Why the heck would I want to download a Netflix video to my hard drive? It would just fill it up. I can stream Netflix movies to my appleTV or iPad, so the only reason I might download something is if I wanted to watch it when I was going to be disconnected.
Netflix has made piracy unnecessary by making so much great content available for a reasonable rate... there's no reason to protect against it anymore, since Netflix is a more convenient way of watching the content than any pirate collection of videos. They've won. Just like being able to buy audio tracks means I no longer have to go to pirate sites to try to find music I like. Piracy is becoming obsolete as content availability becomes totally reasonable.
I remember that my favorite TRS-80 Color Computer projects were the ones that had some sensor or link to the real world. I would use CDS cells to tell if anyone was walking up to the front door, and then have it play some spooky sound...
Today, I'd try to work a Wii remote and a webcam into a project, and have it do something that your son will have to show all his friends... PyGame lets me do things like play sounds when my son jumps on a DDR mat... (He's three, and I use his voice for the sounds.) Projects like this hopefully contrast nicely with that impersonal plastic feeling that you get in a toy store these days.
Python would be my choice of language... although Flex would be fun too. At some point, expose him to some assembler and C just so that he starts to develop a model of what is really happening inside the box when he programs it.
I've recently spent a year with the GWT, and just a couple of months with Flex.
I would use Flex to flashify whatever dynamic parts of a standard html page I needed to for my next project. Everything that I'm trying to do in GWT could be done much faster in Flex... and when you are done in Flex, you are really done.
In the GWT, you have to be aware of what html each of the Java GWT widgets equates to... and then in the CSS, you have to work thinking about the resulting html. (FireBug makes it pretty easy.)
Cons for GWT 1.4:
- Long start-up times: web sites can take 8 seconds to show you their first page as the GWT javascript initializes.
- One imperfect CSS declaration, and you're having to debug IE6 / IE7 / Firefox / Safrai issues... Only very plain sites are insulated well from browser incompatibilities.
- Your site is all-or-nothing GWT. It's possible to use one GWT app to automate one part of a static page easily... but usually your whole site is 100% GWT, with no other static pages outside of the GWT's control.
- The AJAX mechanism on RFC-compliant browsers only lets you make two async requests at once... a third request is queued until one of the first two async requests returns... making it only asynchronous to an extent.
- I ended up having lots of html in my.java files, and using the HTMLPanel to turn that html into a GWT Widget. There are some parts of a web site that really do make more sense as HTML, and there's no easy way in GWT to keep the html separate (no templates!?!)
- The integration of GWT development can be done simply, but it can also grow to mirror the complexity of EJB style Java junk way too easily.
- IE needs special treatment (worth repeating.)
That said, it's probably the best way to create a web app for an iPhone right now, since there's no flash on the iPhone. (Please Adobe, I'd love it if you created an Air run-time for the iPhone!)
Pros of the GWT:
- it makes it easy to handle the back button and bookmarks.
- it can scale up to fairly large sites, and the smallest building blocks can be kept clean and small.
- the end user experience is a good one after that start-up delay.
- The GWT team has done lots of fantastic work, and in an open exchange... one of my coworkers has committed some changes to one of the supporting libraries.
Flex, on the other hand is designed to appeal to people who are weary from fighting CSS / browser incompatibility issues. In Flex, you still use CSS, but it works the way you would expect all the time. In Flex, you can also skin any compononent to look however you want, and then have a very clean top-level which wires up the various components with their skins. It's really beautiful... and best of all, when you're done, You're done! You don't even have to test on IE6! The learning curve is about the same, or a little harder, but it's all forward motion.
My next site is going to be 80% Django templates, with a good dose of mochikit (or dojo) for some dynamic parts, and a few Flex / flash applets sprinkled in where they make sense.
Upper management is not trying to be the market leader anymore, they're trying to look good in one way or another.
Either they want to package the company for acquisition, and want the company to look like it has a bite-sized IT burden. or....
This sort of thing can also happen when one of the people in management is trying to get rid of some of the better programmers who can accomplish more when they use additional technologies. In my experience it's been because the Manager wants to seem like they are the smartest person in the room, and they can achieve that if the tools that they standardize on are the ones that the manager knows. Anyone who disagrees with their wisdom can also be branded as not a team player and forced out as well.
I've worked for a company in a similar situation, and was painfully forced out. Now I work for a company that will use the right tools for the job, and expect their employees to learn new technologies to suit the jobs that come up. Each employee documents every aspect of the project, so other employees can come up to speed on the project quickly... and it works!
If your company is trying to standardize on one set of technologies, chances are that they are in financial trouble, or trying to hide some drama and want to cull the team.
You know what I really hate, is all these roads filled up with people who can drive from anywhere to anywhere else!
If we restrict people to only driving out of major cities, then we can transform every highway to both sides coming out of the city! Imagine how fast we could go, and how under-capacity all the roads would be!
The MyBookWorld is great... and hackable linux.
on
Best Home Network NAS
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· Score: 1
I've used an old linux machine with two drives in software raid1 over the years, and it's been great. I even had three hard drives fail, and each time it recovered nicely.
