I did my own. Been working on it and upgrading it for about 7 years now. Actually I started it as a plugin to Slashcode. Working on that project has ben my way to keep up with stuff. I moved from using Slashcode's DB accessors to Class::DBI, then I decided to ditch slashcode entirely and use Catalyst, then I ditched Class::DBI in favor of DBIx::Class. I have javascript/JSON/AJAX (is AJAJ a real term yet?) interface. We (my wife and I) use it to organize photos and build a static public site. Gallery and the like annoy me because so many pictures suck and people take no time at all to cull the bad ones. So my system is all inward facing, and we pick the good ones (good being subjective, of course) and assemble a static site with words and images, etc. Static is really easy on the server when hit by grandparents and aunts and uncles.
I've played with Image::Magick mostly to do the image manipulation. I looked at GD, but it wasn't feature-full enough. At one time I had lots of interface stuff for Image::Magick routines, like brightness and contrast, etc etc, but even I wasn't using them, so I deleted them. At the moment I have a nifty ajax thing for area of interest, and rotation, and that's pretty much it, but a hold over from the complicated filter days is that I have a crazy pipeline of eval'ed perl stored in the database representing a transform to apply to an image, so that when it is rotated, colored, brightened, or whatever, the transform is applied to the original image, rather than obliterating the original. And in doing that I learned that sometimes a join table in a database has to be three way, or you can get big problems. So I've got a threeway join table, linking the imageid, blobid, and transformid. And I have a small clue about database normalization.
And taking a cue from Slashcode (right before I ditched the code) I bought the argument that it was a good idea to stick images directly in the database. So that's where they are, blobs in the the database. Now I regret that as my images have grown to 2-3 MB rather than about 200K when I started out. Apparently you can play tricks with the server to just memcopy an image from a filesystem to the browser, but not if the image is stuffed in a database.
blah blah blah. I know lots about this stuff, and about perl and apache and mysql and postgresql and ajax and so on that I never would have learned had I not "rolled my own" Why just last weekend I learned about perlcritic and perltidy, and realized how far my usual idioms are from those recommended by Damian Conway. So now I am on a perldoc diet until perlcritic stops whining at me.
nice rant.
may I add my own?
Bush's Electoral Math:
4 years of Bush
- 100,000 dead Iraqi *civilians* and counting
- 1,000 US soldiers and counting
- 2,752 dead US civilians
- 2 World Trade Center Towers
- some civil liberties
+ 0 WMD
+ 0 Osama Bin Laden
+ 1 Saddam Hussein (but he wasn't hiding WMD, he was just being an evil dictator)
+ a record-setting deficit
- tax cuts
=
4 more years of Bush
I can do the math. All that lovely stuff in the middle adds up to zero for more than 50% of the USofA, which means a few tax cuts balances horrible atrocities and illegally invading a sovereign nation which had nothing *whatsoever* to do with the World Trade Center destruction.
Yes, my fellow Americans have been brainwashed apparently. Time to start dishing out some nasty liberalism. Enough of the make nice social disapproval. I want blood on the floor of the House every time the Republicans try to cut taxes for the rich, increase defense spending, funnel through Patriot Acts, and so on. The Democrats in offics have nothing to lose, so my Senators (yay Barbara Boxer!) had better start throwing themselves in front of this trainwreck. Sadly, my representative is a Red-neck.
As I'm sure many others have said, I can't stand plugins and all that, and have never installed Flash and have Java turned off. So good, perhaps this patent will rid the web of those irritating flash only web sites.
Maybe this will spur M$ support for SVG in their browsers, as I believe that qualifies as a standard, not a plugin. Oh, hey, and maybe there will be fewer word, excel, and powerpoint files on the web. Hooray hooray.
But (violence always has a way of justifying itself)...
