People living in coffin 'hotels', doing micro-scale low-revenue high-thoughput business and paying half of what they earn to stay connected to whatever net is hip at the moment. If they're 'richer' they have a container storage somewhere where they keep their stuff. Most of the money won't be payed to own stuff but to have access to things. Homeless will get a new kind of definition. We're seeing societies like this building allready - in Japan for instance, where the cost of living is so high you're a dropout almost as soon as you lose a job. Without the last straw called 'Hartz 4' we'd have the very same situation in germany aswell. In the future it will be very much like in the Novels Neuromancer and Snow Crash in some places.
Any pro level gamer here? Do these mousepads maken a difference with laser mice instead of a piece of cardboard or something? I'd presume modern laser mice really work the exact same on nearly any surface, no?
I've suffered from extreme phobia attacks during a large portion of my teen ages. They are extremely nasty - I know what you are talking about. To all the ones not knowing: they are basically a horror trip without bad drugs. Not that I've ever taken drugs, but I can hardly imagine anything worse than these phobia attacks. I eventually managed to overcome them and now am basically phobia-free. Every once in a while - maybe once in a decade - they return and show a slight effect but since I know how to deal with them they go away quick.
Here's the deal: 1.) You say you are safe in the saddle in the field your studying in and are usually a high profile student. This indicates unconcious psychological stress that has been building unattended at the border to your subconcious and now, in a situation that maybe has changed only slightly for you, surface and rear their ugly head. Double check your biography. Maybe something happend recently, maybe you even just read an article or saw a news report that triggered existencial fear in you and now all of a sudden the sum of all fears (no pun intended) outweighs the self-confidence you've gotten so comfortable with. It sometimes is just that easy. For instance me: Conracts are running dry, no new on the horizon for the last 6 weeks, a good client/friend went broke and allthough it was all only a matter of time and I'm actually doing better than the most people around me I suddenly get the creepies. Check what's going on around you and on your inside and find that dark spot. That will be the first step.
2.) We fear the unknow. It's allways that way. Learn to know the unknow which you fear. If your closing in on your degree and suddenly exams become a serious thing and you lose your cool and break: Practice doing exams! Maybe it really is the time for you to take a deeper insight into the mechanisims of academics and the tough thing they can be. There are countless ords who feel what you feel since the fifth grade. For you it's new. Use you skills and brains to take on the challenge. Some people deal with it by not doing exams and taking a job at McDonalds instead. Maybe you love what you do so much that you fear to lose it if you fail. Here's a secret for you: Academia, no matter how comfortable you felt with it up to now, doesn't care a flying f*ck about wether people love what they do or not. Take this from a guy who's programmed for the largest part of his life and gets weird looks when he applies for admittance at a university only because he doesn't have the german standard A-Levels. No matter how exorbitantly you fail, you'll *allways* be able to do what you love. 10 years from now no one will care how good or bad you passed your exams. Get through with them and do something productive if they're bugging you to much.
3.) There is a science that deals with elementary fears of the unknown. It's called Philosophy. I recommend reading anything from Alan Watts. It was he that ended my phobias instantly. Carnegies "How to stop worrying and start living" is more of the simple kind but very good aswell. It's not one of the best selling books of the entire history of mankind without a reason. If you consider jumping the postive thinking revival hype thats flooding the upper class and academic US right now (so I've heard and read in a current article) I strongly suggest Marie 'Shakti' Gawains all-time classic "Creative Visualisation". It's dirt-cheap, a little more than 100 pages thick and contains everything you'll ever need to know about positive thinking. It's Shakti Gawain and Alan Watts that brought me through some psychologically very tough times.
4.) Exercise, Performing Arts and Zen Buddisim or any mixture of those can help a great deal. They get you in touch with the spiritual world - ofter better and faster than the other solution: religion - and get your brain chemistry back in line. Join a chorus, do some Aikido (doing that myself, great thing that), join a local street-climbing/'urban-ninja'/parcour crew (that's currently the hippest I'd say) o
There's like ten bazillion ways to integrate PHP with Image processing tools like Image Magick just like with any other OSS language. Only more so because the PHP userbase is largest. No need to use some Hack involving Perl. Typo3 (www.typo3.org) uses Image Processing to generate Menubuttons and stuff, there are countless other PHP projects out there doing the same, and it's no sweat at all to start the imagemagick CLI tools (contvert, etc.) including parameters from PHP. 30 lines of code max I'd say. Do you homework and then ask in some PHP forums and mailinglists for sample code. You'll get answers in no time.
Get an ergonomic chair. Get a knee chair if that's your type. Don't get an american knee chair though. Get one of these: http://www.designsforcomfort.com/ The Stokke Duo and the Stokke Wing are both very good. I tried them myself. The Duo has a Boss Chair option that lets you lean back for a change once in a while. Stokke == high end scandinavian quality. Not cheap, but worth it imho.
Yet the best ergonomic chair I know of is a german stool which I actually would get for myself. In my experience the Swopper is the best Back-friendly ergonomic sitting device available. However it costs 600$. You'll have the ultimate Mercedes Benz of polstered stools though. I've heard that they are impossible to break. After sitting on one for a length of time I have to say this one is among the best when doing deskwork.
All in one hardware with minimal cable clutter. Heh. You haven't seen the USB hubs and resulting cable rat-nests and the additional monitor and external speakers and the cat5 Ethernet and the firewire iSight attached to my 12" iBook right here.... Wait a minute, did I just say "firewire iSight"?... There you go. You can see a bit of this post on the screen.... 'Minimal cable clutter',*ts*, my ass.
(That purple thing is the most expensive USB device in the picture, btw. It's a dongle for Lightwave.)
What do you need that OpenOffice doesn't provide?
