PDQ Bach (aka Peter Schickele) also did a spoof called 'Prelude to "Einstein on the Fritz"'. It's found on his "1712 Overture" album.
I actually find Einstein to be good music to program to. Does a good job of masking people talking in the background and seems to help me keep up a good pace.
A copy of Donald Knuth's argument against software patents can be found on the LPF's web site. He is a very well respected computer scientist and programmer and makes a good argument.
NT is extremely difficult to configure for use in a public lab environment. You have to lock down the machine well enough that one user can't make the machine unusable for others, without breaking all of the software running on it.
A lot of apps want to write in system directories or write in random places in the registry (which, out of the box, is wide open to the current logged in user). Add to this users downloading random software from the web and trying to install it and a web browser that does the same (active X controls).
I'm guessing these people have locked down as best as they can, but end up with a bunch of machines being unusable at any given time, and a lot of "taxpayers money" being spent on reinstalling the broken machines.
Also, I believe installing security patches and service packs is still a manual, go-to-every-machine process on Win2k. (Unless you want to reimage the machine for every patch - either way a lot of manpower and hence money wasted.)
At my last job my desktop was a dual 866MHz PIII Dell 2450 with 2 19" LCDs. It only had 768MB of RAM, but I'd definitely take it over most Sun machines that you'd see near a desk.
On it, I ran XEmacs, Mozilla, Oracle, an complex XML/XSL based Java web application, two other Java applications that fetch and process data, and the usual desktop junk (gnome) without any sluggishness.
We put smaller 2450's in production to replace U80s and E450s with more processors because the Dell boxes ran our Java app a lot faster. (The web app was at least twice as fast.)
And MS-SQL usually returns the same result set for a given query. True, it sometimes leaves out a few rows, but cut it some slack - we all make mistakes.
Re:When will we get a proper packaging system?
on
RPM Dependency Graph
·
· Score: 1
RPM is nice, because almost everyone uses it, and because it is based on Redhat, which - unlike Debian - devotes enough effort to the initial installation process that it comes close to being a viable Windows alternative.
The initial installation process on RH is better. This has nothing to do with the packaging system itself. Debian has 90% of the stuff to make initial instalation easy; e.g., debconf infrastructure. X (and other hardware) configuration, and writing the install program are all thats left undone.
I love debian - in theory - but in practice, it can be a bitch to get working. Even experienced Debian users who repeatedly try to persuade me to abandon RedHat are forced to admit that they never did get USB working, and after a while you realize that they are more in-love with the theory of debian than the reality.
USB seems to work for me, but I've had to tweak conf files and/or run the utilities that come in the package to rebuild the conf files. There are a lot of rough edges, though. For example, X is a pain to set up in Debian.
Secondly, no elegant way to integrate software that hasn't committed to one of the packaging systems into an architecture. Both RedHat and Debian both work great when you stick to rpms and debs, but just try installing the latest version of a piece of software that doesn't have an rpm or deb yet, and you run into a world of pain.
As another poster pointed out, these install just fine into/usr/local. If you want to be clean about it, install into a subdir of/usr/local and use GNU "stow" to link it into/usr/local.
For stuff thats already packaged, but has a newer version (usually, it's in debian unstable, but..) I usually just apply the patch to the new version and rebuild the package.
The big issues is the "architecture". This RPM/DEB stuff doesn't really matter, except dpkg is a bit slower to startup and it keeps our packages nicely seperated from all the RPMs out there. Apt would work just as well on top of RPM. But if Debian used RPM, to get Debian quality, you'd have to only install Debian RPM packages. Debian's package policy makes all the packages work when you install them. You would have to stick with packages that comform to that.
This includes our emacs system, which recompiles you emacs package for each (compatible) flavor of emacs that happens to be installed. And our mechanisms for adding fonts, adding TeX formats, menu entries, etc.
The packages actually working together, the extensive set of packages, and, most importantly, apt are why I use Debian (if it wasn't for apt, I probably would have switched to *BSD a year or two ago). But, to each his own.