The old machine was too loud and not worth the time upgrading to latest versions of stuff... so I went to Best Buy, and crossed my fingers and bought a MyBookWorld which is a small enclosure with two 500MB drives. It comes in raid 0, but it can be switched to raid1 (it takes about a day to do the conversion.)
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was linux, and I could enable ssh and use rsync + ssh to move stuff onto it.
It's not as quiet as it could be, and it's got silly ass restrictions on usernames (must be at least 5 chars) and passwords (no symbols) and it insits on making your shares UPPER case. Otherwise... it's great.
If you really get annoyed at it, there are some people who have just installed debian on the thing...
The throughput is a little slow, It takes about 6 minutes per GB for me. It also lights up the room with some of the breathing bright blue leds. I keep mine in the basement next to my switch & DSL... and am very happy with it.
Re:I'm lovin' Miro, but there's room for improveme
on
Miro Turns 1.0
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· Score: 1
Hi Dave,
I've been really tempted to send my resume in for the latest programmer position. I've done some Python + C++ work in the past, and really want to get back to that toolset.
The code I wrote extended wxWidgets Image with a filter-chain that was optimized with the Intel Performance Primitives. I had images from multiple research-grade high resolution live cameras, with interactive and real-time thresholding, colorization and other filters that could be added in for the task at hand. It was some of the best work I'd ever done, but it got shelved by a VP who didn't understand it.
I'll be in touch with the devel team soon. (I've just gotta get over the hump on my current contract!)
-Jim
I'm lovin' Miro, but there's room for improvement.
on
Miro Turns 1.0
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· Score: 1
In my living room, I have a Sharp Aquos flat-panel, with a Mac Mini (Power PC) running Leopard. Miro entertains the family most of the day.
I have some Folders set up that point to the MyWorldBook (cheap raid NAS) in the basement (which is hackable linux) This holds a large collection of feature movies, and more importantly, copies of all the DVDs that we own that my two year old wants to watch over and over. We have tons of Thomas the Tank engine, Go Diego Go, Kipper, etc.. ready for him to watch.
We use a bluetooth MightyMouse for a remote, and even my two year old can choose what he wants to watch next, and also (just last week!) click the button that makes it full-screen.
Next, I have some great RSS feeds, Webb Alert, NASA ESA space telescope news, NBC Nightly news, and some National Geographic. not to mention TED talks.
Finally, I have a few RSS feed based torrent downloads automated from tvrss. Even though I do get House on the television, one day later Miro has downloaded the HD version thanks to tvrss. I also download the Daily Show, Doctor Who, Psych, and a couple others.
I've only come across one movie that was so high resolution that the PowerPC based Mac Mini couldn't show it... it was some footage of very high resolution images taken from the Mars explorers.
So I think Miro is the best thing to happen to my living room.
I also love Miro under the hood. It's cross-platform, and on each platform it uses the best native platform tools that it can. On Windows it uses Mozilla XUL, on Linux it uses PyGTK, and on Mac it uses PyObjectiveC to get the best native interfaces on each platform. In effect it's three different applications, with lots of shared code, and only Python could make this sort of thing manageable by a small team that can subsist on $50,000 fundraisers.
It uses HTML for its guide and VLC for its video engine. Everything is in touch with the mainstream, and very nicely integrated.
I only have a couple of complaints. One is that sometimes if I play a widescreen movie, followed by a smaller movie, I can see the last still image of the widescreen in the upper left hand corner 'behind' the current movie. It also is pretty dumb about the movies on my network drive. If I start miro without first connecting to the NAS, Miro decides that all those movies have been deleted, and when I connect the NAS, all of them show up as new. There's no way to mark each movie as watched, so I end up watching the first 8 seconds of 60 movies to clean up the 'new' list. After about 35 movies, Miro will freeze and I'll have to Force Quit, then restart and finish up my cleaning.
All around, it's been done using the best possible methods (IMHO) and achieved a fantastically usable result.
The one time that tags were really useful to me were when I was asked to implement rounded corners on the portlets of a web page, and I was looking at what other people had done. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for until I checked del.icio.us for 'rounded' and found lots of other ways of rounding the corners of web content.
I've been asked to implement tags on an existing discussion site, and I'm afraid it's going to turn out as poorly as the tags on slashdot. Unless the tagging system is used by people in a way that's meaningful to them, the quality of the tags is going to be poor.
The tags have to fill a need for categorization, and there have to be people interested in those categories, then it will get used widely, and turn into something that even newcomers to the site would use.
So far, del.icio.us has done well, because the tags are 'mine' and they mean what I want them to mean, and they categorize my bookmarks, I know what to expect when I use them.
In a huge pile of similar things, like flickr, tags are the only categories that outsiders can use to narrow what they're interested in without text search.
Tags are truly implemented differently based on the role that they serve. There's no way to standardize yet. If they were standardized, how would one site use the tags on another site? What would all the use-cases be? There's also no way to ensure quality of tags are accurate and thorough. Text search is reliable because it looks at the content itself. Has text search been standardized? I think not.