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Manual Writing Tools?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Or more precisely: What do you need that OpenOffice 2 doesn't provide? You're obviously not into Docbook, because that would be the obvious choice for freaks who want to do their editing in VI/Emacs/Nedit/Jedit. The Blender folks did that with the Blender 2.3 manual. And they hated it. Now they're back to open source word processing. Honestly, if you want ease of use, felxibility and power, I strongly suggest using Open Office 2 and the features it provides, such as indexing, data source linking, DB frontends and Forms, etc. Otherwise - if you are a Browser oriented shop - just use one of the countless wikis or - if you all dig the command line and your favorite editors - continue using XML (Docbook or whatever) but beef up your editors with XML plugins, extensions and macros. It's not that difficult, is it?
"This isn't some critical release patch. This isn't some driver that's long overdue. Microsoft never hand signed a sheet of paper telling me that I would have my copy of "Longhorn" by the end of 2005 or even 2006. It's a new operating system."
"Oooh, de poor little Vista Developers are sooo overworked. Lets give them a break."
No. Wrong. No break. And no extra auto-credit for being MS. I couldn't care less about Vista being delayed or not. But I will take every chance to turn the situation against all legends that cause people to think Computer == Windows. Usability == Doubleclick. Etc.
Reading that essay - from a Vista Guy with a position - gives of one clear message: Vista actually is a bloated weedy mess beyond any measure. And, guess what, making something new or not, the code that makes the unixes so usefull has been programmed allready and is in heavy field use for quite some time now. Somewhere between 10 and 20 years. After 30 years of unix, hardware finally is fast enough to run it on PDAs and cheap Notebooks. What x86 is to architecture - ancient, crazy, nutcase, but good enough for everything, even a Mac, Unix is to OSes - ancient, crazy, nutcase, but good enough for everything, even good enough for a Mac. No, no break. Game over I say. If MS has the guts to burn 10 Billion - 20 Billion on getting a new OS paradigm on to every plattform on the planet and do a good job at the same time they'll maybe make it. But even this late, jumping the OSS bandwagon and burning the cash it takes to take over the whole OSS service, distribution and customization sheebang would be cheaper and have better prospects.
I am a professional freelance webdeveloper at the end of cash resevers with no new deals in sight. It isn't nice, especially with a family and bills to pay. However I know what you're talking of but don't think the technology diversity is a downside. Most people do various technologies for the fun of it. I've done a bazillion different ones in the last 3 years and now I will take the chance and start to focus.
If you don't like switching the technology every odd month - then don't. It's that simple. There are countless OSS solutions out there, one better than the next. Pick one server side and one client side and stick to that. Zope/XUL, Typo3/Flash Java/Java, OpenLaszlo, Joomla/Ajax, Symfony/XHTML... whatever you fancy. Stick to it and specialize and do ALL your stuff from here on down with only that technology. See to it that you join the core team of that project and you've no reason to switch solutions ever again.
I know a webdesigner who does EVERYTHING with ExpressionEngine (a commercial PHP/MySQL Weblog/CMS that's popular amoung designers). It uses some hairbrained Template Level PL for small logic actions. Some more webappy things he does are a total mess and totally destroy the concept of MVC but all the websites he puts out are top notch and easy to operate for his customers. He knows his way around that CMS and customers don't question him.
After years of exploring all the neat and fun OSS webtechnologies and after 3 years freelancing in the field I'm slowly growing old and will bite the bullet and start to focus. Allready I've done a few jobs with Joomla. Since I'm building a larger PHP webapp just now I'll probably chose a PHP CMS to dive into. And since I'm in germany it probably will be Typo3 - allthough I hate the beast.
Bottom line: Specialize and focus. That will bring you further than eternally trying to be the jack of all trades.
I was a little disappointed that we couldn't expand the scope of the test to put stuff like Apache and Squid and mySQL through the paces, but the topic was enterprise administration, not publishing live services.
Oh, so in an monocultured LAN where everybody works with MS Office, Exchange and Outlook Windows is easyer than Linux? Big news.
Who are you trying to fool? The best Windows admins are Linux people because they know that you need to keep Win of the net or patch and tweak it untill everything but the most needed services are turned off. My Windowses run longer than anybody elses and hardware recognition works most of the time. Installing Games and one-click windows software packages is quite easy too. But calling that an easy or secure server is a joke.
As professional freelance web developer, do you program in Java? You seem to have some strongly negative views about Java, OOP and polymorphism. I'm just curious, is this based on first hand experience testing and using Java in your Web applications, or is it based on some other source of information?
I don't have negative views about Java. My first SSI apps where with JSP back when PHP was a little experiment and Cold Fusion was setting the bar. I do have negative views about people thinking that Java is the only possibility for big projects. Which is wrong. Java and also server side Java has it's upsides. For one it's nearly OSS on it's own. It's usefull for client, GUI *and* server and it's plattform independent. You don't get that with any other PL or VM I know of.
Yet RAD for the web is next to impossible in Java. And what about Zope? Sorry, Java may have a solid footage in ERP and stuff like that, because of SAP, BEA and also because it was ready for stuff like that about a decade ago - as you say - but Jahia, Alfresco and likewise aren't really in the headlines that much when it comes to web applications and CM. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Germany we have a regular magazin on Typo3 which is a pure LAMP application. In terms of publications PHP is at least on par with Java - not counting books on Eclipse and PHP/MySQL which both are a league of their own. Nobody said Java is bad, it's just that its not the only way to go anymore. That's what I was saying.
The article is rubbish and/or tells nothing new. Being a professional freelance web developer and familiar with various web technologies I can say this guy has got it all backwards.
1) MySQL is not a full blown database. Big news. Would've you thunk? What this guy aparently just discovered the other day or so others have been aware of for years. I've got more news: Databases in general are pathetic. View logic and transactions just move the problem into the DB and away from the App. They don't really solve it. Object-relational setups and DBs do, but they are still a few years away from widespread use. In that respect Postgres and Oracle are closer to MySQL than to ZopeDB. On top of that, in order to utilize a DB properly you have to know about the problems you'll be facing. And that you learn of best by using flatfiles or it's SQL equivalent: MySQL.