The World Trade Center strike killed a lot of people. That was war on our soil, somewhat as you describe. Americans are still willing to lash out because of this, looking for payback. This is why Bush had such an easy time linking Iraq and 9/11, and selling this stupid but "convenient" war---we don't want war on our streets, which to us is the threat of Anthrax in the mail and airplanes plowing into Disneyland. So popular opinion will be swayed (however slightly) by equating "bomb that nation" with "war on terrer".
Sure there may be more terrorism because of bombing Iraq. But maybe not. An open, mobilized military is a lot more destructive and immediate than a terror cell, plotting in secret. And so the argument of peace is a hard sell, appearing to give the terrorists more time to plan, more resources to use.
Unfortunately for everybody, it is the job of president Bush to sell peace; I think he is smart enough to know that he is too stupid to pull of that argument, so he took the easy exit and is selling war instead.
Re:Yet another blunder by American president
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, we probably will win this war, and quickly, and the rest of the world will forget about it and shut up. For a while.
Most repressive regimes get away with repression for a very long time until the repressed turn the tables. If this war marks the start of America as Global Thug (personally, I hope this period ends in 2004), we have probably 20 to 50 years before we really have to seriously worry about all the little kids on the playground organizing themselves to take us out.
But stupid as it is, I still think this war is just payback because Saddam tried to knock off dubya's daddy. Wouldn't you do the same thing if (a) you lost the popular vote, (b) most basic statistics texts use the Florida election returns to demonstrate that you should have also lost the electoral vote and (c) you're president anyway?
We were handed Bill Bryson books by my English relatives when we were traveling there three years ago. I must say I found them pretty un-funny. I think it was because his humor is negative/sarcastic, and here we were trying to enjoy England, not hate it. So he may be a funny author (and indeed, my British relatives love his books), but I'd advise the curious to *not* read his work when you're traveling yourself.
Not to get completely off topic, but I had the same feeling reading the Blue Guide to France when we were camping in the Loire. The author said something like the Loire River itself is ugly and there are better Chateaux elsewhere in France.... While that may be a true statement, I immediately donated the book to the campground library.
if you don't plan to save money, get enough credit to save your self if you get stuck somewhere. You don't have to use it, but there's nothing like a visa limit of 5K to give you peace of mind when you eating weeds, hitchhiking, sleeping on trains, and whatnot. the best part is that if your card gets snaked, if your mom or someone has your number back home (and if you've memorize the ATT phone home numbers and your ATT phone home credit card number) then you can phone home, have her cancel your card, and arrange to get a new one issued. Much easier than stupid travelers checks or cash.
also, when you leave a country, give all your local currency away---to beggars, travelin friends going the other way, charity, whatever. it is good travel karma, and you will get it back.
as to where or how, just bum around and live by your wits.
I saved money and spent it slowly. but if you don't want to save, then be a hitchiker.
I once configured a dialup modem on slackware the extremely hard way, including AT commands. Now it is pretty easy, but I am running a DSL line, which required me to compile a new kernel and read some HOWTOs. Then my harddrive crashed, oh disaster, lost many photos of my daughter, and my Slackware DSL gateway...but I had been itching to install LEAF Bering rc2 and see how it worked. It was a breeze, as it was designed to work with DSL gateways---some guy (Jaques Nilo, if I remember right) thought of all the little things! Now I have a DSL gateway that boots and runs, firewall and all, from a floppy that isn't even mounted at runtime so I can just press power whenever and reboot nice and clean.
Linux is hard, sure. But it runs my laptop, my webserver, and my hard-drive free firewall.
Try to get that flexible and useful with os-x or win-xp!
I dislike the fact that this seems to be little more than advertising promo echoed by slashdot. I have no interest in deploying a proprietary extension to 802.11b when folks like NoCat.net, nyc wireless, personal telco, and so on are all trying to provide wide area access within the 802.11b published standard. I'd think the Ciscos and Linksyses of the world would be more interested in solving the multihop networking problems within the 802.11b standard and open the results up for others to use, so that they can sell more radios.