None of this is brain-surgery people!
It gets to be messier than brain surgery when you have packages coming from random places on the internet with few standards on how they're layed out or hook into the system configuration. The status quo of RPM packages at the moment.
Thanks, but where do you get the ingredients? I can't bring myself to buy those tiny jars of spice in the grocery stores, because I know I'm getting ripped off.
Both general tips and specific places near Berkeley would be appreciated.
(Right now, it's trader joe's curry for me, which isn't too bad, and at $2 a jar it is much cheaper than rolling your own - but I'd still rather make my own.)
They offered me a job (decent pay). I didn't take it because of the commute, friends at my current job, and I wasn't sure how the business model would do (companies were starting to go under at that point). Mainly though, it was because I'm way too loyal, and it would have meant moving from development back to admin. (They did a really good admin interview, down to sendmail ruleset and perl coding questions.)
Anyways, it's good to know that they're still alive - at least when I interviewed about a year ago they had some decent geeks working there (i.e. smart people with a fairly strong academic background).
It's a good idea, IM is a great communication mechanism for humans talking to intelligent agents. The functionality could be expanded, but once the framework is there that should be easy.
Another response would be to setup a procmail/gnumeric script that automagically posts a comma or tab seperated text translation of any message containing an excel document.
Sad to see them go, but they never made anything I wanted. Call me weird, but I like RPG/Adventure games, not the simulation games they keep turning out, and I've told them that. Closest I've gotten is "Deus Ex" which has been in development for years, never released. You'd think the baldurs gate series would be a shoe-in, since they've been using the same engine for year after year.
And yes, I would have payed a premium for linux versions of the games I own.
At least we have Ultima VII (a free linux/windows engine for the game data has been written by fans, because the released version of the game doesn't run on any recent OS).
It should also be noted that he specialized in Old English, and some of the stories found in his middle earth mythology (published in the Silmarillion) bear a strong resemblance to Germanic mythology. (Included naming a dwarf Mim.)
One of my guesses as to why he did this was to position his mythology as a progenetor of european mythology, or maybe he just liked the stories.:)
Either way, he was probably also influenced by other mythologies, but I'm not familiar with them.
He even wrote some middle earth material in old english (a translation of some annals) and used it for one of his languages. (That of "wild" men that lived in the forest near Rohan.)
I owned a copy of DICE for the Amiga - a nice, fast, lightweight compiler. (Came with libc source too.)
He wrote DME, a lightweight opensource editor which had a macro programming facility. (I studied a lot of source back then to learn techniques.)
And he also wrote DLink, which would multiplex terminal sessions, forward tcp connections, and do remote filesystem operations over a terminal session to an Amiga or Unix box. (I hacked support for it into the Amiga Mosaic Port many years ago.)
Nice to know he's still working on opensource projects. Too bad the BSD people got him.:)
Dunno how practical the IP hopping thing would turn out to be in practice, but it makes me wonder if a usable IP equivalent of the anonymous remailer system could be developed. (It would, of course, have to frequently switch paths, perhaps with every packet.)
This would be less centralized and offer anonymity, in addition to making it hard to trace the connection.
I did the writing on windows thing in college, with water soluble markers. The problem is, you can no longer read what you are writing when it
gets dark. (Kinda annoying.) Nonetheless, I got a lot of useful work done that way.
I've also tried putting white contact paper on the wall and writing on that, but the marks didn't go away if left for a few days.
I eventually settled on pulling late night sessions in the classrooms in the math building and copying down the results on paper. I found it really helpful to have a lot of space to work out my thoughts in.
I never tried dry erase, 'cause I can't stand the smell of acetone, but I may buy an 8' sheet
of dry erase board for my apartment. (Slate is
too heavy to consider.:)
Slashdot Mirror
PDQ Bach (aka Peter Schickele) also did a spoof called 'Prelude to "Einstein on the Fritz"'. It's found on his "1712 Overture" album.