Search and tags are web services that are exposed in different ways from different sites, for different purposes and that's about the best we can hope for for the time being.
I don't use my phone much... so Tracfone makes a lot of sense.
There are no monthly fees, but you do have to buy some minutes each year to keep your number. If you pay their full rate, it comes out to about a dollar a minute... but it's not hard to combine their special offers to get down to about 20 cents a minute... remember though, no monthly fee, so it ends up being _way_ cheaper for someone like me that only uses about 300 minutes a year.
My parents and grandparents actually use tracfone as a keep-in-care emergency phone too.
There are alternatives to Matlab that are similar, and can be resold in commercial apps without any license or royalty issues.
I would personally use Python / NumPy & SciPy / Matplotlib in a heartbeat. There are even tutorials for people who are used to Matlab on the subtle syntax differences.
You can even use SWIG (or Boost_python) to integrate your high level code with your low level code in the same application. You can then distribute the result on Windows, Mac or Linux with different bundling or freezing options.
I'm using wxPython for the GUI which I can also program in both Python and C++.
I have to admit, the Matlab people will have a hard time letting go of their favorite tool. One job I had in the past ended up simply installing a full Matlab installation on every machine we wanted or main C++ software to work on. This was just to take some regularly spaced data and put it on a regular grid. (Today I'd use natgrid or a smoothed delaunay from Python and have a free, fast implementation in no time.)
-Jim
The book is great for beginners
on
WxPython in Action
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· Score: 2, Informative
Having used wxPython for just a few small projects, and currently one very large one, I found that the book was appropriate for someone who was just getting started. WxWidgets and wxPython can do much more than this book would suggest.
I keep it on my bookshelf next to the wxWidgets book and end up reaching for the wxWidgets book more often, even though I'm using wxPython.
I agree with the other poster who suggests that people code GUIs with sizers instead of using the XRC resources, although if you have multiple people on a project, and one or two want to change just the GUI, then the XRC, along with Dialog Blocks would be a perfect combination. The trick to making the gui stuff quick even though it's in code is to configure your favorite text editor with snippets or aliases or whatever it calls them to have lots of fill-in the blanks templates for things like a staticText / Edit box row in a dialog. I have a good collection of VisualSlickedit aliases I'd be happy to send to anyone who e-mails me at: jim at maplesong dot com.
wxPython is easy to debug too. I'm coding my application partially in C++ wxWidgets, and driving the complex gui parts in wxPython. I have my wxPython extension dll in a visual studio project, and I point the "when debugging run:" to python itself, with an argument that points to my script. I can set breakpoints in my C++ code, and they are hit when I get to the right place in the wxPython gui. I can simutaneously use Wing IDE from Wingware to debug the python code. The trick is the python actually initiates the conversation with the debugger through sockets... the debugger just has to be in 'passive mode' to accept the connection.
Unlike the other posters, I have not run into anything buggy. Everything has been solid, and has made sense, and for the most part worked the first time every time, even mostly on OSX. (I start off on Windows.) The only troule I've had on Linux/GTK is controlling the font size in the HTML windows. (wxWidgets has a simple but fantastically useful lightweight HTML layout widget!)
I'm really hoping that Google comes around to putting some support into wxWidgets & wxPython. It already has great support from Mitch Kaypor and the OSAF, and AOL has used it for their communicator, and lots and lots of small shops have used it successfully, as well as several open source projects... Ok, it's doing fine.
I've been following python web development for a while, and currently have a few sites running with Zope + Zope Page Templates + ZSQL Objects + MySQL and they work great. The only problem is that I want a more lightweight faster server.
I am all ready to try TurboGears, but I have not been able to get mod_python + apache2 running on my mac mini. Does anyone know of a howto that will make my TurboGears web app start when the mac starts and mix TurboGears with static content? I really want to follow this example http://www.jamwt.com/mpcp.py but don't quite know how to get past some compilation errors with mod_python on my mac (OSX 10.3) and convert this to be TurboGears-aware instead of just cherrypy aware.
The Kid templates are a great alternative / improvement over the Zope Page templates. The pages are cleaner and I don't have to look up how to do tal:defines as often. I would probably not use SQLObject, but instead start with Durus.
I'm just waiting a few months for it to become even more of a no-brainer for me.
After a project that I worked on for years was cut down before its prime because of a software patent threat (there wasn't even clear infringement!) I am sick of companies that play the game (right or wrong) of software patents.
Even though the patent system follows some honorable principles, the reality is that any patent suit brings down both companies involved.
I for one am going to buy "What the dormouse said." by John Markoff from www.penguinputnam.com/ instead of amazon today. Take that! (I just read a great review by Bill Joy of Markoff's book in Technology Review.)
Are there any sites that track how litigious companies are, so I can give my business to the ones that sling the least mud?
No really. It's a pleasure. Think firefox instead of IE pleasure. Think OS X pleasure. ( Oops you already did? ) I've been typing on Dvorak for about 15 years, and even though I can type on QWERTY pretty well when I need to it just doesn't flow.