In my opinion, any company that sells a proprietary extension to a standard will most likely fail, esp. when the standard is free (free spectrum, free implementations, just buy the radio). After all, there are plenty of better, proprietary networking standards, but we all use TCP/IP.
I use a floppy-based LEAFBering distro for my firewall on my DSL line at home. No hard drive on that old box since it died. The system boots from the floppy, which isn't
mounted at run time, so I just press power or toggle the reset button to shut down/start up. If I ever get hacked, hey, a clean, fresh system is only a reboot away.
I also use a floppy to boot slackware whenever I've downloaded the latest distro to a partition and want to try it out. I don't have a cdrom burner, so a floppy is the only way to go.
i've got a better idea. How about streaming content underneath ads that only shows during commercials. i'm thinking sport scores on espn, stock ticker on msnbc, etc. all the stuff these guys currently stick under their usual content they can instead stick under their ads.
anyway, i don't own a tv, so maybe they already do this.
in the greater LA area, there is kcrw, which has a great
music program. Also available online at http://kcrwmusic.com/.
In my opinion the best show for what you're asking
about is metropolis. The dj, Jason Bentley, was recently written up pretty favorably in an LA Times puff piece on the local electronic music and dance scene.
Good comment. School is for learning. The most subversive thing one can do is learn and learn well. And to break free of / become intellectually and socially equal to those of us in the older generations.
I've always held that the best time to go to college is right after you graduate and realize what you just missed in the past 4 years.
Many years ago the company I worked for migrated from word perfect lotus 123 to work/excel. it was a painful transition for the average secretary, but the tech staff didn't care much.
In my opinion, the people who claim to "know" ms office products actually have an arcane set of incantations and bad practices that get the job done. the retraining you speak of should be rephrased as "learning a whole new set of bad heuristics". I haven't really used any ms product since 1997, but when i glace over my shoulder at my wife's work on word, i want to retch at her one-at-a-time modification of paragraph styles, intendation, and so on. And she is considered a small miracle worker amongst her co-workers.
That aside, my migration path away from windows is to get away from the whole what you see is what you get trap. what you see is all you get. Instead, make everybody use LaTeX, cold turkey, and hire a LaTeX hack to devise a set of document formats for your company---reports, memos, letters, etc. That's how I switched. First MikTeX, then Emacs to use MikTeX, then ghostview to see the.ps output, then gnumeric got pretty usable at version 0.4 i think, and voila, i jumped into linux with a completely compatible set of skills.
I've been installing MikTeX around the office here on various windows boxes, and the latest setup is pretty nice, and there are some excellent setup instructions linked from that page. Although Emacs has a learning curve, AucTeX is pretty great, and with Flyspell running in the background, Word users can even get their spelling checked as they type.
yes, thank you for stating what i was going to say. i'm glad your response was modded up. I am quite satisfied with the level of activity on LEAF. We are going to move to a recent version of Oxygen in the near future. And the reason for doing that is to be able to run Seawall as a firewall on our 'embedded' boxes.
As a grader of the intro CS clas, way way back when i was a sophomore (jeez, stunning to think how long ago that was in computer years...the freshman worked on FroshVAX), i came across one or two copiers, as i recall. they complained that how can you tell, and all that, until i pointed out that the indenting was identical. of course, they weren't bad students, they were just being lazy. the professor was pretty enlightened and they got off with a severe slap on the wrist---academic probation for the rest of their stay at my school.
So as to your last paragraph, at least back in 1986, permitted collaboration meant you can work together, but type your own damn code. if you copy files mimic indenting, then you really aren't learning anything. As to your last sentence, school is not the real world. school is where you are supposed to learn how to be one of the people to whom others go begging for answers!
hear hear. I agree entirely, and you saved me having to write the same. My favorite observation is that PRT is just like the automobile system, except that you can't go everywhere you want, the roads are really really expensive, and *you* don't own your car, the government/operator does, so you get the lowest common denominator vehicle---which isn't what most users want or need. In otherwords, expensive crock of shit that sounds really neat.