2) PHP is the web generations Basic. Very true. Does it spoil developers? No. The legend of procedural (Basic) coders lost to OOP was spread by academics who were unable to explain OOP in correct terms and context. Meanwhile people wo aren't that arrogant and mix OOP and functional programming whenever they feel like it (Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java).
LAMP isn't the end all of web technologies. Nobody has ever said otherwise without making himself look extremly silly. But LAMP is a viable solution for any project of any size if the enviroment permits using it. The tools and production pipeline are among the most sohpisiticated FOSS programms around. Half of Googles Database is filled with forum postings and tutorials on PHP. DBDesigner, Clay and MySQK Workbench make working with MySQL so easy and fast that Oracle is seriously concerned about it. A bazillion of available FOSS and commercial tools and solutions for PHP are biting huge chunks away from the serverside Java market, pushing it back to where it belongs: The client.
Bottom line: LAMP isn't beautifull or notably advanced. Has never been and probably never will be. But it is: a) Extremely easy to get rolling with. b) Used by the largest amount of stable and mature OSS projects. c) Growing it's featureset and best-pratice compatibility in the same rate the general populace is becoming aware of OOP and what Databases where initially meant for. d) Nearly so widespread it can be considered a monopoly. e) Entirely FOSS. f) A T-Rex-sized Microsoft/Oracle/Macromedia/BEA/[fill in commercial webappserver vendor here] Boogieman.
And that's why it will remain a wide used setup and why that's a good thing.
Many have mentioned Trac/Subversion allready and I second that. For managing Documents I would use Knowledge Tree. The open source version is cool and the professional edition adds in all the stuff managers like.
And I just bought 'Deus Ex' the other day ... :-)
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'SLI On A Stick' Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I just bought the budget edition of 'Deus Ex' the other day. What I really like about it is that I needn't think twice about wether it will run smooth or not. I have an Athlon 2100 XP + and a Geforce 4 Ti 4-something, I can crank up the grafics to full and needn't worry about lag or something. That's allways the more fun way to go IMHO.
Email exists since before the Internet. That's nearly 40 years. There is no other protocol in existance that is so hard to use in an effective manner, because in these decades tons of features have been bolten left right and center. I could've been done right, but effectively in the end Outlook killed of all hope of getting Email to become something halfway usefull at hand.
Transfer sucks, I18n sucks big time, seperation of content and metadata sucks, attachments suck, the somewhere between 5 and 10 encryption standards suck, hashing, threading and signatures suck. User Agents suck. Quoting is so silly it's beyond bizar. Even Crosspoint and the Fidonet was better at that, and that's about 15 years ago. MTAs and Mailservers are so crappy that experts in the field actually consider setups with Exim and Postfix the more usefull ones. Think about that for a minute and tell me how sick is that?
Apache is only about a decade old and it's quirkyness is easy dealt with with a little patience. I've done a lot of things in IT in the last 20 years, including setting up an entire Typo3 enviroment yesterday - and that's a real PITA for a PHP CMS. Yet nothing is on par with suckyness than setting up an email enviroment.
The simple truth is that, for the better of humanity, email has to die. Quickly. A complete redo is what we need. Compulsive hashing with reciepient-keys with asymetric encryption that takes up to half a minute per mail to zero out spam. XML all the way through. Zero hassle standardised encryption. Total seperation of metadata, content and optional design. ONE transfer protocol. ONE encryption standard. ONE full-blown OSS MTA and a fitting OSS recepient-hashkey standard that's easy transferable over the web and human-readable. Non-user-level unique identification of content for indestructable threading and commenting - could be combined with IP6 or something. Merciless enforcement of standards at MTA level. A x-plattform client that makes use of all the goodies in the new standard.
If that would be done - and if it where 'just' by an open source group of enthusiasts - the difference would be so extreme the people would start using it *fast*. And the world would be a measurably better place. Until then Email will remain so crappy that - believe it or not - a thing like Mutt is considered one of the better ways of using it.... Absolutely unbelievable.
... is asking for it, imho. It does nothing to help get the concept of fair use and evil market restriction technologies through to the elder blockheads in politics. I really can't say if I should wish for these guys to be put away or sued to chunky kibbles at least.
But anyway I'd actually try to apply my 1-person-shop strategy if I would be maintaining that much. It may sound crazy for most people but it goes like this:
1) All critical data on central servers. No critical data on workstations, ever.
2) Critical Stuff for MS stored on Unix via Samba (Asuming your using Ethernet and not some Turbo Protokoll I don't know of)
3) A guy responsible for backup including taking this weeks backup home + a standin for him. Both have necessary root access and have specific payd time devoted to maintaining a working backup policy.
4) Automated regular overturning backups (custom shell script) using an PHATT external USB 2/Firewire HDD or, in your case, a few of these (or something simular).
5) A custom polstered Zarges Box or suitcase large enough to carry a backups worth of those around (home/offsite).
Downside: Doesn't use expensive unreliable ancient-technology tape, which, for some bizar and strange reason I really can't fathom, somehow still is the ultimate way to do backups for most people. Ergo: It will be hard to convince management *and* your IT co-workers that this is actually a very good solution.
Upside: Faster, Cheaper, more reliable, easier to recover from, easier to replace/find spare parts and easier to handle than any other solution I know of - or my IT-expert geek friends use for that matter. I have actually managed to recover from backups done that way. And since I've been hearing the some horror stories about tape for almost two decades now - no matter what type of tape - I consider my observation confirmed.
Footnote: I strongly suggest using ext3 as backup filesystem. It's a slowpoke, adding maybe a few hours to your backup, but it's insanely easy to recover from any Unix without having to do panik purchases of strange GUI FS recovery software that require some strange configuration of Win XP + Service Pack 2 and the additional sacrifice of your firstborn child.