If you don't spend several hours a day typing, or using an operating system or a browser then having one flow better than another doesn't matter. But for those who do... it does.
Thanks, this is just the issue that leads to a lot of premature dismissal of an essential programming language.
In my mind, no one language is appropriate for everything that runs on the computer. You have some things that need to be as fast as possible and run in 'machine time', and then a lot of logic that happens in 'human time.'
You need some things to be very fast like crunching lost of numbers mathmatically, rendering web pages, transforming live video streams, decoding ogg, or implementing opengl. C or C++ is the language of choice for these purposes.
The rest of what runs on the computer is simply helping the user tell the computer when to run that fast code. It shows them images, watches them move the mouse and click on things, and responds. Huge amounts of logic are required for things that run in 'human time' and as long as it doesn't take over about 1/10 of a second for a satisfying reaction by the computer, then the language that implements it is appropriate.
I also beleive that you can't have a language that is so high level that it's a pleasure to do high level things, and also be as fast as any other language.
So for high level code, I don't beleive that there's anything more appropriate than Python. I've put together scripts that pull data from spreadsheets or xmlrpc data sources, run them through a SimpleTAL to create web pages, download data from ftp sites, zip all the data with the created web pages, and do crypto on the result in a very short period of time. It's really beautiful... and months later I can go back to my code and never worry about scratching my head trying to read it.
I also use wxPython for most of my prototyping, and any app that I need to deliver quickly with a decent UI.
I'm just getting into using SWIG to script some of the C++ I've written over the last few years, and it's really much simpler than I thought.
I strongly beleive that a commerical product like WingIDE (a good example of a serious application written in Python in itself) with a good wxWidgets gui builder, web page template builder, and (harder) a seamless way of doing hybrid C++ / Python integration by automating SWIG will be the ultimate combination that unifies programmers that are spread out all over on other languages at the moment.
I just ran out of space on my old raid array (two 200GB drives in a gentoo linux machine with software raid 1 mirroring.) I also was inspired by the slashdot story about someone who did a iPod shuffle raid using a usb hub... and since I just ordered a mac mini, I wanted to do something similar, but with actual hard drives. The screenshots of the OS X raid configuration in the disk tool sold me on the idea.
I checked out Tom's hardware for hard drive enclosures that could power and connect some cheap 200GB Maxtor drives. link
and decided on the Nexstar NST-350UF. Each enclosure is small, fanless, and has two firewire ports, so I can chain lots of drives as my raid array grows.
Newegg sells enclosures for about $45 and 200GB drives for about $105, so I'm starting off with 400GB raid5 (three drives) for about $350, and will be able to upgrade to 600GB for another $150 when I need to.
I'm anticipating a few problems... 7200rpm drives in fanless enclosures might not last very long... I ran them for 24 hours and they were pretty warm to the touch. Firewire adds a little latency on each access, and raid5 tends to access the drives as a set, so I might be creating a fast-as-oatmeal volume.
Once you get to the page, zoom in about ten times using the + magnifying glass icon.
The file is 135,000 pixels wide by 200,000 pixels high which would take 77.25 Gigabytes to store uncompressed. The compressed size on the server is 3.912 Gigabytes.
Magnatune fits your description and it already exists. All we need is to have Magnatune license it's storefront for many other publishers to open and make some money in a similar grass-roots way.
I'm not affiliated in any way other than to love what they do. I've listened to lots of stuff, including their streaming mp3s of entire genres. I have bought a couple of albums from magnatune, and still listen to it today. It's been a long time since I've been into music this much.
My Boss, loves his ThoughtManager from Hands High Software so much that he gave me a Palm Zire so I could install it and he could beam his heirarchies of notes / to-do lists to me when we meet. It has an import from MS Word outlines too.
It isn't open source or free, but it's worth $30 if you need something really well done (and own a palm.)
I installed Xandros on my IBM Thinkpad T40 a few weeks ago, and love it. Before that I had Gentoo installed, and spent several days trying to tweak the configuration for accelerated 3D in X (the T40 has a sweet Radeon) and getting my CD-R to work properly.
When I installed Xandros, and did one upgrade / update using Xandros Networks then rebooted I had almost everything on the laptop working perfectly. I could play Tux Racer at full speed, and burn CDs without any trouble. I installed MS Office 2000 and it worked, including printing to my (CUPS - on Gentoo server managed) HP OfficeJet.
The only things I'm left wanting is the ability to sleep / suspend my laptop. (I end up powering it off and back on whenever I'm not using it.) And better behaivour when I plug in a USB Joystick. At the moment I have to run a little script that loads the right JOY modules, then sets the permissions for the/dev/input/js0 before I can play PyDance.
If Crossover Office let me run Visual C++ and create windows applications, I would be using it full time at work too!
It's well worth $90 for the configuration time it saved me!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you _but_...
Why the heck would I want to download a Netflix video to my hard drive? It would just fill it up. I can stream Netflix movies to my appleTV or iPad, so the only reason I might download something is if I wanted to watch it when I was going to be disconnected.