I must say, however, that government boondoggle is being a bit unfair. In many ways, we need projects like this to keep reminding ourselves that, as bad as the system is what with traffic and negative environmental consequences, the car/highway system generally is the best solution to providing the most people with the most mobility.
For the public transit afficionados out there, I'd add that for the same cost of this PRT system (I think it was 40m pounds, right?) the fine folks in Cardiff could have an excellent bus system. Not that the downtown bus station isn't already pretty spiffy, but, well, okay, it is an eyesore. 40m pounds would create a tremendous improvement to the bus station, the various bus stops on the routes, and even have plenty of money left over for dedicated rights of way to give buses priority around particularly bad intersections.
Without evidence to the contrary, one can only assume that when Søren reverse engineered the proprietary data structures it was legal for him to do so.
Or perhaps you've forgotten the principle of innocent until proven guilty?
Second, reverse engineering is probably more difficult that engineering in the first place. If you can just write your spec and API, hey, you can do what you want and make it how you see fit. Søren had to figure out what corporate engineers did without even being able to talk to them.
Before you slander and defame someone who is working for your benefit, gather some proof to back up your claims.
president bush would not be president had the vote been conducted properly in florida. To many people, myself included, that makes him unworthy of the presidency, and a living breathing insult to the office. He and his party (the supreme court was divided on party lines) show no respect for the office, nor for the will of the people, and therefore he does not deserve my respect. The constitution has already been severly damaged by his holding office, and by the supreme court willfully tossing out their impartiality in their handling of the case.
second, the beauty of our country is that the president deserves no more respect than the next man doing his job. bush is a terrible president, and was promoted to president due to his family connections. Whatever happened to focusing like a laserbeam on the economy? Perhaps the same fate lies for his claim to win this war on terrorists??
as to our next president, I'm putting my money on Rudy Giuliani.
yes and curiously, it is the one piece of unix software that is bloated.
on the other hand, if you know what you're doing, you can almost get it to do what you want always. I edit latex, hit control-c a couple of times to process it, then the same to dvips or bibtex it, then the ggv window automatically updates itself.
I use emacs for programming, and it knows what language i am typing in and how to color the commands.
and so on. Of course, someone else wrote all that bloated featurism in there for me, all i gotta do is find and download the occasional.el file that is missing, like for XAE, the XML authoring environment for Emacs
but emacs sucks eggs when it comes to its gui. God how I wish someone would make emacs pretty, and make the gui do something other than spring up text that responds counter intuitively to mouse
clicky clicky. especially that terribly unhelpful help stuff. The oreilly book is the only way I figured out anything in emacs.
Well, all the pundits are saying now Americans will wake up to the fact that we are vulnerable to terrorism on a grand scale, etc. But really, we are just vulnerable to rich terrorists. This was a major, well planned operation, obviously. Well financed, and by whom? Probably someone who has been profiting handsomely by our mass consumer habits.
All fingers are pointing at Osama Bin Laden. I hate to join the crowd before any proof is offered, but if it is true, guess what, our massive dependence upon crude oil is paying for terrorist attacks on our soil.
So all the yups driving SUVs, and so on and so forth, um, drive a damn fuel efficient car.
Ironically, the oil market has reacted, rather over-reacted to the tragedy, which is driving gas prices way way up. CNN is reporting price gouging at $5 a gallon. Compound that with the fact that the major financial center of the world, and companies who run the stuff, have been creamed. So the futures markets are going to go nuts (tanking, etc). So maybe this attack will cut off the money pipe from the US to the Middle East.
