Perly things that may help Perl people in functional programming (or at least that help me) are: - Perl's map, grep and global match/substitution functions - Anonymous subroutines with lexical scoping (ie Scheme closures), and lexical scoping with my in general - eval - the distinction between lists and scalars - foreach
I'm sure other people with less Shiraz inside them can think of other functional language constructs in Perl
Recently a consortium of New Zealand banks tried to get.bank.nz off the ground for the second time - and failed. This was the subject of much mockery and debate on the NZNOG mailing list. The "team" listed on the page looks much like the "From" column in my NZNOG mailbox. Poking fun at the process, and the incorporated society that administers it, has at least as much to do with seeking.geek.nz as any desire for a geeksafe playpen.
1. Most people who have business goals that include slick presentation regard it as "necessary". You will not convince them otherwise.
2. Even if you (the user) follow a strict definition of "necessary", human nature is that there will be one site that tempts you to turn on scripting (or Flash, or Java). It is a pain for the average user to do this on a site by site basis. So eventually, once you've visited enough sites, your browser will be wide open again.
I think you have failed to understand how the filter works.
It is "trained" on a corpus of spam, which is compared to a corpus of known good messages. The important part is that YOU, the user, supply the spam corpus and the good messages. Thus in your case, as long as your "good spamlike messages" are in your "known good pile", similar new ones from the same source will not be tagged as spam. This is where the statistical approach shines over simple keyword matching.
Go on, read about how it works. You might learn something.
A K Dewdney's New Turing Omnibus. Lots of short, chatty chapters on interesting problems in computer science, with illustrations and pseudocode. Good stuff.
Dave Winer's Frontier (http://userland.com) uses outlines combined with a block-structured language (think Python-flavoured C). It's a very nice environment.
According to Bruce Tognazzini, it's because the trash can is in the lower right by default, and the drive icons are directly above it. It is therefore a very easy action to perform. Considerations of ease of performance won out over semantics, and the engineers beat the designers. (I still think was a bad idea too, FWIW - I never met anyone who used a Mac who was confused by this the first time).
The original is the somewhat more pithy "pot calling the kettle blackarse", and dates back to a time when both these utensils were heated by suspending them over fires. The reference is to being dirty/sooty.
"[superlative] in the southern hemisphere" is the standard appellation for anything that New Zealanders (or Australians) are proud of, but isn't actually that huge.
Eg: "New Zealand has the most DSL connections per head of population in the southern hemisphere", or "Australia boasts more camel-related accidents than any other country in the Southern Hemisphere".
Several of the previous comments in this thread referred to 16 year olds. Hence my confusion - when you guys say "underage", I never know whether you're talking about children or not...
Listen up, US folks. In most of the world, including where I live, the age of consent is at least two years lower than 18. I am constantly jarred by references to child pornography and underage sex where the participants turn out to be 16 or 17. Try and be a little less inward-looking, please.
The author of the article I linked did say it was a rant.
Cookies only work their magic if you have full control of the hosting environment; ie if you can set a unique cookie in the first place, and record it in the logs. (Yes, I know, you ought to be able to do this everywhere, but it's not a perfect world). In their absence, I don't know how you measure the effect of proxies in conflating IP numbers.
I think there's WebTrends, and WebTrends. The versions that I have seen (WebTrends Enterprise) did not operate in the manner you described - it was a product that you ran on your own boxes that did pure log file analysis. It did not have a server component that could "tag" a page, and WT themselves were not involved. The feature you describe is very neat - although whether it justifies WT's very high price tag is a good question.
I still feel that if there is a particular metric that is important to you, you are better off coding it yourself or using Analog.
I much prefer less flashy but more capable tools such as Analog (http://www.analog.cx).
WebTrends annoys me greatly, because it is poorly documented, has a sucky interface, and misleads naive users into thinking they are getting reports on "visitors" and "sessions" when in fact they are simply getting stats on a window of visits from an IP number.
Also, remind your marketing folks that quantitative data from your logfiles can only be interpreted with qualitative data from interviews/focus groups/usability studies. If people stay for less time in your site tan before, is it because your design sucks, or because they found what they wanted and left quickly? Only qualitative research can tell you.