Netflix has made piracy unnecessary by making so much great content available for a reasonable rate... there's no reason to protect against it anymore, since Netflix is a more convenient way of watching the content than any pirate collection of videos. They've won. Just like being able to buy audio tracks means I no longer have to go to pirate sites to try to find music I like. Piracy is becoming obsolete as content availability becomes totally reasonable.
The plane itself is nothing dangerous or even impressive.
Build your own if you want... start here: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=14465
My first reference for python is:
http://rgruet.free.fr/PQR25/PQR2.5.html
I wish there was something as complete and helpful for AS3... please let me know if you come across one.
Did this happen even when you embedded your true type fonts?
I remember that my favorite TRS-80 Color Computer projects were the ones that had some sensor or link to the real world. I would use CDS cells to tell if anyone was walking up to the front door, and then have it play some spooky sound...
Today, I'd try to work a Wii remote and a webcam into a project, and have it do something that your son will have to show all his friends... PyGame lets me do things like play sounds when my son jumps on a DDR mat... (He's three, and I use his voice for the sounds.) Projects like this hopefully contrast nicely with that impersonal plastic feeling that you get in a toy store these days.
Python would be my choice of language... although Flex would be fun too. At some point, expose him to some assembler and C just so that he starts to develop a model of what is really happening inside the box when he programs it.
I've recently spent a year with the GWT, and just a couple of months with Flex.
I would use Flex to flashify whatever dynamic parts of a standard html page I needed to for my next project. Everything that I'm trying to do in GWT could be done much faster in Flex... and when you are done in Flex, you are really done.
In the GWT, you have to be aware of what html each of the Java GWT widgets equates to... and then in the CSS, you have to work thinking about the resulting html. (FireBug makes it pretty easy.)
Cons for GWT 1.4:
- Long start-up times: web sites can take 8 seconds to show you their first page as the GWT javascript initializes.
- One imperfect CSS declaration, and you're having to debug IE6 / IE7 / Firefox / Safrai issues... Only very plain sites are insulated well from browser incompatibilities.
- Your site is all-or-nothing GWT. It's possible to use one GWT app to automate one part of a static page easily... but usually your whole site is 100% GWT, with no other static pages outside of the GWT's control.
- The AJAX mechanism on RFC-compliant browsers only lets you make two async requests at once... a third request is queued until one of the first two async requests returns... making it only asynchronous to an extent.
- I ended up having lots of html in my .java files, and using the HTMLPanel to turn that html into a GWT Widget. There are some parts of a web site that really do make more sense as HTML, and there's no easy way in GWT to keep the html separate (no templates!?!)
- The integration of GWT development can be done simply, but it can also grow to mirror the complexity of EJB style Java junk way too easily.
- IE needs special treatment (worth repeating.)
That said, it's probably the best way to create a web app for an iPhone right now, since there's no flash on the iPhone. (Please Adobe, I'd love it if you created an Air run-time for the iPhone!)
Pros of the GWT:
- it makes it easy to handle the back button and bookmarks.
- it can scale up to fairly large sites, and the smallest building blocks can be kept clean and small.
- the end user experience is a good one after that start-up delay.
- The GWT team has done lots of fantastic work, and in an open exchange... one of my coworkers has committed some changes to one of the supporting libraries.
Flex, on the other hand is designed to appeal to people who are weary from fighting CSS / browser incompatibility issues. In Flex, you still use CSS, but it works the way you would expect all the time. In Flex, you can also skin any compononent to look however you want, and then have a very clean top-level which wires up the various components with their skins. It's really beautiful... and best of all, when you're done, You're done! You don't even have to test on IE6! The learning curve is about the same, or a little harder, but it's all forward motion.
My next site is going to be 80% Django templates, with a good dose of mochikit (or dojo) for some dynamic parts, and a few Flex / flash applets sprinkled in where they make sense.
Upper management is not trying to be the market leader anymore, they're trying to look good in one way or another.
Either they want to package the company for acquisition, and want the company to look like it has a bite-sized IT burden. or....
This sort of thing can also happen when one of the people in management is trying to get rid of some of the better programmers who can accomplish more when they use additional technologies. In my experience it's been because the Manager wants to seem like they are the smartest person in the room, and they can achieve that if the tools that they standardize on are the ones that the manager knows. Anyone who disagrees with their wisdom can also be branded as not a team player and forced out as well.
I've worked for a company in a similar situation, and was painfully forced out. Now I work for a company that will use the right tools for the job, and expect their employees to learn new technologies to suit the jobs that come up. Each employee documents every aspect of the project, so other employees can come up to speed on the project quickly... and it works!
If your company is trying to standardize on one set of technologies, chances are that they are in financial trouble, or trying to hide some drama and want to cull the team.
You know what I really hate, is all these roads filled up with people who can drive from anywhere to anywhere else!
If we restrict people to only driving out of major cities, then we can transform every highway to both sides coming out of the city! Imagine how fast we could go, and how under-capacity all the roads would be!