But probably, in a few months after a few thousand pounds of ordinance are dropped, everybody will forget about conservation (especially with our prezident) and go write back to writing the blank check that will fund the next round of attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
I did my own. Been working on it and upgrading it for about 7 years now. Actually I started it as a plugin to Slashcode. Working on that project has ben my way to keep up with stuff. I moved from using Slashcode's DB accessors to Class::DBI, then I decided to ditch slashcode entirely and use Catalyst, then I ditched Class::DBI in favor of DBIx::Class. I have javascript/JSON/AJAX (is AJAJ a real term yet?) interface. We (my wife and I) use it to organize photos and build a static public site. Gallery and the like annoy me because so many pictures suck and people take no time at all to cull the bad ones. So my system is all inward facing, and we pick the good ones (good being subjective, of course) and assemble a static site with words and images, etc. Static is really easy on the server when hit by grandparents and aunts and uncles.
I've played with Image::Magick mostly to do the image manipulation. I looked at GD, but it wasn't feature-full enough. At one time I had lots of interface stuff for Image::Magick routines, like brightness and contrast, etc etc, but even I wasn't using them, so I deleted them. At the moment I have a nifty ajax thing for area of interest, and rotation, and that's pretty much it, but a hold over from the complicated filter days is that I have a crazy pipeline of eval'ed perl stored in the database representing a transform to apply to an image, so that when it is rotated, colored, brightened, or whatever, the transform is applied to the original image, rather than obliterating the original. And in doing that I learned that sometimes a join table in a database has to be three way, or you can get big problems. So I've got a threeway join table, linking the imageid, blobid, and transformid. And I have a small clue about database normalization.
And taking a cue from Slashcode (right before I ditched the code) I bought the argument that it was a good idea to stick images directly in the database. So that's where they are, blobs in the the database. Now I regret that as my images have grown to 2-3 MB rather than about 200K when I started out. Apparently you can play tricks with the server to just memcopy an image from a filesystem to the browser, but not if the image is stuffed in a database.
blah blah blah. I know lots about this stuff, and about perl and apache and mysql and postgresql and ajax and so on that I never would have learned had I not "rolled my own" Why just last weekend I learned about perlcritic and perltidy, and realized how far my usual idioms are from those recommended by Damian Conway. So now I am on a perldoc diet until perlcritic stops whining at me.
nice rant.
may I add my own?
Bush's Electoral Math:
4 years of Bush
- 100,000 dead Iraqi *civilians* and counting
- 1,000 US soldiers and counting
- 2,752 dead US civilians
- 2 World Trade Center Towers
- some civil liberties
+ 0 WMD
+ 0 Osama Bin Laden
+ 1 Saddam Hussein (but he wasn't hiding WMD, he was just being an evil dictator)
+ a record-setting deficit
- tax cuts
=
4 more years of Bush
I can do the math. All that lovely stuff in the middle adds up to zero for more than 50% of the USofA, which means a few tax cuts balances horrible atrocities and illegally invading a sovereign nation which had nothing *whatsoever* to do with the World Trade Center destruction.
Yes, my fellow Americans have been brainwashed apparently. Time to start dishing out some nasty liberalism. Enough of the make nice social disapproval. I want blood on the floor of the House every time the Republicans try to cut taxes for the rich, increase defense spending, funnel through Patriot Acts, and so on. The Democrats in offics have nothing to lose, so my Senators (yay Barbara Boxer!) had better start throwing themselves in front of this trainwreck. Sadly, my representative is a Red-neck.
As I'm sure many others have said, I can't stand plugins and all that, and have never installed Flash and have Java turned off. So good, perhaps this patent will rid the web of those irritating flash only web sites.
Maybe this will spur M$ support for SVG in their browsers, as I believe that qualifies as a standard, not a plugin. Oh, hey, and maybe there will be fewer word, excel, and powerpoint files on the web. Hooray hooray.
True enough.
But (violence always has a way of justifying itself)...