Whenever marketing people spot trend variations, they will ask you why. You will need to know the above in order to respond properly.
"I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do whatever I am told is a good idea. This might cost me bonuses, raises, promotions, and may even label me as "undesirable" by places I don't want to work at anyway, but I don't care. I will not compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight. Of course, I won't always win, and I will sometimes be forced to do things I don't agree with, but if I am my objections will be known, and if I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I will shout "I told you so!" repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage." -- Abigail, as reworked by Mike Sphar
OK. I use MS Word 2000 every day to write technical documentation, reports and proposals - I work in a consulting firm where for better or worse, Office docs are standard.
I have taken to using OO 641 with Linux at home. I have no problems importing docs both ways, and no one is any the wiser at work.
As a substitute for Word, OO is just fine. And the autocompletion as you type is kind of nice.
- Bruce at aardvark.co.nz - Anyone at Computerworld NZ - Anyone at NetGuide - TelstraClear;-)
Seriously, if you are correct, this amounts to fraud, and paying customers deserve to know. If you can rat them out anonymously in the NZ press, you should.
I'm sorry. I graft web front-ends on to other systems for a living. No matter how much I talk up the benefits of a bigger customer base, or point out that people with Macs or Linux desktops probably have more money to spend, clients say that gaining the last 5% is not worth another 20% in time. (Non-Windows = 5% of browsers. And there's variation there between IE for Mac, Netscape flavours, and various Mozillas).
We try to write standards-compliant code that will work on most platforms, but if a customer really wants some client-side voodoo, 9 times out of 10 they only want to pay for, say, IE 4, 5 and up. Maybe Netscape 4.7* if you're lucky. And PCs only. Where there's little extra effort to be compatible, we can sneak it in and everyone wins. But sometimes DHTML/Javascript/CSS/streaming media issues make it impossible to justify the cost.
Having just spent last night wrestling with xanim and mplayer to try and get streaming WMP going, I can sympathise. But in the end, we can only do what clients pay us to do.
You could also speculate whether professional couple who work in IT are more likely to spend insufficient time with their kids. 60 hour weeks, heavy reliance on daycare.., parents preoccupied when they _are_ home.
Perhaps there is a correlation between certain behaviours, and the children of engineers - but it might not be genetic, it might be to do with the way those children are raised. (Or both, of course).
In any skill, there are stages of mastery, from novice to expert.
Novices know nothing.
Apprentices know some things by rote.
Competent people have mastered all the rules...
... and so on, until you hit experts, who no longer follow any easily described rules at all - they understand everything as it is, with no simplification.
In general, the best people to teach novices are the competent, whose knowledge is still at the "rule" stage, but whose abilities are broad ranging and well learnt. The worst people to teach novices are experts, who understand so much that they no longer think in the same way as the novice.
Hence the derision experts often express for teachers ("those who can't, teach"). The good teacher knows something the expert doesn't - what to leave out, how to convey broad principles memorably, what explanations to leave until later. Cranky experts knock Dummies books, which for all their cutesiness and condescension are models of clear technical writing.
The first wave of Linux documentation was written by experts for experts. I have no doubt that the simpler stuff will come along (there's a Linux for Dummies, perhaps it's coming already).
The point: don't assume that you can teach well because you are a subject expert. Conversely, don't think that you have nothing to teach because you're not.
"It dosen't matter how bad, buggy, cludgy, and crufty a code base is, never ever rewrite it". If you don't understand what the code is, if it's impossible to read, don't worry! that's the sign of good code!"
That's completely misunderstanding what Joel said. He's saying don't throw _working_code out: fix bugs, clean it up, incrementally improve it. (Which is XP practice too, come to think of it). He just says "don't rewrite from scratch".
All he says about code being hard to read is that it may explain why people would prefer to throw working code out. The alternative is to comment and then slowly improve the old code: he argues that this often turns out to be faster.