I've used an old linux machine with two drives in software raid1 over the years, and it's been great. I even had three hard drives fail, and each time it recovered nicely.
The old machine was too loud and not worth the time upgrading to latest versions of stuff... so I went to Best Buy, and crossed my fingers and bought a MyBookWorld which is a small enclosure with two 500MB drives. It comes in raid 0, but it can be switched to raid1 (it takes about a day to do the conversion.)
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was linux, and I could enable ssh and use rsync + ssh to move stuff onto it.
It's not as quiet as it could be, and it's got silly ass restrictions on usernames (must be at least 5 chars) and passwords (no symbols) and it insits on making your shares UPPER case. Otherwise... it's great.
If you really get annoyed at it, there are some people who have just installed debian on the thing...
There's a forum on hacking it at wikidot:
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/start
The throughput is a little slow, It takes about 6 minutes per GB for me. It also lights up the room with some of the breathing bright blue leds. I keep mine in the basement next to my switch & DSL... and am very happy with it.
Hi Dave,
I've been really tempted to send my resume in for the latest programmer position. I've done some Python + C++ work in the past, and really want to get back to that toolset.
The code I wrote extended wxWidgets Image with a filter-chain that was optimized with the Intel Performance Primitives. I had images from multiple research-grade high resolution live cameras, with interactive and real-time thresholding, colorization and other filters that could be added in for the task at hand. It was some of the best work I'd ever done, but it got shelved by a VP who didn't understand it.
I'll be in touch with the devel team soon. (I've just gotta get over the hump on my current contract!)
-Jim
In my living room, I have a Sharp Aquos flat-panel, with a Mac Mini (Power PC) running Leopard. Miro entertains the family most of the day.
I have some Folders set up that point to the MyWorldBook (cheap raid NAS) in the basement (which is hackable linux) This holds a large collection of feature movies, and more importantly, copies of all the DVDs that we own that my two year old wants to watch over and over. We have tons of Thomas the Tank engine, Go Diego Go, Kipper, etc.. ready for him to watch.
We use a bluetooth MightyMouse for a remote, and even my two year old can choose what he wants to watch next, and also (just last week!) click the button that makes it full-screen.
Next, I have some great RSS feeds, Webb Alert, NASA ESA space telescope news, NBC Nightly news, and some National Geographic. not to mention TED talks.
Finally, I have a few RSS feed based torrent downloads automated from tvrss. Even though I do get House on the television, one day later Miro has downloaded the HD version thanks to tvrss. I also download the Daily Show, Doctor Who, Psych, and a couple others.
I've only come across one movie that was so high resolution that the PowerPC based Mac Mini couldn't show it... it was some footage of very high resolution images taken from the Mars explorers.
So I think Miro is the best thing to happen to my living room.
I also love Miro under the hood. It's cross-platform, and on each platform it uses the best native platform tools that it can. On Windows it uses Mozilla XUL, on Linux it uses PyGTK, and on Mac it uses PyObjectiveC to get the best native interfaces on each platform. In effect it's three different applications, with lots of shared code, and only Python could make this sort of thing manageable by a small team that can subsist on $50,000 fundraisers.
It uses HTML for its guide and VLC for its video engine. Everything is in touch with the mainstream, and very nicely integrated.
I only have a couple of complaints. One is that sometimes if I play a widescreen movie, followed by a smaller movie, I can see the last still image of the widescreen in the upper left hand corner 'behind' the current movie. It also is pretty dumb about the movies on my network drive. If I start miro without first connecting to the NAS, Miro decides that all those movies have been deleted, and when I connect the NAS, all of them show up as new. There's no way to mark each movie as watched, so I end up watching the first 8 seconds of 60 movies to clean up the 'new' list. After about 35 movies, Miro will freeze and I'll have to Force Quit, then restart and finish up my cleaning.
All around, it's been done using the best possible methods (IMHO) and achieved a fantastically usable result.
The one time that tags were really useful to me were when I was asked to implement rounded corners on the portlets of a web page, and I was looking at what other people had done. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for until I checked del.icio.us for 'rounded' and found lots of other ways of rounding the corners of web content.
I've been asked to implement tags on an existing discussion site, and I'm afraid it's going to turn out as poorly as the tags on slashdot. Unless the tagging system is used by people in a way that's meaningful to them, the quality of the tags is going to be poor.
The tags have to fill a need for categorization, and there have to be people interested in those categories, then it will get used widely, and turn into something that even newcomers to the site would use.
So far, del.icio.us has done well, because the tags are 'mine' and they mean what I want them to mean, and they categorize my bookmarks, I know what to expect when I use them.
In a huge pile of similar things, like flickr, tags are the only categories that outsiders can use to narrow what they're interested in without text search.
Tags are truly implemented differently based on the role that they serve. There's no way to standardize yet. If they were standardized, how would one site use the tags on another site? What would all the use-cases be? There's also no way to ensure quality of tags are accurate and thorough. Text search is reliable because it looks at the content itself. Has text search been standardized? I think not.
