"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family. I tell this joke a lot. Once, a teacher told me that she tells the same one but for a 'teacher'."
Previous posts have mentioned Perl and PHP; seconding those for high-intensity search-and-destroy missions. As for software, you can't go wrong with TextPad, WinSCP, and PuTTY.
JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.
Beg to differ. JavaScript has just as much "modularity" as any other object-oriented language; methods like JSON and libraries like Dojo, Prototype, and the aforementioned Yahoo! Web Services APIs are proof.
Every few years there comes along Yet Another Initiative to fire all the webdevs. No disrepect to Google's engineers, who are clearly brilliant, but we've been there and done that. For a good time, open up Firefox's DOM Inspector, crack into their Kitchen Sink demo, and boggle over the iframes and tables and embedded JavaScript, oh my!
Most of the way through the article the author says the following:
"So the point of all this is to say, although most people don't choose technology based on personality, often personality can influence important decisions such as business expenditures."
Have to disagree strongly. Personality--how sexy is that iPod Nano, how cute is that Mini Cooper, how smart will you look running Linux--is the prime mover behind a huge number of technology purchases.
Unfortunately, the personality lesson many people learn from installing Linux is this: if you get stuck, you will be made to feel very, very stupid, and--bonus!--your experience will remain online for others to boggle over forever.
Dood... they missed one of the very best skiffy shows EVAR, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. X-Files creatorChris Carter cites Kolchak as key inspiration... run down the five-DVD set, turn off the lights, and prepare to be creeped out, starting with the scariest theme song in the history of TV.
I note with interest the presence of an onboard speedometer in the Oregon graphic. If they're not very careful to protect individual rights, the government of California is going to wind up with an extremely efficient method for collecting revenue in the form of traffic tickets.
Next logical steps: centrally-controlled speed governors, ignition cutoffs, and Breathalyzers. What fun!;)
I cringe whenever the hi-tech forensics teams come onstage... IP addresses that start with 400, magic trace-back of e-mail to physical locations, and (of course) those 320-by-200 pixel security cameras that can zoom in tightly enough to grab the reflection of the suspect's face off the victim's cornea really make my teeth itch. (And then there are those red-hot CSIs and coroners who wear low-cut tank tops while gathering evidence... but that's all totally real, right?)
This would be the Bracher School polling place, at the intersection of Chromite and Bowers. My vote went into the box without an envelope... my wife's vote, and four or five others I saw before I left, went into Provisional Ballot envelopes.
If you intend to cast a paper ballot today, please be ready for an adventure. This morning in Santa Clara, Vickie and I signed in the way we always do and requested paper ballots. Hilarity ensued: attempting to vote on paper caused a flurry of activity: oh-no-you're-not, you-have-to-vote-with-the-machine, what's-your-major-malfunction-mister, and other clucking noises. (Cory Doctorow had something about this in BoingBoing on October 18th, which was dead on.)
There was no "votamatic" machine for paper ballots any longer; we had to enter a plain brown cardboard voting station that looked exactly like a refrigerator carton and mark our ballots with a pen. (Pen not supplied; bring your own.) I was first in line; after marking my ballot I approached the desk and asked the Nice Lady on the end if I should put it into the box. She nodded and smiled at me, so in it went.
Then I turned to look at Vickie and the rest of the line and noticed they all had big pink envelopes to put their ballots into when they were done. A tiny peanut-sized bulb flickered to life inside my brain. I went to the stack and checked, and sure enough: the big pink envelope said PROVISIONAL BALLOT on it. It had several choices to check: you had no ID, you had moved after the registration deadline, or were Otherwise Unclean. The Other Nice Lady--the one who had her act together--was making everybody who voted on paper seal it inside the provisional ballot envelope, even though there was no "I HAVE BEEN REGISTERED VOTER IN THIS PRECINCT SINCE 1987 AND I AM CHOOSING TO VOTE ON PAPER DAMMIT" box to check.
Further hilarity ensued: Vickie is a lawyer with a long history of political activism, so there was much back-and-forth between her and the Other Nice Lady, who then got on the phone with Headquarters and came back with the following ruling: we were all to mark our paper ballots, seal them in pink envelopes, and don't worry about filling out our names and addresses on the envelopes. Somehow--the nebulous theory goes--the election workers will be able to magically detect the paper ballots filled out by properly identified voters and pull them out to be counted tonight.
We left the station feeling VERY unsure that our votes would be counted.