Look at your network, do the math and have some shelves built for a few of those external driveboxes. Your critcal stuff can't be more than a 1-digit sum of TBs.
Both are neat. I personally like the runner up better. But both are modern and in a style that I would've used. I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. Linkstyles are broken in Camino, btw.
MS would vault onto end-user level servicing big time. But the most prominent thing that makes this super-fitting is that Ebay as a Web Portal is just as shitty - or even shittier - than the Windows family is as operating systems. The whole smell of Ebay put's it right next to AOL and shady Sharespyjunkware vendors imho.
The Silicon Saxony in East Germany has simular ingredients. Super Cheap real estate, minimum friction bureaucracy. Guess why AMD built Fab36 in Dresden. Same reason Fairchild Semiconductor took a shed in the middle of nowhere in the californian desert and started the whole craze.
It's derived from the dutch way of humorously finding a quick end to a childrens bedtime story quickly. Roughly "... and then came a Elefant streched his snoot and blew the whole story away." The original title (can't remember) had the word 'dream' in it and after Ton told the team the story of the typical ending with the elefant they quickly all agreed on "elefants dream". There was a little discussion wether it would be "elefant's dream" or "elefants dream". Being educated europeans they agreed on the gramatically more plausible version without the apostrophe. These discussions took place on the many Amsterdam downtown 'dinner outs' the Team had during the production.
I was at the premiere in Amsterdam and had a chat with some of the creators at one time or the other. Allthough we all grieve a little over the jerky anims one should keep in mind the following: 1) The timeschedule for a project like this was extremly tight. Remember they didn't have *anything* when they started. Not even a basic plot! 2) They had less experience in film project management than a guy that doesn't do blender all day but watches 'making of's'. Bassam (the director) said that he learned a storyboard and animatics are really important but it's important to move on fast from there on. I could've told him that right away. Then again I don't know a tenth of what Bassam knows about Blender. 3) They got stuck in the middle and took the time for experimenting and redoing animatics, which they, sadly, didn't have. Final anim started to late. Even the extra month they added in the end wasn't enough to give them room to breathe. 4) They didn't prerecord. Very big mistake. One guy said "There was so much emotion in the voices we had to redo some anims". Would've you thunk? Actors can act. It's what they do for a living. *ALLWAYS* prerecord unless you've got an acting director who has the skill to railroad the actors into the anim stance. And even then it's still better to prerecord. 5) Blender was extended with features they needed while they where requesting them *without* having a reference to other packages. All these guys are the elite when it comes to blender. IIRC none of them has any notable experience with any other package. Matt likes to toy around with ZBrush but Andy, for instance, is a 100% Blender guy. Watching him Blendering gives you a good reason why. When he's doing a little doodling in a break at the blender conference there's allways a bunch of people crowded around his workstation looking over his shoulder with amazement. It's absolutely fascinating just to watch this guy work. Then again, whith a feature list beforehand the parallel development of Blender would've gone quicker and features would've even been there before they where requested. 6) The jerky anims are paid of with awesome details that you usually don't notice at first viewing. In fact, one could say that the '2nd unit shots' are the actuall piece of art in this. That fits the lack of experience the Orange team had with larger productions. Bassams mechanical characters just plain rock. That's a fact. 7) AFAIK they where rendering in production which took away some time. Usually you outsource that or another dept. does it. I don't think they used renderplanet, which, if not, they should have. 8) All OSS Tools. Thats the single largest obstacle. The OSS tools are impressive, but OSS NLE and Compositing is just plain no match at all for, let's say, Apple Shake or Digital Fusion. 9) The benefits of compositing only became aware at the beginning of the project and key personell didn't have enough playing time to try things out, imho.
All in all I have to say that I am extremely impressed with the results. As for the semi-finished anims: As it is entirely open, there is no one at all stopping us from reanimating the entire move. The strange background of the story offers countless oportunities to extend the original and the fact that the riggs will be published gives pure animators a chance to show off their skills. Everyone can say: If you don't like it, redo it. A true OSS project indeed. Once again the Blender Community has shown true spirit. Ton and Team Orange rul3Z0Rz!.
I first give my interns and trainees a CLI rundown explaining them the heritage of VI & Emacs and why they are such nutcases in operating and show them ssh, grep, pipes, etc.. Then I move to jEdit. jEdit is used for showing of jDiff, Regexes for search/replace and a bag of other cool jEdit-rules-all features and plugins. If your focus is Java dev'ing I'd make a stop at jEdit but then move on. It's to cool an editor not to check out some features and learn to use it. Anyhow, with java you'll want to move on to an IDE to streamline collaboration, toolkitting and GUI-building, even though editing itself will be worse than with jEdit. Here, of course, you've got two choices, Eclipse and Netbeans. If you're on Linux only add KDE Studio/KDevelop and Erics Python IDE to that. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are top-of-the-line and it's up to personal preference which one you teach.
My rules are: 1) Bash CLI is to cool, usefull, praktical and omnipresent it would be irresponsible not to teach a little of it. 2) It's irresponsable to teach anything other than OSS tools. OSS is better and has more features than most people will ever use. If they wanna go MS afterwards, it's up to them. I (you) warned them.
It's OK of course to give your students a peek if you have a favourite commercial tool - especially if it's Non-MS. IDEA comes to mind as a potential candidate. But don't do that for more of a day or two and not without explaining *why* you think it's fair to shell out money for the tool.
Whatever you do, never forget to warn them of MS and protect your padavans from the dark side, Master Cliff.