The World Trade Center strike killed a lot of people. That was war on our soil, somewhat as you describe. Americans are still willing to lash out because of this, looking for payback. This is why Bush had such an easy time linking Iraq and 9/11, and selling this stupid but "convenient" war---we don't want war on our streets, which to us is the threat of Anthrax in the mail and airplanes plowing into Disneyland. So popular opinion will be swayed (however slightly) by equating "bomb that nation" with "war on terrer".
Sure there may be more terrorism because of bombing Iraq. But maybe not. An open, mobilized military is a lot more destructive and immediate than a terror cell, plotting in secret. And so the argument of peace is a hard sell, appearing to give the terrorists more time to plan, more resources to use.
Unfortunately for everybody, it is the job of president Bush to sell peace; I think he is smart enough to know that he is too stupid to pull of that argument, so he took the easy exit and is selling war instead.
Unfortunately, we probably will win this war, and quickly, and the rest of the world will forget about it and shut up. For a while.
Most repressive regimes get away with repression for a very long time until the repressed turn the tables. If this war marks the start of America as Global Thug (personally, I hope this period ends in 2004), we have probably 20 to 50 years before we really have to seriously worry about all the little kids on the playground organizing themselves to take us out.
But stupid as it is, I still think this war is just payback because Saddam tried to knock off dubya's daddy. Wouldn't you do the same thing if (a) you lost the popular vote, (b) most basic statistics texts use the Florida election returns to demonstrate that you should have also lost the electoral vote and (c) you're president anyway?
We were handed Bill Bryson books by my English relatives when we were traveling there three years ago. I must say I found them pretty un-funny. I think it was because his humor is negative/sarcastic, and here we were trying to enjoy England, not hate it. So he may be a funny author (and indeed, my British relatives love his books), but I'd advise the curious to *not* read his work when you're traveling yourself.
Not to get completely off topic, but I had the same feeling reading the Blue Guide to France when we were camping in the Loire. The author said something like the Loire River itself is ugly and there are better Chateaux elsewhere in France.... While that may be a true statement, I immediately donated the book to the campground library.
if you don't plan to save money, get enough credit to save your self if you get stuck somewhere. You don't have to use it, but there's nothing like a visa limit of 5K to give you peace of mind when you eating weeds, hitchhiking, sleeping on trains, and whatnot. the best part is that if your card gets snaked, if your mom or someone has your number back home (and if you've memorize the ATT phone home numbers and your ATT phone home credit card number) then you can phone home, have her cancel your card, and arrange to get a new one issued. Much easier than stupid travelers checks or cash.
also, when you leave a country, give all your local currency away---to beggars, travelin friends going the other way, charity, whatever. it is good travel karma, and you will get it back.
as to where or how, just bum around and live by your wits.
I saved money and spent it slowly. but if you don't want to save, then be a hitchiker.
I once configured a dialup modem on slackware the extremely hard way, including AT commands. Now it is pretty easy, but I am running a DSL line, which required me to compile a new kernel and read some HOWTOs. Then my harddrive crashed, oh disaster, lost many photos of my daughter, and my Slackware DSL gateway...but I had been itching to install LEAF Bering rc2 and see how it worked. It was a breeze, as it was designed to work with DSL gateways---some guy (Jaques Nilo, if I remember right) thought of all the little things! Now I have a DSL gateway that boots and runs, firewall and all, from a floppy that isn't even mounted at runtime so I can just press power whenever and reboot nice and clean.
Linux is hard, sure. But it runs my laptop, my webserver, and my hard-drive free firewall.
Try to get that flexible and useful with os-x or win-xp!
I dislike the fact that this seems to be little more than advertising promo echoed by slashdot. I have no interest in deploying a proprietary extension to 802.11b when folks like NoCat.net, nyc wireless, personal telco, and so on are all trying to provide wide area access within the 802.11b published standard. I'd think the Ciscos and Linksyses of the world would be more interested in solving the multihop networking problems within the 802.11b standard and open the results up for others to use, so that they can sell more radios.