If I was a busy election worker tonight, I'd just grab all those pink envelopes and heave them into the Provisional stack. And if I was the guy at the Provisional Counting Station, I'd have to seriously consider trashing all those envelopes without names and addresses filled in on the form on the outside. That's the point of a provisional ballot envelope, after all: to make it possible for them to verify your right to vote.
Hugo rules have varied over the years; currently they use the same criteria for as do the Nebula Awards. According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a short story is anything under 7500 words, a novelette is 7500 to 15000 words, a novella is 15000 to 40000 words, and a novel is anything longer than that.
Is there really a measurable difference in artistic impact between a 7499-word short story and a 7501-word novella? Not really. Authors and publishers like those multiple categories, however, since it increases the net number of available awards and therefore the possibility that they might win one.
You can do this without using an image or JavaScript, and give away nothing in the source of the message. Here's one way, using Apache,.htaccess, and PHP:
1) In the header of your HTML e-mail message, load up a style sheet:
2) In the server directory containing your CSS file, add the following line to.htaccess:
AddType application/x-httpd-php.css
Any file ending in.css under this directory will now be run as if it were a PHP script.
3) Save this as your.css:
<?php require "track_message.php"; ?>
Done. No images, no JavaScript... any reader that accepts HTML messages will trigger track_message.php, and nothing unusual will be visible in source code, even if some curious person pulls down http://your.server.com/your.css to take a look.
Text-based interfaces cannot be beat for data entry. Anecdotes about users typing several screens ahead without looking at the terminal are correct; I used to do this myself when entering sales orders and A/R/ invoices. (Hundreds, sometimes thousands per day; this was an early-Eighties monkey-work job doing software order fulfillment.)
There's a much firmer-feeling connection with the interface when you don't have to constantly reach for the mouse, find the tiny button, and click it. I never felt a single twinge of RSI until I had to start mousing around.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of old-school technology that worked best, I dearly loved my high-speed dot-matrix printer and fanfold multi-layer NCR forms. When the LaserJets landed it was a Sign of the Apocalypse.
Mental math depends heavily on the availability and reliability of short-term memory. You need to be able to hold two or three numbers in memory while you manipulate two or three more. The most reliable way to acquire this mental RAM is to practice, so here is the mental equivalent of push-ups:
To square any two-digit number X, decide what number N it will take to raise or lower X to P, the nearest multiple of 10. Add the opposite of N to X to get Q, multiply P times Q, and add N^2 to the result. For instance:
The hard part is 70 * 64, but if you teach yourself to ignore the zero at the end of the 70 and multiply from left to right, it sounds like this:
"Seven sixes make forty-two, times ten makes four hundred and twenty. Seven fours make twenty-eight, plus four hundred and twenty makes four hundred and forty-eight, times ten makes forty-four hundred and eighty, plus three squared--that's nine--makes forty-four hundred and eighty-nine."
Presto, you've figured out the answer in less time than it takes to say it. Note: don't be discouraged if you forget what number you needed to add at the end, or what number you were originally squaring; they're going to drop out of your short-term memory storage until you practice enough.
If you get this down you will win bar bets, impress your co-workers, and shut your hardass father's mouth next time he starts droning on about how they didn't have calculators when he was in school... they had sticks and rocks, and they were happy to have 'em!
Seconding motions on music, languages, and resolving inner conflicts, especially the ones with family.
This may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for your brain is to get your body into better shape. Get a physical or at least go donate blood at a university hospital like Stanford; they'll send you your hematocrit (iron count) and cholesterol. More exercise will clear the cobwebs and improve your sleep cycle; better diet will feed your brain more of what it needs to keep running. You might also want to consider supplementing with moderate amounts of creatine; it's good for the body and good for the brain.
That's an easily verifiable bit of amateur anthropology. Go to any Gold's Gym or other health club overwhelmingly populated by guys and you'll see it in action: women with headphones on are working out right now, thanks very much, and do not want to be told for the umpteenth time that they have "nice abs."
At work it's problematic: some people in cubes who must concentrate on coding need the option of personal music, but people whose job it is to support the people in cubes need to show that they're available from clear across the room. This is very tough to conceptualize among the support staff, who need to feel like they count as much as everybody else or there will be a bunch of very unhappy coders in the cubes.
At home... ick, don't get me started. Kids who show up for dinner or get in the car with the Walkman on are clearly communicating that they Do Not Wish To Be Parented Right Now, and that sends an extra-loud message of Please Parent Me Extra-Hard Right Now.:)
I'm guessing it's going to be a French flag as soon as they have the French version of the site ready to go.