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People living in coffin 'hotels', doing micro-scale low-revenue high-thoughput business and paying half of what they earn to stay connected to whatever net is hip at the moment. If they're 'richer' they have a container storage somewhere where they keep their stuff. Most of the money won't be payed to own stuff but to have access to things. Homeless will get a new kind of definition. We're seeing societies like this building allready - in Japan for instance, where the cost of living is so high you're a dropout almost as soon as you lose a job. Without the last straw called 'Hartz 4' we'd have the very same situation in germany aswell. In the future it will be very much like in the Novels Neuromancer and Snow Crash in some places.
Any pro level gamer here? Do these mousepads maken a difference with laser mice instead of a piece of cardboard or something? I'd presume modern laser mice really work the exact same on nearly any surface, no?
I've suffered from extreme phobia attacks during a large portion of my teen ages. They are extremely nasty - I know what you are talking about. To all the ones not knowing: they are basically a horror trip without bad drugs. Not that I've ever taken drugs, but I can hardly imagine anything worse than these phobia attacks. I eventually managed to overcome them and now am basically phobia-free. Every once in a while - maybe once in a decade - they return and show a slight effect but since I know how to deal with them they go away quick.
Here's the deal:
1.) You say you are safe in the saddle in the field your studying in and are usually a high profile student. This indicates unconcious psychological stress that has been building unattended at the border to your subconcious and now, in a situation that maybe has changed only slightly for you, surface and rear their ugly head. Double check your biography. Maybe something happend recently, maybe you even just read an article or saw a news report that triggered existencial fear in you and now all of a sudden the sum of all fears (no pun intended) outweighs the self-confidence you've gotten so comfortable with. It sometimes is just that easy. For instance me: Conracts are running dry, no new on the horizon for the last 6 weeks, a good client/friend went broke and allthough it was all only a matter of time and I'm actually doing better than the most people around me I suddenly get the creepies. Check what's going on around you and on your inside and find that dark spot. That will be the first step.
2.) We fear the unknow. It's allways that way. Learn to know the unknow which you fear. If your closing in on your degree and suddenly exams become a serious thing and you lose your cool and break: Practice doing exams! Maybe it really is the time for you to take a deeper insight into the mechanisims of academics and the tough thing they can be. There are countless ords who feel what you feel since the fifth grade. For you it's new. Use you skills and brains to take on the challenge. Some people deal with it by not doing exams and taking a job at McDonalds instead. Maybe you love what you do so much that you fear to lose it if you fail. Here's a secret for you: Academia, no matter how comfortable you felt with it up to now, doesn't care a flying f*ck about wether people love what they do or not. Take this from a guy who's programmed for the largest part of his life and gets weird looks when he applies for admittance at a university only because he doesn't have the german standard A-Levels. No matter how exorbitantly you fail, you'll *allways* be able to do what you love. 10 years from now no one will care how good or bad you passed your exams. Get through with them and do something productive if they're bugging you to much.
3.) There is a science that deals with elementary fears of the unknown. It's called Philosophy. I recommend reading anything from Alan Watts. It was he that ended my phobias instantly. Carnegies "How to stop worrying and start living" is more of the simple kind but very good aswell. It's not one of the best selling books of the entire history of mankind without a reason. If you consider jumping the postive thinking revival hype thats flooding the upper class and academic US right now (so I've heard and read in a current article) I strongly suggest Marie 'Shakti' Gawains all-time classic "Creative Visualisation". It's dirt-cheap, a little more than 100 pages thick and contains everything you'll ever need to know about positive thinking. It's Shakti Gawain and Alan Watts that brought me through some psychologically very tough times.
4.) Exercise, Performing Arts and Zen Buddisim or any mixture of those can help a great deal. They get you in touch with the spiritual world - ofter better and faster than the other solution: religion - and get your brain chemistry back in line. Join a chorus, do some Aikido (doing that myself, great thing that), join a local street-climbing/'urban-ninja'/parcour crew (that's currently the hippest I'd say) o
There's like ten bazillion ways to integrate PHP with Image processing tools like Image Magick just like with any other OSS language. Only more so because the PHP userbase is largest. No need to use some Hack involving Perl. Typo3 (www.typo3.org) uses Image Processing to generate Menubuttons and stuff, there are countless other PHP projects out there doing the same, and it's no sweat at all to start the imagemagick CLI tools (contvert, etc.) including parameters from PHP. 30 lines of code max I'd say. Do you homework and then ask in some PHP forums and mailinglists for sample code. You'll get answers in no time.
Get an ergonomic chair. Get a knee chair if that's your type. Don't get an american knee chair though. Get one of these: http://www.designsforcomfort.com/ The Stokke Duo and the Stokke Wing are both very good. I tried them myself. The Duo has a Boss Chair option that lets you lean back for a change once in a while. Stokke == high end scandinavian quality. Not cheap, but worth it imho.
Yet the best ergonomic chair I know of is a german stool which I actually would get for myself. In my experience the Swopper is the best Back-friendly ergonomic sitting device available. However it costs 600$. You'll have the ultimate Mercedes Benz of polstered stools though. I've heard that they are impossible to break. After sitting on one for a length of time I have to say this one is among the best when doing deskwork.
All in one hardware with minimal cable clutter. ... Wait a minute, did I just say "firewire iSight"? ... There you go. You can see a bit of this post on the screen. ... 'Minimal cable clutter' ,*ts*, my ass.
Heh. You haven't seen the USB hubs and resulting cable rat-nests and the additional monitor and external speakers and the cat5 Ethernet and the firewire iSight attached to my 12" iBook right here.
(That purple thing is the most expensive USB device in the picture, btw. It's a dongle for Lightwave.)
Or more precisely: What do you need that OpenOffice 2 doesn't provide? You're obviously not into Docbook, because that would be the obvious choice for freaks who want to do their editing in VI/Emacs/Nedit/Jedit. The Blender folks did that with the Blender 2.3 manual. And they hated it. Now they're back to open source word processing.