In my opinion, any company that sells a proprietary extension to a standard will most likely fail, esp. when the standard is free (free spectrum, free implementations, just buy the radio). After all, there are plenty of better, proprietary networking standards, but we all use TCP/IP.
Nope---old fashioned adults per unit of length.
km is not area; it is length.
km^2 is area.
If you are going to mock a typo, at least get it right.
I use a floppy-based LEAF Bering distro for my firewall on my DSL line at home. No hard drive on that old box since it died. The system boots from the floppy, which isn't mounted at run time, so I just press power or toggle the reset button to shut down/start up. If I ever get hacked, hey, a clean, fresh system is only a reboot away.
I also use a floppy to boot slackware whenever I've downloaded the latest distro to a partition and want to try it out. I don't have a cdrom burner, so a floppy is the only way to go.
i've got a better idea. How about streaming
content underneath ads that only shows during
commercials. i'm thinking sport scores on espn,
stock ticker on msnbc, etc. all the stuff these
guys currently stick under their usual content
they can instead stick under their ads.
anyway, i don't own a tv, so maybe they already
do this.
in the greater LA area, there is kcrw, which has a great music program. Also available online at http://kcrwmusic.com/. In my opinion the best show for what you're asking about is metropolis. The dj, Jason Bentley, was recently written up pretty favorably in an LA Times puff piece on the local electronic music and dance scene.
public slashcode has this.
Good comment. School is for learning. The most subversive thing one can do is learn and learn well. And to break free of / become intellectually and socially equal to those of us in the older generations.
I've always held that the best time to go to college is right after you graduate and realize what you just missed in the past 4 years.
Many years ago the company I worked for migrated from word perfect lotus 123 to work/excel. it was a
.ps output, then gnumeric got pretty usable at version 0.4 i think, and voila, i jumped into linux with a completely compatible set of skills.
painful transition for the average secretary, but the tech staff didn't care much.
In my opinion, the people who claim to "know" ms office products actually have an arcane set of incantations and bad practices that get the job done. the retraining you speak of should be rephrased as "learning a whole new set of bad heuristics". I haven't really used any ms product since 1997, but when i glace over my shoulder at my wife's work on word, i want to retch at her one-at-a-time modification of paragraph styles, intendation, and so on. And she is considered a small miracle worker amongst her co-workers.
That aside, my migration path away from windows is to get away from the whole what you see is what you get trap. what you see is all you get. Instead,
make everybody use LaTeX, cold turkey, and hire a LaTeX hack to devise a set of document formats for your company---reports, memos, letters, etc. That's how I switched. First MikTeX, then Emacs to use MikTeX, then ghostview to see the
I've been installing MikTeX around the office here on various windows boxes, and the latest setup is pretty nice, and there are some excellent setup instructions linked from that page. Although Emacs has a learning curve, AucTeX is pretty great, and with Flyspell running in the background, Word users can even get their spelling checked as they type.
yes, thank you for stating what i was going to say.
i'm glad your response was modded up. I am quite satisfied with the level of activity on LEAF. We are going to move to a recent version of Oxygen in the near future. And the reason for doing that is to be able to run Seawall as a firewall on our
'embedded' boxes.
As a grader of the intro CS clas, way way back when i was a sophomore (jeez, stunning to think how long ago that was in computer years...the freshman worked on FroshVAX), i came across one or two copiers, as i recall. they complained that how can you tell, and all that, until i pointed out that the indenting was identical. of course, they weren't bad students, they were just being lazy. the professor was pretty enlightened and they got off with a severe slap on the wrist---academic probation for the rest of their stay at my school.
So as to your last paragraph, at least back in 1986, permitted collaboration meant you can work together, but type your own damn code. if you copy files mimic indenting, then you really aren't learning anything. As to your last sentence, school is not the real world. school is where you are supposed to learn how to be one of the people to whom others go begging for answers!
right on man.
hear hear. I agree entirely, and you saved me having to write the same. My favorite observation is that PRT is just like the automobile system, except that you can't go everywhere you want, the roads are really really expensive, and *you* don't own your car, the government/operator does, so you get the lowest common denominator vehicle---which isn't what most users want or need. In otherwords, expensive crock of shit that sounds really neat.