I actually find Einstein to be good music to program to. Does a good job of masking people talking in the background and seems to help me keep up a good pace.
They preempted it for a baseball game..
It works for CD blanks... put a tax on chalk and spread it around to the large "bandwidth" providers. :)
A copy of Donald Knuth's argument against software patents can be found on the LPF's web site. He is a very well respected computer scientist and programmer and makes a good argument.
They should sue Heinlein's estate too. He obviously stole the idea of soldiers in powered suits from them (in Starship Troopers).
NT is extremely difficult to configure for use in a public lab environment. You have to lock down the machine well enough that one user can't make the machine unusable for others, without breaking all of the software running on it.
A lot of apps want to write in system directories or write in random places in the registry (which, out of the box, is wide open to the current logged in user). Add to this users downloading random software from the web and trying to install it and a web browser that does the same (active X controls).
I'm guessing these people have locked down as best as they can, but end up with a bunch of machines being unusable at any given time, and a lot of "taxpayers money" being spent on reinstalling the broken machines.
Also, I believe installing security patches and service packs is still a manual, go-to-every-machine process on Win2k. (Unless you want to reimage the machine for every patch - either way a lot of manpower and hence money wasted.)
At my last job my desktop was a dual 866MHz PIII Dell 2450 with 2 19" LCDs. It only had 768MB of RAM, but I'd definitely take it over most Sun machines that you'd see near a desk.
On it, I ran XEmacs, Mozilla, Oracle, an complex XML/XSL based Java web application, two other Java applications that fetch and process data, and the usual desktop junk (gnome) without any sluggishness.
We put smaller 2450's in production to replace U80s and E450s with more processors because the Dell boxes ran our Java app a lot faster. (The web app was at least twice as fast.)
And MS-SQL usually returns the same result set for a given query. True, it sometimes leaves out a few rows, but cut it some slack - we all make mistakes.
RPM is nice, because almost everyone uses it, and because it is based on Redhat, which - unlike Debian - devotes enough effort to the initial installation process that it comes close to being a viable Windows alternative.
/usr/local. If you want to be clean about it, install into a subdir of /usr/local and use GNU "stow" to link it into /usr/local.
The initial installation process on RH is better. This has nothing to do with the packaging system itself. Debian has 90% of the stuff to make initial instalation easy; e.g., debconf infrastructure. X (and other hardware) configuration, and writing the install program are all thats left undone.
I love debian - in theory - but in practice, it can be a bitch to get working. Even experienced Debian users who repeatedly try to persuade me to abandon RedHat are forced to admit that they never did get USB working, and after a while you realize that they are more in-love with the theory of debian than the reality.
USB seems to work for me, but I've had to tweak conf files and/or run the utilities that come in the package to rebuild the conf files. There are a lot of rough edges, though. For example, X is a pain to set up in Debian.
Secondly, no elegant way to integrate software that hasn't committed to one of the packaging systems into an architecture. Both RedHat and Debian both work great when you stick to rpms and debs, but just try installing the latest version of a piece of software that doesn't have an rpm or deb yet, and you run into a world of pain.
As another poster pointed out, these install just fine into
For stuff thats already packaged, but has a newer version (usually, it's in debian unstable, but..) I usually just apply the patch to the new version and rebuild the package.
The big issues is the "architecture". This RPM/DEB stuff doesn't really matter, except dpkg is a bit slower to startup and it keeps our packages nicely seperated from all the RPMs out there. Apt would work just as well on top of RPM. But if Debian used RPM, to get Debian quality, you'd have to only install Debian RPM packages. Debian's package policy makes all the packages work when you install them. You would have to stick with packages that comform to that.
This includes our emacs system, which recompiles you emacs package for each (compatible) flavor of emacs that happens to be installed. And our mechanisms for adding fonts, adding TeX formats, menu entries, etc.
The packages actually working together, the extensive set of packages, and, most importantly, apt are why I use Debian (if it wasn't for apt, I probably would have switched to *BSD a year or two ago). But, to each his own.