Re:Easier way to lower the electricity bill
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Placebostats worked quite nicely for me a few years back when I was converting a warehouse to an open-plan office building. The poodleheads in sales and marketing froze to death in the offices and the tech support types sweated in the cube farm in the middle. This had resulted in spectacular Thermostat Wars in the old building, and quite a lot of interest from the poodleheaded sales and marketing types in making sure that Everyone Who Mattered was warm enough the next time around. (Remember, the person who is colder always beats the person who is hotter, especially if the person who is colder is a female person and the person who is hotter is not. This seems counterintuitive; the person who is colder can always wear more clothes, while there is a lower limit to the number of clothes the person who is hotter may remove in the workplace... but I digress.)
We found some very nice dummies that lit up, clicked, and hummed convincingly. Problem solved... although I must concur with the poster above me who said Don't Try This At Home.
I've been fielding communications from people like you for almost nine years now over at Speculations, and I keep saying the same thing to everyone: please don't self-publish your work.
With very few exceptions it ends badly for the author, with a garage full of books, an empty bank account, and no chance of a career as a professional author. Pointers upstream to SFWA and Writer Beware are excellent places to start; I would also recommend looking around the Speculations site, paying particular attention to the Caveat Scrivener section of The Rumor Mill.
Above all things, remember Yog's Law: money flows towards the artist. Never pay anyone to read, edit, represent, review, or publish your work; if you do, you're a sucker, not a professional.
Slashdot Mirror
Quake Live works fine under Parallels; the only gotcha is you have to press fn-F3 to ready yourself.
From woz.org:
"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family. I tell this joke a lot. Once, a teacher told me that she tells the same one but for a 'teacher'."
Thanks, but it's not that big of a deal. Speculations is a magazine for writers, and could do without being Slashdotted again. :)
Previous posts have mentioned Perl and PHP; seconding those for high-intensity search-and-destroy missions. As for software, you can't go wrong with TextPad, WinSCP, and PuTTY.
For best practices (separation of content from structure from behavior, mostly) keep an eye on are listed in and around A List Apart and the Web Standards Project. And if you're looking for several sets of outstanding presentation and behavior tools, check out the YUIBlog and the Yahoo! Developer Network. (Hint: their page grid layout, font normalization, and CSS reset libraries are an excellent place to start.)
Beg to differ. JavaScript has just as much "modularity" as any other object-oriented language; methods like JSON and libraries like Dojo, Prototype, and the aforementioned Yahoo! Web Services APIs are proof.
Every few years there comes along Yet Another Initiative to fire all the webdevs. No disrepect to Google's engineers, who are clearly brilliant, but we've been there and done that. For a good time, open up Firefox's DOM Inspector, crack into their Kitchen Sink demo, and boggle over the iframes and tables and embedded JavaScript, oh my!
Most of the way through the article the author says the following:
"So the point of all this is to say, although most people don't choose technology based on personality, often personality can influence important decisions such as business expenditures."
Have to disagree strongly. Personality--how sexy is that iPod Nano, how cute is that Mini Cooper, how smart will you look running Linux--is the prime mover behind a huge number of technology purchases.
Unfortunately, the personality lesson many people learn from installing Linux is this: if you get stuck, you will be made to feel very, very stupid, and--bonus!--your experience will remain online for others to boggle over forever.
If you plan to use it for development, you can't go too far wrong with TextPad and WinSCP.
You might also find Tunebite useful, if you subscribe to any online music services.
Look for me (as Lars Overshank) in Expodrine, scragging those Cheese Elementals.
Dood ... they missed one of the very best skiffy shows EVAR, Kolchak: The Night Stalker . X-Files creator Chris Carter cites Kolchak as key inspiration ... run down the five-DVD set, turn off the lights, and prepare to be creeped out, starting with the scariest theme song in the history of TV.
I note with interest the presence of an onboard speedometer in the Oregon graphic. If they're not very careful to protect individual rights, the government of California is going to wind up with an extremely efficient method for collecting revenue in the form of traffic tickets.
;)
Next logical steps: centrally-controlled speed governors, ignition cutoffs, and Breathalyzers. What fun!