I must say, however, that government boondoggle is being a bit unfair. In many ways, we need projects like this to keep reminding ourselves that, as bad as the system is what with traffic and negative environmental consequences, the car/highway system generally is the best solution to providing the most people with the most mobility.
For the public transit afficionados out there, I'd add that for the same cost of this PRT system (I think it was 40m pounds, right?) the fine folks in Cardiff could have an excellent bus system. Not that the downtown bus station isn't already pretty spiffy, but, well, okay, it is an eyesore. 40m pounds would create a tremendous improvement to the bus station, the various bus stops on the routes, and even have plenty of money left over for dedicated rights of way to give buses priority around particularly bad intersections.
So go out already, and enjoy the fact that the city is awake. I haven't had a television for, um, a long time. 15 years.
you could go war driving, and find the geek guard.
Without evidence to the contrary, one can only assume that when Søren reverse engineered the proprietary data structures it was legal for him to do so.
Or perhaps you've forgotten the principle of innocent until proven guilty?
Second, reverse engineering is probably more difficult that engineering in the first place. If you can just write your spec and API, hey, you can do what you want and make it how you see fit. Søren had to figure out what corporate engineers did without even being able to talk to them.
Before you slander and defame someone who is working for your benefit, gather some proof to back up your claims.
okay, that's flamebait sure, but I will bite.
president bush would not be president had the vote been conducted properly in florida. To many people, myself included, that makes him unworthy of the presidency, and a living breathing insult to the office. He and his party (the supreme court was divided on party lines) show no respect for the office, nor for the will of the people, and therefore he does not deserve my respect. The constitution has already been severly damaged by his holding office, and by the supreme court willfully tossing out their impartiality in their handling of the case.
second, the beauty of our country is that the president deserves no more respect than the next man doing his job. bush is a terrible president, and was promoted to president due to his family connections. Whatever happened to focusing like a laserbeam on the economy? Perhaps the same fate lies for his claim to win this war on terrorists??
as to our next president, I'm putting my money on Rudy Giuliani.
on the other hand, if you know what you're doing, you can almost get it to do what you want always. I edit latex, hit control-c a couple of times to process it, then the same to dvips or bibtex it, then the ggv window automatically updates itself.
I use emacs for programming, and it knows what language i am typing in and how to color the commands.
and so on. Of course, someone else wrote all that bloated featurism in there for me, all i gotta do is find and download the occasional .el file that is missing, like for XAE, the XML authoring environment for Emacs
but emacs sucks eggs when it comes to its gui. God how I wish someone would make emacs pretty, and make the gui do something other than spring up text that responds counter intuitively to mouse clicky clicky. especially that terribly unhelpful help stuff. The oreilly book is the only way I figured out anything in emacs.
All fingers are pointing at Osama Bin Laden. I hate to join the crowd before any proof is offered, but if it is true, guess what, our massive dependence upon crude oil is paying for terrorist attacks on our soil.
So all the yups driving SUVs, and so on and so forth, um, drive a damn fuel efficient car.
Ironically, the oil market has reacted, rather over-reacted to the tragedy, which is driving gas prices way way up. CNN is reporting price gouging at $5 a gallon. Compound that with the fact that the major financial center of the world, and companies who run the stuff, have been creamed. So the futures markets are going to go nuts (tanking, etc). So maybe this attack will cut off the money pipe from the US to the Middle East.
But probably, in a few months after a few thousand pounds of ordinance are dropped, everybody will forget about conservation (especially with our prezident) and go write back to writing the blank check that will fund the next round of attacks.
okay, that's my conspiracy theory.