Search and tags are web services that are exposed in different ways from different sites, for different purposes and that's about the best we can hope for for the time being.
I don't use my phone much... so Tracfone makes a lot of sense.
There are no monthly fees, but you do have to buy some minutes each year to keep your number.
If you pay their full rate, it comes out to about a dollar a minute... but it's not hard to combine their special offers to get down to about 20 cents a minute... remember though, no monthly fee, so it ends up being _way_ cheaper for someone like me that only uses about 300 minutes a year.
My parents and grandparents actually use tracfone as a keep-in-care emergency phone too.
Enjoy...
-Jim
There are alternatives to Matlab that are similar, and can be resold in commercial
apps without any license or royalty issues.
I would personally use Python / NumPy & SciPy / Matplotlib in a heartbeat. There are even
tutorials for people who are used to Matlab on the subtle syntax differences.
You can even use SWIG (or Boost_python) to integrate your high level code with your
low level code in the same application. You can then distribute the result on
Windows, Mac or Linux with different bundling or freezing options.
I'm using wxPython for the GUI which I can also program in both Python and C++.
I have to admit, the Matlab people will have a hard time letting go of their favorite
tool. One job I had in the past ended up simply installing a full Matlab installation
on every machine we wanted or main C++ software to work on. This was just to take
some regularly spaced data and put it on a regular grid. (Today I'd use natgrid or
a smoothed delaunay from Python and have a free, fast implementation in no time.)
-Jim
Having used wxPython for just a few small projects, and currently one very large one, I found that the book was appropriate for someone who was just getting started. WxWidgets and wxPython can do much more than this book would suggest.
I keep it on my bookshelf next to the wxWidgets book and end up reaching for the wxWidgets book more often, even though I'm using wxPython.
I agree with the other poster who suggests that people code GUIs with sizers instead of using the XRC resources, although if you have multiple people on a project, and one or two want to change just the GUI, then the XRC, along with Dialog Blocks would be a perfect combination. The trick to making the gui stuff quick even though it's in code is to configure your favorite text editor with snippets or aliases or whatever it calls them to have lots of fill-in the blanks templates for things like a staticText / Edit box row in a dialog. I have a good collection of VisualSlickedit aliases I'd be happy to send to anyone who e-mails me at: jim at maplesong dot com.
wxPython is easy to debug too. I'm coding my application partially in C++ wxWidgets, and driving the complex gui parts in wxPython. I have my wxPython extension dll in a visual studio project, and I point the "when debugging run:" to python itself, with an argument that points to my script. I can set breakpoints in my C++ code, and they are hit when I get to the right place in the wxPython gui. I can simutaneously use Wing IDE from Wingware to debug the python code. The trick is the python actually initiates the conversation with the debugger through sockets... the debugger just has to be in 'passive mode' to accept the connection.
Unlike the other posters, I have not run into anything buggy. Everything has been solid, and has made sense, and for the most part worked the first time every time, even mostly on OSX. (I start off on Windows.) The only troule I've had on Linux/GTK is controlling the font size in the HTML windows. (wxWidgets has a simple but fantastically useful lightweight HTML layout widget!)
I'm really hoping that Google comes around to putting some support into wxWidgets & wxPython. It already has great support from Mitch Kaypor and the OSAF, and AOL has used it for their communicator, and lots and lots of small shops have used it successfully, as well as several open source projects... Ok, it's doing fine.
-Jim
I've been following python web development for a while, and currently have a few sites running with Zope + Zope Page Templates + ZSQL Objects + MySQL and they work great. The only problem is that I want a more lightweight faster server.
I am all ready to try TurboGears, but I have not been able to get mod_python + apache2 running on my mac mini. Does anyone know of a howto that will make my TurboGears web app start when the mac starts and mix TurboGears with static content? I really want to follow this example http://www.jamwt.com/mpcp.py but don't quite know how to get past some compilation errors with mod_python on my mac (OSX 10.3) and convert this to be TurboGears-aware instead of just cherrypy aware.
The Kid templates are a great alternative / improvement over the Zope Page templates. The pages are cleaner and I don't have to look up how to do tal:defines as often. I would probably not use SQLObject, but instead start with Durus.
I'm just waiting a few months for it to become even more of a no-brainer for me.
-Jim
After a project that I worked on for years was cut down before its prime because of a software patent threat (there wasn't even clear infringement!) I am sick of companies that play the game (right or wrong) of software patents.
Even though the patent system follows some honorable principles, the reality is that any patent suit brings down both companies involved.
I for one am going to buy "What the dormouse said." by John Markoff from www.penguinputnam.com/ instead of amazon today. Take that! (I just read a great review by Bill Joy of Markoff's book in Technology Review.)
Are there any sites that track how litigious companies are, so I can give my business to the ones that sling the least mud?
-Jim
No really. It's a pleasure. Think firefox instead of IE pleasure. Think OS X pleasure. ( Oops you already did? ) I've been typing on Dvorak for about 15 years, and even though I can type on QWERTY pretty well when I need to it just doesn't flow.