Honestly, if you want ease of use, felxibility and power, I strongly suggest using Open Office 2 and the features it provides, such as indexing, data source linking, DB frontends and Forms, etc. Otherwise - if you are a Browser oriented shop - just use one of the countless wikis or - if you all dig the command line and your favorite editors - continue using XML (Docbook or whatever) but beef up your editors with XML plugins, extensions and macros. It's not that difficult, is it?
"This isn't some critical release patch. This isn't some driver that's long overdue. Microsoft never hand signed a sheet of paper telling me that I would have my copy of "Longhorn" by the end of 2005 or even 2006. It's a new operating system."
"Oooh, de poor little Vista Developers are sooo overworked. Lets give them a break."
No. Wrong. No break. And no extra auto-credit for being MS. I couldn't care less about Vista being delayed or not. But I will take every chance to turn the situation against all legends that cause people to think Computer == Windows. Usability == Doubleclick. Etc.
Reading that essay - from a Vista Guy with a position - gives of one clear message: Vista actually is a bloated weedy mess beyond any measure. And, guess what, making something new or not, the code that makes the unixes so usefull has been programmed allready and is in heavy field use for quite some time now. Somewhere between 10 and 20 years. After 30 years of unix, hardware finally is fast enough to run it on PDAs and cheap Notebooks. What x86 is to architecture - ancient, crazy, nutcase, but good enough for everything, even a Mac, Unix is to OSes - ancient, crazy, nutcase, but good enough for everything, even good enough for a Mac.
No, no break. Game over I say.
If MS has the guts to burn 10 Billion - 20 Billion on getting a new OS paradigm on to every plattform on the planet and do a good job at the same time they'll maybe make it. But even this late, jumping the OSS bandwagon and burning the cash it takes to take over the whole OSS service, distribution and customization sheebang would be cheaper and have better prospects.
I'm just having that image of Arthur fighting against the Black Knight.
"Let's call it a tie."
Very funny indeed.
And exactly what technology is outdated? PHP compared to Ruby or what?
Then why is rubyonrails.org running on PHP I ask?
Slashdot just got a refreshing update, has an ever growing featureset and that beast runs on Perl and MySQL.
No, I think you've got it wrong. As long as it's a live OSS soltion it will never fall back far behind the current techtrend.
I am a professional freelance webdeveloper at the end of cash resevers with no new deals in sight. It isn't nice, especially with a family and bills to pay. However I know what you're talking of but don't think the technology diversity is a downside. Most people do various technologies for the fun of it. I've done a bazillion different ones in the last 3 years and now I will take the chance and start to focus.
... whatever you fancy. Stick to it and specialize and do ALL your stuff from here on down with only that technology. See to it that you join the core team of that project and you've no reason to switch solutions ever again.
If you don't like switching the technology every odd month - then don't. It's that simple. There are countless OSS solutions out there, one better than the next. Pick one server side and one client side and stick to that. Zope/XUL, Typo3/Flash Java/Java, OpenLaszlo, Joomla/Ajax, Symfony/XHTML
I know a webdesigner who does EVERYTHING with ExpressionEngine (a commercial PHP/MySQL Weblog/CMS that's popular amoung designers). It uses some hairbrained Template Level PL for small logic actions. Some more webappy things he does are a total mess and totally destroy the concept of MVC but all the websites he puts out are top notch and easy to operate for his customers. He knows his way around that CMS and customers don't question him.
After years of exploring all the neat and fun OSS webtechnologies and after 3 years freelancing in the field I'm slowly growing old and will bite the bullet and start to focus. Allready I've done a few jobs with Joomla. Since I'm building a larger PHP webapp just now I'll probably chose a PHP CMS to dive into. And since I'm in germany it probably will be Typo3 - allthough I hate the beast.
Bottom line: Specialize and focus. That will bring you further than eternally trying to be the jack of all trades.
I was a little disappointed that we couldn't expand the scope of the test to put stuff like Apache and Squid and mySQL through the paces, but the topic was enterprise administration, not publishing live services.
Oh, so in an monocultured LAN where everybody works with MS Office, Exchange and Outlook Windows is easyer than Linux?
Big news.
Who are you trying to fool? The best Windows admins are Linux people because they know that you need to keep Win of the net or patch and tweak it untill everything but the most needed services are turned off. My Windowses run longer than anybody elses and hardware recognition works most of the time. Installing Games and one-click windows software packages is quite easy too. But calling that an easy or secure server is a joke.
As professional freelance web developer, do you program in Java? You seem to have some strongly negative views about Java, OOP and polymorphism. I'm just curious, is this based on first hand experience testing and using Java in your Web applications, or is it based on some other source of information?
I don't have negative views about Java. My first SSI apps where with JSP back when PHP was a little experiment and Cold Fusion was setting the bar. I do have negative views about people thinking that Java is the only possibility for big projects. Which is wrong. Java and also server side Java has it's upsides. For one it's nearly OSS on it's own. It's usefull for client, GUI *and* server and it's plattform independent. You don't get that with any other PL or VM I know of.
Yet RAD for the web is next to impossible in Java. And what about Zope? Sorry, Java may have a solid footage in ERP and stuff like that, because of SAP, BEA and also because it was ready for stuff like that about a decade ago - as you say - but Jahia, Alfresco and likewise aren't really in the headlines that much when it comes to web applications and CM. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Germany we have a regular magazin on Typo3 which is a pure LAMP application. In terms of publications PHP is at least on par with Java - not counting books on Eclipse and PHP/MySQL which both are a league of their own. Nobody said Java is bad, it's just that its not the only way to go anymore. That's what I was saying.
The article is rubbish and/or tells nothing new.
Being a professional freelance web developer and familiar with various web technologies I can say this guy has got it all backwards.
1) MySQL is not a full blown database. Big news. Would've you thunk? What this guy aparently just discovered the other day or so others have been aware of for years.