I cringe whenever the hi-tech forensics teams come onstage ... IP addresses that start with 400, magic trace-back of e-mail to physical locations, and (of course) those 320-by-200 pixel security cameras that can zoom in tightly enough to grab the reflection of the suspect's face off the victim's cornea really make my teeth itch. (And then there are those red-hot CSIs and coroners who wear low-cut tank tops while gathering evidence ... but that's all totally real, right?)
This would be the Bracher School polling place, at the intersection of Chromite and Bowers. My vote went into the box without an envelope ... my wife's vote, and four or five others I saw before I left, went into Provisional Ballot envelopes.
If you intend to cast a paper ballot today, please be ready for an adventure. This morning in Santa Clara, Vickie and I signed in the way we always do and requested paper ballots. Hilarity ensued: attempting to vote on paper caused a flurry of activity: oh-no-you're-not, you-have-to-vote-with-the-machine, what's-your-major-malfunction-mister, and other clucking noises. (Cory Doctorow had something about this in BoingBoing on October 18th, which was dead on.)
There was no "votamatic" machine for paper ballots any longer; we had to enter a plain brown cardboard voting station that looked exactly like a refrigerator carton and mark our ballots with a pen. (Pen not supplied; bring your own.) I was first in line; after marking my ballot I approached the desk and asked the Nice Lady on the end if I should put it into the box. She nodded and smiled at me, so in it went.
Then I turned to look at Vickie and the rest of the line and noticed they all had big pink envelopes to put their ballots into when they were done. A tiny peanut-sized bulb flickered to life inside my brain. I went to the stack and checked, and sure enough: the big pink envelope said PROVISIONAL BALLOT on it. It had several choices to check: you had no ID, you had moved after the registration deadline, or were Otherwise Unclean. The Other Nice Lady--the one who had her act together--was making everybody who voted on paper seal it inside the provisional ballot envelope, even though there was no "I HAVE BEEN REGISTERED VOTER IN THIS PRECINCT SINCE 1987 AND I AM CHOOSING TO VOTE ON PAPER DAMMIT" box to check.
Further hilarity ensued: Vickie is a lawyer with a long history of political activism, so there was much back-and-forth between her and the Other Nice Lady, who then got on the phone with Headquarters and came back with the following ruling: we were all to mark our paper ballots, seal them in pink envelopes, and don't worry about filling out our names and addresses on the envelopes. Somehow--the nebulous theory goes--the election workers will be able to magically detect the paper ballots filled out by properly identified voters and pull them out to be counted tonight.
We left the station feeling VERY unsure that our votes would be counted.
If I was a busy election worker tonight, I'd just grab all those pink envelopes and heave them into the Provisional stack. And if I was the guy at the Provisional Counting Station, I'd have to seriously consider trashing all those envelopes without names and addresses filled in on the form on the outside. That's the point of a provisional ballot envelope, after all: to make it possible for them to verify your right to vote.
AirFlash and Viag Interkom did this in 2001 ... and Orange UK did it in May. Perhaps the technology is finally Ready for Prime Time?
Hugo rules have varied over the years; currently they use the same criteria for as do the Nebula Awards. According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a short story is anything under 7500 words, a novelette is 7500 to 15000 words, a novella is 15000 to 40000 words, and a novel is anything longer than that.
Is there really a measurable difference in artistic impact between a 7499-word short story and a 7501-word novella? Not really. Authors and publishers like those multiple categories, however, since it increases the net number of available awards and therefore the possibility that they might win one.
You can do this without using an image or JavaScript, and give away nothing in the source of the message. Here's one way, using Apache, .htaccess, and PHP:
.htaccess:
.css
.css under this directory will now be run as if it were a PHP script.
... any reader that accepts HTML messages will trigger track_message.php, and nothing unusual will be visible in source code, even if some curious person pulls down http://your.server.com/your.css to take a look.
1) In the header of your HTML e-mail message, load up a style sheet:
<style type="text/css">
@import "http://your.server.com/your.css";
</style>
2) In the server directory containing your CSS file, add the following line to
AddType application/x-httpd-php
Any file ending in
3) Save this as your.css:
<?php
require "track_message.php";
?>
Done. No images, no JavaScript
Text-based interfaces cannot be beat for data entry. Anecdotes about users typing several screens ahead without looking at the terminal are correct; I used to do this myself when entering sales orders and A/R/ invoices. (Hundreds, sometimes thousands per day; this was an early-Eighties monkey-work job doing software order fulfillment.)