None of this is brain-surgery people!
It gets to be messier than brain surgery when you have packages coming from random places on the internet with few standards on how they're layed out or hook into the system configuration. The status quo of RPM packages at the moment.
Thanks, but where do you get the ingredients? I can't bring myself to buy those tiny jars of spice in the grocery stores, because I know I'm getting ripped off.
Both general tips and specific places near Berkeley would be appreciated.
(Right now, it's trader joe's curry for me, which isn't too bad, and at $2 a jar it is much cheaper than rolling your own - but I'd still rather make my own.)
Maybe he uses thou in his C++ code. :)
2) Several times I got caught on the fact that there is no way to pass an int by reference.
To pass an integer by reference, pass an int[1]. (This array hack is also how you get anonymous inner classes to close over locals.)
They offered me a job (decent pay). I didn't take it because of the commute, friends at my current job, and I wasn't sure how the business model would do (companies were starting to go under at that point). Mainly though, it was because I'm way too loyal, and it would have meant moving from development back to admin. (They did a really good admin interview, down to sendmail ruleset and perl coding questions.)
Anyways, it's good to know that they're still alive - at least when I interviewed about a year ago they had some decent geeks working there (i.e. smart people with a fairly strong academic background).
It's a good idea, IM is a great communication mechanism for humans talking to intelligent agents. The functionality could be expanded, but once the framework is there that should be easy.
maybe they're posting stories together...
Another response would be to setup a procmail/gnumeric script that automagically posts a comma or tab seperated text translation of any message containing an excel document.
Sad to see them go, but they never made anything I wanted. Call me weird, but I like RPG/Adventure games, not the simulation games they keep turning out, and I've told them that. Closest I've gotten is "Deus Ex" which has been in development for years, never released. You'd think the baldurs gate series would be a shoe-in, since they've been using the same engine for year after year.
And yes, I would have payed a premium for linux versions of the games I own.
At least we have Ultima VII (a free linux/windows engine for the game data has been written by fans, because the released version of the game doesn't run on any recent OS).
It should also be noted that he specialized in Old English, and some of the stories found in his middle earth mythology (published in the Silmarillion) bear a strong resemblance to Germanic mythology. (Included naming a dwarf Mim.)
:)
One of my guesses as to why he did this was to position his mythology as a progenetor of european mythology, or maybe he just liked the stories.
Either way, he was probably also influenced by other mythologies, but I'm not familiar with them.
He even wrote some middle earth material in old english (a translation of some annals) and used it for one of his languages. (That of "wild" men that lived in the forest near Rohan.)
change the ticker symbol from LNUX to VSFT?
Would be nice if they put the extra bits in where they could do some good.
Note that the movie from the quicktime standalone screenshot on their site is CmdrTaco's "Hamster Havoc".
He wrote DME, a lightweight opensource editor which had a macro programming facility. (I studied a lot of source back then to learn techniques.)
And he also wrote DLink, which would multiplex terminal sessions, forward tcp connections, and do remote filesystem operations over a terminal session to an Amiga or Unix box. (I hacked support for it into the Amiga Mosaic Port many years ago.)
Nice to know he's still working on opensource projects. Too bad the BSD people got him.
This would be less centralized and offer anonymity, in addition to making it hard to trace the connection.
The chart says that the phones are being rated in W/kg. Does this mean that they are factoring in the weight of the phone?
I did the writing on windows thing in college, with water soluble markers. The problem is, you can no longer read what you are writing when it gets dark. (Kinda annoying.) Nonetheless, I got a lot of useful work done that way.
I've also tried putting white contact paper on the wall and writing on that, but the marks didn't go away if left for a few days.
I eventually settled on pulling late night sessions in the classrooms in the math building and copying down the results on paper. I found it really helpful to have a lot of space to work out my thoughts in.
I never tried dry erase, 'cause I can't stand the smell of acetone, but I may buy an 8' sheet of dry erase board for my apartment. (Slate is too heavy to consider. :)