes no sense to me.
This would make a great HOWTO, I think. If I manage it, I'll write one.
What *about* lists vs. tuples? Tuples are read-only lists, and exist for performance reasons and to use as hash keys.
List slicing is based on the gaps between elements, and works the same in either slot.
Functions and lambdas require all variables to be brought into the namespace explicitly. Lexical scoping may be introduced soon.
Were you bitten by a Python when you were little, or what?
Two major objections to online voting:
1. "Voting Parties": Vote coercion/buying is possible if a binding vote can be submitted from anyplace that isn't guaranteed private.
2. "Hacking/Spoofing Votes": Someone could crack the security of the system, and alter votes or submit votes for other people.
One possible solution: Don't make the online votes binding. Still require a voter to show up at a polling station and verify their choice. They could submit multiple votes, if they liked, and then check off the one they really meant while in guaranteed privacy. If their real choice was altered or removed, or if they were flooded with fake votes, or if they just didn't or couldn't vote online, they could re-vote while at the station.
If they still have to go to the station, why bother allow online submission? To make things easier. In the (hopefully) normal case, you would simply go in to sign off on your single submitted vote. You could take as much time as you wanted to make your decision. If the system allowed, say, preferential ranking, you wouldn't have to memorize your choices. The voting "interface" could provide ample data and handholding. Changed your mind? Vote again, and choose that vote at the station.
Simple, yes?
It's not "whitespace-sensitive", it just cares about consistent indentation. Apart from that, you can play with whitespace all you want.
The only place I've seen Python code get munged this way is on Slashdot, since you can't PRE, and I was able to whip up a Python script to get around that problem very easily.
Of course, if you need an excuse to limit your toolbox, calling it "whitespace-sensitive" is as good as any.
The significant scarce Net resource is eyeballs. Other people's attention. An audience/community.
That's why Yahoo and Amazon have such stunning stock prices, and why the Slashdot effect exists. Domain name scarcity is only a corollary - after all, you could always register y79grh0.com, or even do without! All you really need is an IP address, unless you care about people finding and remembering your site. Net "real estate" is exactly as valuable as the number of people who will visit it regularly.
Bandwidth and host capacity are considerations, of course, but only if you're popular, which ought to pay the necessary bills through ads, etc. There's no direct analogy to gentrification of neighborhoods driving people out, since the costs of becoming a "high-rent district" are directly coupled to income opportunity.
I realize that this is obvious to a lot of you, but Jon and others seemed distracted by the bogus idea of spacial scarcity (congestion/real estate).
Obvious problems with relative ratings (moderators add or subtract points from a score) have been mentioned by others. Absolute ratings (moderators vote for a rating in some scale) have advantages which haven't been mentioned, though. If each moderator rates articles on a scale from -3 to +3 (say), then it is possible to
:~)
1) Filter/sort articles based not only on some average score, but on the actual distribution of scores. High sigma (lots of -3 and lots of +3) may indicate an interesting but controversial post, while a cluster at zero indicates that nobody cared much about the post at all. Lots of geeks here; Many of us might enjoy dinking our personal "interest formula"
2) Maintain a vector of weights for how well my tastes line up with each moderator, by allowing me to rate posts myself and adjusting the weighting of each moderator by the difference between my choice and theirs.
I've been using the predecessor of its ZServer component (called Bobo ) for quite a while. It's an excellent way to do fairly sophisticated CGI in a very nice language (Python) without a lot of fuss. Right now I'm gearing up to move everything over to full Zope, which I expect will make my life a great deal easier, what with the web-based management, sessions, database connectors, and pre-built application components.
There seems to be a deep, peculiar mental dividing line among programmers which is highlighted by the contrasts of Perl and Python. The two languages are actually very similar; Both are free, widely ported, easily expandable and embeddable. Both have good standard libraries, powerful dynamic built-in datatypes and OO features.
Perl has C-ish syntax, with extensive use of non-alphanumeric characters. Python has more Pascal-ish syntax, apart from the use of indentation for blocks. This is where the divide shows itself; On the one hand there are programmers (such as myself) who find Perl and C very ugly and hard to read, while Python seems totally clear and natural. On the other hand, there are programmers who find Perl to be clear and natural, and Python's indentation too weird to be endured.
No amount of advocacy is going to convince coders on either side of this line to switch. It's completely a matter of taste. If having both seems like unnecessary division or duplication of effort, remember that "there's more than one way to do it".
Taste shouldn't lead to disinformation, though. I'm rather annoyed by those people who don't merely dislike Python's syntactic indentation, but start (incorrectly) comparing it to COBOL or moaning about how fragile the whitespace is and how tabs and spaces don't mix well. For anyone who uses Python regularly, these are non-problems; We simply don't mix tabs and spaces, and don't use tools which muck up leading whitespace. The only trouble I've *ever* had was in posting code to Slashdot, and a quick script elsewhere in this thread fixed that.
I was led astray by the behavior of Netscape and IE; Sorry. Here's another go:
slashpost.py'''
Here's a little script which formats indented code
for posting on Slashdot (where <PRE> doesn't work).
It is being used on itself, via:
python slashpost.py slashpost.py
Far shorter and less simple-minded than my first shot at this.
'''
import cgi, fileinput
from string import expandtabs, replace
for line in fileinput.input():
if fileinput.isfirstline():
print '<STRONG>'+fileinput.filename()+'</STRONG><BR>'
# Trim newline, convert tabs to spaces, escape &s and <s
if line[-1]=='\n':
line = line[:-1]
line = cgi.escape(expandtabs(line, 8))
# Make hard spaces and line breaks
print replace(line, '', ' ')+'<BR>'