I've got more news: Databases in general are pathetic. View logic and transactions just move the problem into the DB and away from the App. They don't really solve it. Object-relational setups and DBs do, but they are still a few years away from widespread use. In that respect Postgres and Oracle are closer to MySQL than to ZopeDB. On top of that, in order to utilize a DB properly you have to know about the problems you'll be facing. And that you learn of best by using flatfiles or it's SQL equivalent: MySQL.
2) PHP is the web generations Basic. Very true. Does it spoil developers? No. The legend of procedural (Basic) coders lost to OOP was spread by academics who were unable to explain OOP in correct terms and context. Meanwhile people wo aren't that arrogant and mix OOP and functional programming whenever they feel like it (Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java).
LAMP isn't the end all of web technologies. Nobody has ever said otherwise without making himself look extremly silly. But LAMP is a viable solution for any project of any size if the enviroment permits using it. The tools and production pipeline are among the most sohpisiticated FOSS programms around. Half of Googles Database is filled with forum postings and tutorials on PHP. DBDesigner, Clay and MySQK Workbench make working with MySQL so easy and fast that Oracle is seriously concerned about it. A bazillion of available FOSS and commercial tools and solutions for PHP are biting huge chunks away from the serverside Java market, pushing it back to where it belongs: The client.
Bottom line:
LAMP isn't beautifull or notably advanced. Has never been and probably never will be.
But it is:
a) Extremely easy to get rolling with.
b) Used by the largest amount of stable and mature OSS projects.
c) Growing it's featureset and best-pratice compatibility in the same rate the general populace is becoming aware of OOP and what Databases where initially meant for.
d) Nearly so widespread it can be considered a monopoly.
e) Entirely FOSS.
f) A T-Rex-sized Microsoft/Oracle/Macromedia/BEA/[fill in commercial webappserver vendor here] Boogieman.
And that's why it will remain a wide used setup and why that's a good thing.
Many have mentioned Trac/Subversion allready and I second that.
For managing Documents I would use Knowledge Tree. The open source version is cool and the professional edition adds in all the stuff managers like.
I just bought the budget edition of 'Deus Ex' the other day. What I really like about it is that I needn't think twice about wether it will run smooth or not. I have an Athlon 2100 XP + and a Geforce 4 Ti 4-something, I can crank up the grafics to full and needn't worry about lag or something.
That's allways the more fun way to go IMHO.
Email exists since before the Internet. That's nearly 40 years. There is no other protocol in existance that is so hard to use in an effective manner, because in these decades tons of features have been bolten left right and center. I could've been done right, but effectively in the end Outlook killed of all hope of getting Email to become something halfway usefull at hand.
... Absolutely unbelievable.
Transfer sucks, I18n sucks big time, seperation of content and metadata sucks, attachments suck, the somewhere between 5 and 10 encryption standards suck, hashing, threading and signatures suck. User Agents suck. Quoting is so silly it's beyond bizar. Even Crosspoint and the Fidonet was better at that, and that's about 15 years ago. MTAs and Mailservers are so crappy that experts in the field actually consider setups with Exim and Postfix the more usefull ones. Think about that for a minute and tell me how sick is that?
Apache is only about a decade old and it's quirkyness is easy dealt with with a little patience. I've done a lot of things in IT in the last 20 years, including setting up an entire Typo3 enviroment yesterday - and that's a real PITA for a PHP CMS. Yet nothing is on par with suckyness than setting up an email enviroment.
The simple truth is that, for the better of humanity, email has to die. Quickly.
A complete redo is what we need. Compulsive hashing with reciepient-keys with asymetric encryption that takes up to half a minute per mail to zero out spam. XML all the way through. Zero hassle standardised encryption. Total seperation of metadata, content and optional design. ONE transfer protocol. ONE encryption standard. ONE full-blown OSS MTA and a fitting OSS recepient-hashkey standard that's easy transferable over the web and human-readable. Non-user-level unique identification of content for indestructable threading and commenting - could be combined with IP6 or something. Merciless enforcement of standards at MTA level. A x-plattform client that makes use of all the goodies in the new standard.
If that would be done - and if it where 'just' by an open source group of enthusiasts - the difference would be so extreme the people would start using it *fast*. And the world would be a measurably better place.
Until then Email will remain so crappy that - believe it or not - a thing like Mutt is considered one of the better ways of using it.
My 2 cents.
... is asking for it, imho. It does nothing to help get the concept of fair use and evil market restriction technologies through to the elder blockheads in politics.
I really can't say if I should wish for these guys to be put away or sued to chunky kibbles at least.
But anyway I'd actually try to apply my 1-person-shop strategy if I would be maintaining that much.
It may sound crazy for most people but it goes like this:
1) All critical data on central servers. No critical data on workstations, ever.
2) Critical Stuff for MS stored on Unix via Samba (Asuming your using Ethernet and not some Turbo Protokoll I don't know of)
3) A guy responsible for backup including taking this weeks backup home + a standin for him. Both have necessary root access and have specific payd time devoted to maintaining a working backup policy.
4) Automated regular overturning backups (custom shell script) using an PHATT external USB 2/Firewire HDD or, in your case, a few of these (or something simular).
5) A custom polstered Zarges Box or suitcase large enough to carry a backups worth of those around (home/offsite).
Downside: Doesn't use expensive unreliable ancient-technology tape, which, for some bizar and strange reason I really can't fathom, somehow still is the ultimate way to do backups for most people. Ergo: It will be hard to convince management *and* your IT co-workers that this is actually a very good solution.
Upside: Faster, Cheaper, more reliable, easier to recover from, easier to replace/find spare parts and easier to handle than any other solution I know of - or my IT-expert geek friends use for that matter. I have actually managed to recover from backups done that way. And since I've been hearing the some horror stories about tape for almost two decades now - no matter what type of tape - I consider my observation confirmed.