You did read the article, didn't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Perly things that may help Perl people in functional programming (or at least that help me) are:
- Perl's map, grep and global match/substitution functions
- Anonymous subroutines with lexical scoping (ie Scheme closures), and lexical scoping with my in general
- eval
- the distinction between lists and scalars
- foreach
I'm sure other people with less Shiraz inside them can think of other functional language constructs in Perl
Recently a consortium of New Zealand banks tried to get .bank.nz off the ground for the second time - and failed. This was the subject of much mockery and debate on the NZNOG mailing list. The "team" listed on the page looks much like the "From" column in my NZNOG mailbox. Poking fun at the process, and the incorporated society that administers it, has at least as much to do with seeking .geek.nz as any desire for a geeksafe playpen.
The double-click interval is configurable. Why didn't you show him how to change it?
1. Most people who have business goals that include slick presentation regard it as "necessary". You will not convince them otherwise.
2. Even if you (the user) follow a strict definition of "necessary", human nature is that there will be one site that tempts you to turn on scripting (or Flash, or Java). It is a pain for the average user to do this on a site by site basis. So eventually, once you've visited enough sites, your browser will be wide open again.
The MS puppy is neutered, and can't breed. The free puppy still has its nuts, and will happily sire a litter of vigorous bastards for you.
I think you have failed to understand how the filter works.
It is "trained" on a corpus of spam, which is compared to a corpus of known good messages. The important part is that YOU, the user, supply the spam corpus and the good messages. Thus in your case, as long as your "good spamlike messages" are in your "known good pile", similar new ones from the same source will not be tagged as spam. This is where the statistical approach shines over simple keyword matching.
Go on, read about how it works. You might learn something.
A K Dewdney's New Turing Omnibus. Lots of short, chatty chapters on interesting problems in computer science, with illustrations and pseudocode. Good stuff.
The Maverick Partnership
A division of The Which Company Pty Ltd
ABN: 90 091 728 620
Postal: P.O. Box 159, Northbridge W.A. 6865
Phone: +618 6210 1348 Fax: +618 6210 1445
are advertising some book or other.
Any Aussie state or federal laws worth mentioning when I ring them?
Dave Winer's Frontier (http://userland.com) uses outlines combined with a block-structured language (think Python-flavoured C). It's a very nice environment.
According to Bruce Tognazzini, it's because the trash can is in the lower right by default, and the drive icons are directly above it. It is therefore a very easy action to perform. Considerations of ease of performance won out over semantics, and the engineers beat the designers. (I still think was a bad idea too, FWIW - I never met anyone who used a Mac who was confused by this the first time).
... by pausing and restarting. The echo then went away.
(It took a little while to realise it wasn't creative license on the part of the Flash author!)
The original is the somewhat more pithy "pot calling the kettle blackarse", and dates back to a time when both these utensils were heated by suspending them over fires. The reference is to being dirty/sooty.
"[superlative] in the southern hemisphere" is the standard appellation for anything that New Zealanders (or Australians) are proud of, but isn't actually that huge.
Eg: "New Zealand has the most DSL connections per head of population in the southern hemisphere", or "Australia boasts more camel-related accidents than any other country in the Southern Hemisphere".
Several of the previous comments in this thread referred to 16 year olds. Hence my confusion - when you guys say "underage", I never know whether you're talking about children or not...
Listen up, US folks. In most of the world, including where I live, the age of consent is at least two years lower than 18. I am constantly jarred by references to child pornography and underage sex where the participants turn out to be 16 or 17. Try and be a little less inward-looking, please.
Where was Auerbach?
The author of the article I linked did say it was a rant.
Cookies only work their magic if you have full control of the hosting environment; ie if you can set a unique cookie in the first place, and record it in the logs. (Yes, I know, you ought to be able to do this everywhere, but it's not a perfect world). In their absence, I don't know how you measure the effect of proxies in conflating IP numbers.
I think there's WebTrends, and WebTrends. The versions that I have seen (WebTrends Enterprise) did not operate in the manner you described - it was a product that you ran on your own boxes that did pure log file analysis. It did not have a server component that could "tag" a page, and WT themselves were not involved. The feature you describe is very neat - although whether it justifies WT's very high price tag is a good question.
I still feel that if there is a particular metric that is important to you, you are better off coding it yourself or using Analog.