If you don't spend several hours a day typing, or using an operating system or a browser then having one flow better than another doesn't matter. But for those who do... it does.
Thanks, this is just the issue that leads to a lot of premature dismissal of an essential programming language.
In my mind, no one language is appropriate for everything that runs on the computer. You have some things that need to be as fast as possible and run in 'machine time', and then a lot of logic that happens in 'human time.'
You need some things to be very fast like crunching lost of numbers mathmatically, rendering web pages, transforming live video streams, decoding ogg, or implementing opengl. C or C++ is the language of choice for these purposes.
The rest of what runs on the computer is simply helping the user tell the computer when to run that fast code. It shows them images, watches them move the mouse and click on things, and responds. Huge amounts of logic are required for things that run in 'human time' and as long as it doesn't take over about 1/10 of a second for a satisfying reaction by the computer, then the language that implements it is appropriate.
I also beleive that you can't have a language that is so high level that it's a pleasure to do high level things, and also be as fast as any other language.
So for high level code, I don't beleive that there's anything more appropriate than Python. I've put together scripts that pull data from spreadsheets or xmlrpc data sources, run them through a SimpleTAL to create web pages, download data from ftp sites, zip all the data with the created web pages, and do crypto on the result in a very short period of time. It's really beautiful... and months later I can go back to my code and never worry about scratching my head trying to read it.
I also use wxPython for most of my prototyping, and any app that I need to deliver quickly with a decent UI.
I'm just getting into using SWIG to script some of the C++ I've written over the last few years, and it's really much simpler than I thought.
I strongly beleive that a commerical product like WingIDE (a good example of a serious application written in Python in itself) with a good wxWidgets gui builder, web page template builder, and (harder) a seamless way of doing hybrid C++ / Python integration by automating SWIG will be the ultimate combination that unifies programmers that are spread out all over on other languages at the moment.
It's really that good.
I just ran out of space on my old raid array (two 200GB drives in a gentoo linux machine with software raid 1 mirroring.) I also was inspired by the slashdot story about someone who did a iPod shuffle raid using a usb hub... and since I just ordered a mac mini, I wanted to do something similar, but with actual hard drives. The screenshots of the OS X raid configuration in the disk tool sold me on the idea.
I checked out Tom's hardware for hard drive enclosures that could power and connect some cheap 200GB Maxtor drives. link and decided on the Nexstar NST-350UF. Each enclosure is small, fanless, and has two firewire ports, so I can chain lots of drives as my raid array grows.
Newegg sells enclosures for about $45 and 200GB drives for about $105, so I'm starting off with 400GB raid5 (three drives) for about $350, and will be able to upgrade to 600GB for another $150 when I need to.
I'm anticipating a few problems... 7200rpm drives in fanless enclosures might not last very long... I ran them for 24 hours and they were pretty warm to the touch. Firewire adds a little latency on each access, and raid5 tends to access the drives as a set, so I might be creating a fast-as-oatmeal volume.
Wish me luck.
-Jim
Here's a link to a montage of a Dolphin Brain that was assembled with a 10x objective on a microscope.
Dolphin Brain on Neuroinformatica.com
Once you get to the page, zoom in about ten times using the + magnifying glass icon.
The file is 135,000 pixels wide by 200,000 pixels high which would take 77.25 Gigabytes to store uncompressed. The compressed size on the server is 3.912 Gigabytes.
101 commets in 12 hours! that says it more than any well considered argument. I guess Bluetooth just doesn't bring out anyone's child-like enthusiasm.
http://www.magnatune.com
I'm not affiliated in any way other than to love what they do. I've listened to lots of stuff, including their streaming mp3s of entire genres. I have bought a couple of albums from magnatune, and still listen to it today. It's been a long time since I've been into music this much.
-Jim
My Boss, loves his ThoughtManager from Hands High Software so much that he gave me a Palm Zire so I could install it and he could beam his heirarchies of notes / to-do lists to me when we meet. It has an import from MS Word outlines too.
It isn't open source or free, but it's worth $30 if you need something really well done (and own a palm.)
-Jim
I installed Xandros on my IBM Thinkpad T40 a few weeks ago, and love it. Before that I had Gentoo installed, and spent several days trying to tweak the configuration for accelerated 3D in X (the T40 has a sweet Radeon) and getting my CD-R to work properly.
/dev/input/js0 before I can play PyDance.
When I installed Xandros, and did one upgrade / update using Xandros Networks then rebooted I had almost everything on the laptop working perfectly. I could play Tux Racer at full speed, and burn CDs without any trouble. I installed MS Office 2000 and it worked, including printing to my (CUPS - on Gentoo server managed) HP OfficeJet.
The only things I'm left wanting is the ability to sleep / suspend my laptop. (I end up powering it off and back on whenever I'm not using it.) And better behaivour when I plug in a USB Joystick. At the moment I have to run a little script that loads the right JOY modules, then sets the permissions for the
If Crossover Office let me run Visual C++ and create windows applications, I would be using it full time at work too!
It's well worth $90 for the configuration time it saved me!
-Jim