There's a much firmer-feeling connection with the interface when you don't have to constantly reach for the mouse, find the tiny button, and click it. I never felt a single twinge of RSI until I had to start mousing around.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of old-school technology that worked best, I dearly loved my high-speed dot-matrix printer and fanfold multi-layer NCR forms. When the LaserJets landed it was a Sign of the Apocalypse.
"Place on ground, light fuse, get away."
Mental math depends heavily on the availability and reliability of short-term memory. You need to be able to hold two or three numbers in memory while you manipulate two or three more. The most reliable way to acquire this mental RAM is to practice, so here is the mental equivalent of push-ups:
... they had sticks and rocks, and they were happy to have 'em!
To square any two-digit number X, decide what number N it will take to raise or lower X to P, the nearest multiple of 10. Add the opposite of N to X to get Q, multiply P times Q, and add N^2 to the result. For instance:
67^2 =
(67 + 3) * (67 - 3) + 3^2 =
70 * 64 + 9 =
4489
The hard part is 70 * 64, but if you teach yourself to ignore the zero at the end of the 70 and multiply from left to right, it sounds like this:
"Seven sixes make forty-two, times ten makes four hundred and twenty. Seven fours make twenty-eight, plus four hundred and twenty makes four hundred and forty-eight, times ten makes forty-four hundred and eighty, plus three squared--that's nine--makes forty-four hundred and eighty-nine."
Presto, you've figured out the answer in less time than it takes to say it. Note: don't be discouraged if you forget what number you needed to add at the end, or what number you were originally squaring; they're going to drop out of your short-term memory storage until you practice enough.
If you get this down you will win bar bets, impress your co-workers, and shut your hardass father's mouth next time he starts droning on about how they didn't have calculators when he was in school
Seconding motions on music, languages, and resolving inner conflicts, especially the ones with family.
This may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for your brain is to get your body into better shape. Get a physical or at least go donate blood at a university hospital like Stanford; they'll send you your hematocrit (iron count) and cholesterol. More exercise will clear the cobwebs and improve your sleep cycle; better diet will feed your brain more of what it needs to keep running. You might also want to consider supplementing with moderate amounts of creatine; it's good for the body and good for the brain.
That's an easily verifiable bit of amateur anthropology. Go to any Gold's Gym or other health club overwhelmingly populated by guys and you'll see it in action: women with headphones on are working out right now, thanks very much, and do not want to be told for the umpteenth time that they have "nice abs."
... ick, don't get me started. Kids who show up for dinner or get in the car with the Walkman on are clearly communicating that they Do Not Wish To Be Parented Right Now, and that sends an extra-loud message of Please Parent Me Extra-Hard Right Now. :)
At work it's problematic: some people in cubes who must concentrate on coding need the option of personal music, but people whose job it is to support the people in cubes need to show that they're available from clear across the room. This is very tough to conceptualize among the support staff, who need to feel like they count as much as everybody else or there will be a bunch of very unhappy coders in the cubes.
At home
I'm guessing it's going to be a French flag as soon as they have the French version of the site ready to go.
Placebostats worked quite nicely for me a few years back when I was converting a warehouse to an open-plan office building. The poodleheads in sales and marketing froze to death in the offices and the tech support types sweated in the cube farm in the middle. This had resulted in spectacular Thermostat Wars in the old building, and quite a lot of interest from the poodleheaded sales and marketing types in making sure that Everyone Who Mattered was warm enough the next time around. (Remember, the person who is colder always beats the person who is hotter, especially if the person who is colder is a female person and the person who is hotter is not. This seems counterintuitive; the person who is colder can always wear more clothes, while there is a lower limit to the number of clothes the person who is hotter may remove in the workplace ... but I digress.)
... although I must concur with the poster above me who said Don't Try This At Home.
We found some very nice dummies that lit up, clicked, and hummed convincingly. Problem solved
Soulbath has been around for three or four years now; lots of good grayscale fun here.
I've been fielding communications from people like you for almost nine years now over at Speculations, and I keep saying the same thing to everyone: please don't self-publish your work.
With very few exceptions it ends badly for the author, with a garage full of books, an empty bank account, and no chance of a career as a professional author. Pointers upstream to SFWA and Writer Beware are excellent places to start; I would also recommend looking around the Speculations site, paying particular attention to the Caveat Scrivener section of The Rumor Mill.
Above all things, remember Yog's Law: money flows towards the artist. Never pay anyone to read, edit, represent, review, or publish your work; if you do, you're a sucker, not a professional.