WebTrends annoys me greatly, because it is poorly documented, has a sucky interface, and misleads naive users into thinking they are getting reports on "visitors" and "sessions" when in fact they are simply getting stats on a window of visits from an IP number.
Read this document Why web usage statistics are worse than meaningless and memorise it.
Also, remind your marketing folks that quantitative data from your logfiles can only be interpreted with qualitative data from interviews/focus groups/usability studies. If people stay for less time in your site tan before, is it because your design sucks, or because they found what they wanted and left quickly? Only qualitative research can tell you.
Whenever marketing people spot trend variations, they will ask you why. You will need to know the above in order to respond properly.
"I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do whatever I am told is a good idea. This might cost me bonuses, raises, promotions, and may even label me as "undesirable" by places I don't want to work at anyway, but I don't care. I will not compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight. Of course, I won't always win, and I will sometimes be forced to do things I don't agree with, but if I am my objections will be known, and if I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I will shout "I told you so!" repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage."
-- Abigail, as reworked by Mike Sphar
OK. I use MS Word 2000 every day to write technical documentation, reports and proposals - I work in a consulting firm where for better or worse, Office docs are standard.
I have taken to using OO 641 with Linux at home. I have no problems importing docs both ways, and no one is any the wiser at work.
As a substitute for Word, OO is just fine. And the autocompletion as you type is kind of nice.
People who might like to hear from you:
;-)
- Bruce at aardvark.co.nz
- Anyone at Computerworld NZ
- Anyone at NetGuide
- TelstraClear
Seriously, if you are correct, this amounts to fraud, and paying customers deserve to know. If you can rat them out anonymously in the NZ press, you should.
I'm sorry. I graft web front-ends on to other systems for a living. No matter how much I talk up the benefits of a bigger customer base, or point out that people with Macs or Linux desktops probably have more money to spend, clients say that gaining the last 5% is not worth another 20% in time. (Non-Windows = 5% of browsers. And there's variation there between IE for Mac, Netscape flavours, and various Mozillas).
We try to write standards-compliant code that will work on most platforms, but if a customer really wants some client-side voodoo, 9 times out of 10 they only want to pay for, say, IE 4, 5 and up. Maybe Netscape 4.7* if you're lucky. And PCs only. Where there's little extra effort to be compatible, we can sneak it in and everyone wins. But sometimes DHTML/Javascript/CSS/streaming media issues make it impossible to justify the cost.
Having just spent last night wrestling with xanim and mplayer to try and get streaming WMP going, I can sympathise. But in the end, we can only do what clients pay us to do.
You could also speculate whether professional couple who work in IT are more likely to spend insufficient time with their kids. 60 hour weeks, heavy reliance on daycare.., parents preoccupied when they _are_ home.
Perhaps there is a correlation between certain behaviours, and the children of engineers - but it might not be genetic, it might be to do with the way those children are raised. (Or both, of course).
In any skill, there are stages of mastery, from novice to expert.
Novices know nothing.
Apprentices know some things by rote.
Competent people have mastered all the rules...
... and so on, until you hit experts, who no longer follow any easily described rules at all - they understand everything as it is, with no simplification.
In general, the best people to teach novices are the competent, whose knowledge is still at the "rule" stage, but whose abilities are broad ranging and well learnt. The worst people to teach novices are experts, who understand so much that they no longer think in the same way as the novice.
Hence the derision experts often express for teachers ("those who can't, teach"). The good teacher knows something the expert doesn't - what to leave out, how to convey broad principles memorably, what explanations to leave until later. Cranky experts knock Dummies books, which for all their cutesiness and condescension are models of clear technical writing.
The first wave of Linux documentation was written by experts for experts. I have no doubt that the simpler stuff will come along (there's a Linux for Dummies, perhaps it's coming already).
The point: don't assume that you can teach well because you are a subject expert. Conversely, don't think that you have nothing to teach because you're not.
All he says about code being hard to read is that it may explain why people would prefer to throw working code out. The alternative is to comment and then slowly improve the old code: he argues that this often turns out to be faster. You did read the article, didn't you?