Footnote: I strongly suggest using ext3 as backup filesystem. It's a slowpoke, adding maybe a few hours to your backup, but it's insanely easy to recover from any Unix without having to do panik purchases of strange GUI FS recovery software that require some strange configuration of Win XP + Service Pack 2 and the additional sacrifice of your firstborn child.
Look at your network, do the math and have some shelves built for a few of those external driveboxes. Your critcal stuff can't be more than a 1-digit sum of TBs.
My 2 cents.
Both are neat. I personally like the runner up better. But both are modern and in a style that I would've used. I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. Linkstyles are broken in Camino, btw.
MS would vault onto end-user level servicing big time. But the most prominent thing that makes this super-fitting is that Ebay as a Web Portal is just as shitty - or even shittier - than the Windows family is as operating systems. The whole smell of Ebay put's it right next to AOL and shady Sharespyjunkware vendors imho.
The Silicon Saxony in East Germany has simular ingredients. Super Cheap real estate, minimum friction bureaucracy. Guess why AMD built Fab36 in Dresden. Same reason Fairchild Semiconductor took a shed in the middle of nowhere in the californian desert and started the whole craze.
It's derived from the dutch way of humorously finding a quick end to a childrens bedtime story quickly. Roughly "... and then came a Elefant streched his snoot and blew the whole story away." The original title (can't remember) had the word 'dream' in it and after Ton told the team the story of the typical ending with the elefant they quickly all agreed on "elefants dream". There was a little discussion wether it would be "elefant's dream" or "elefants dream". Being educated europeans they agreed on the gramatically more plausible version without the apostrophe. These discussions took place on the many Amsterdam downtown 'dinner outs' the Team had during the production.
I was at the premiere in Amsterdam and had a chat with some of the creators at one time or the other. Allthough we all grieve a little over the jerky anims one should keep in mind the following:
1) The timeschedule for a project like this was extremly tight. Remember they didn't have *anything* when they started. Not even a basic plot!
2) They had less experience in film project management than a guy that doesn't do blender all day but watches 'making of's'. Bassam (the director) said that he learned a storyboard and animatics are really important but it's important to move on fast from there on. I could've told him that right away. Then again I don't know a tenth of what Bassam knows about Blender.
3) They got stuck in the middle and took the time for experimenting and redoing animatics, which they, sadly, didn't have. Final anim started to late. Even the extra month they added in the end wasn't enough to give them room to breathe.
4) They didn't prerecord. Very big mistake. One guy said "There was so much emotion in the voices we had to redo some anims". Would've you thunk? Actors can act. It's what they do for a living. *ALLWAYS* prerecord unless you've got an acting director who has the skill to railroad the actors into the anim stance. And even then it's still better to prerecord.
5) Blender was extended with features they needed while they where requesting them *without* having a reference to other packages. All these guys are the elite when it comes to blender. IIRC none of them has any notable experience with any other package. Matt likes to toy around with ZBrush but Andy, for instance, is a 100% Blender guy. Watching him Blendering gives you a good reason why. When he's doing a little doodling in a break at the blender conference there's allways a bunch of people crowded around his workstation looking over his shoulder with amazement. It's absolutely fascinating just to watch this guy work. Then again, whith a feature list beforehand the parallel development of Blender would've gone quicker and features would've even been there before they where requested.
6) The jerky anims are paid of with awesome details that you usually don't notice at first viewing. In fact, one could say that the '2nd unit shots' are the actuall piece of art in this. That fits the lack of experience the Orange team had with larger productions. Bassams mechanical characters just plain rock. That's a fact.
7) AFAIK they where rendering in production which took away some time. Usually you outsource that or another dept. does it. I don't think they used renderplanet, which, if not, they should have.
8) All OSS Tools. Thats the single largest obstacle. The OSS tools are impressive, but OSS NLE and Compositing is just plain no match at all for, let's say, Apple Shake or Digital Fusion.
9) The benefits of compositing only became aware at the beginning of the project and key personell didn't have enough playing time to try things out, imho.
All in all I have to say that I am extremely impressed with the results. As for the semi-finished anims: As it is entirely open, there is no one at all stopping us from reanimating the entire move. The strange background of the story offers countless oportunities to extend the original and the fact that the riggs will be published gives pure animators a chance to show off their skills. Everyone can say: If you don't like it, redo it. A true OSS project indeed. Once again the Blender Community has shown true spirit. Ton and Team Orange rul3Z0Rz!.
I first give my interns and trainees a CLI rundown explaining them the heritage of VI & Emacs and why they are such nutcases in operating and show them ssh, grep, pipes, etc.. Then I move to jEdit. jEdit is used for showing of jDiff, Regexes for search/replace and a bag of other cool jEdit-rules-all features and plugins. If your focus is Java dev'ing I'd make a stop at jEdit but then move on. It's to cool an editor not to check out some features and learn to use it. Anyhow, with java you'll want to move on to an IDE to streamline collaboration, toolkitting and GUI-building, even though editing itself will be worse than with jEdit. Here, of course, you've got two choices, Eclipse and Netbeans. If you're on Linux only add KDE Studio/KDevelop and Erics Python IDE to that.
Both Eclipse and Netbeans are top-of-the-line and it's up to personal preference which one you teach.
My rules are:
1) Bash CLI is to cool, usefull, praktical and omnipresent it would be irresponsible not to teach a little of it.
2) It's irresponsable to teach anything other than OSS tools. OSS is better and has more features than most people will ever use. If they wanna go MS afterwards, it's up to them. I (you) warned them.
It's OK of course to give your students a peek if you have a favourite commercial tool - especially if it's Non-MS. IDEA comes to mind as a potential candidate. But don't do that for more of a day or two and not without explaining *why* you think it's fair to shell out money for the tool.
Whatever you do, never forget to warn them of MS and protect your padavans from the dark side, Master Cliff.