Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a non-profit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
Unlike other distributed computing projects, Genome@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a non-profit institution dedicated to science research and education.
The results from Genome@home will be made available on several levels. First, we put statistics and information about the protein sequences being designed on the web for everyone to see. These are updated daily, and include information about which users contributed which sequences. Second, analysis of the sequences will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Thirdly, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.
Will Apple be good enough to help roll a decent journaling file system back into the BDSs, so I can return to my blissfil Berkely rc days, and not worry about the cleaning lady pulling out my RAID power outlet to use the vacuum cleaner?
Enable softupdates, mount your filesystems sync, and either set hw.ata.wc=0, or if your drives support tagged queuing, hw.ata.tags=1.
Of course, if power failures are that much of a worry, you could always get a UPS. Otherwise, you make sure transactions aren't interlaced and your drive *really* writes stuff out when it says it does.
My vision isn't that bad (at least with my glasses), but I find that many sites are almost unusable for these reasons. I have a medium resolution "17 monitor, and many sites have fonts way to small to be usable.
My vision is fine; I don't need glasses, and I use a reasonable resolution (1280*1024 on a 17" monitor).
I find most sites like to use fonts that are smaller than I'm comfortable with; the default browser size fonts are fine, they're just right. Unfortunately most sites disagree, and like to pick defaults between 80% and 60% that size. I've even seen sites hard-code their body text to ~6px tall.
The thing is, my user.css expresses my desire to have decent size fonts:
body {
font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em !important; }
Sadly, most sites don't bother setting a base font-size in body, and instead just hardcode px values in individual elements; assuming they use CSS at all. Highly irritating.
I saw an amusing article about font sizes and readability on Microsoft's site a while ago; he was saying that people like small fonts; somewhere around 1/8th of an inch tall for a monitor (which funnily enough is about the size of 1em Verdana).
Why was this amusing? Microsoft chose to render the text of the article at about 1/16th of an inch. Without text zoom, it was next to unreadable.
The quotes are an artifact of LaTeX, which I'm sure could be easily removed by tweaking the latex2html script (it may even be an option)... however, as you see them, they are being strictly translated from the correct inputs to get left/ right quotes in TeX, which then ensures they look right in printed copy
Well, you can specify left and right quotes in HTML:
latex2html should either use them, <q> tags, or normal double quotes. Not abusing backticks (note they don't look anything like the mirror of ' in an awful lot of fonts, including ones very popular online, such as Verdana).
Doing it TWICE to emulate double quotes means the author of latex2html is going to hell for sure (along with 1001 online newspaper editors):)
And yes, there is an option to have the resulting.html files have better names, but latex2html does not have any provision to prevent name collision-- so I opted out of it in this case (not that I needed to worry about that, so your point is valid and I will change that)
Ah, yes, that's better. Better to be dependent on title and have some meaning than be dependent on order in the table of contents and have little meaning:)
In a perfect world, I'd like to see a system that combined the best of Wiki, TeX, and DocBook (I have nothing against XML, I just don't know if I'm in love with DB's DTD yet), so that you could have the pages be fairly interactive for online references (especially useful in a corporate setting), but still generate standalone documents from the entire work. All with complete revision control, of course.
Yes, that would be nice. WebDAV with a versioning backend like SubVersion has some potential for document management - better imo than the million-and-one forms approach.
Document formats are a little more hairy. Sometimes I feel like using something like AFT, which is pretty close to plain text. Other times I want to use XHTML, or DocBook, or my own schema. Some front-end which handles all of them would be nice:)
I'm not really bothered by print, but I do want my documents to be stand-alone from the website. I want navigation elements to grow dynamically from the metadata in my documents, or from some external metadata file. I also want to be able to generate documents from databases etc and have them plug in nicely with the filesystem and keep nice abstract and stable URI's.
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to write this myself. Being a professional slacker, this will likely take a while:)
But then I limited myself to Free Software, whereas someone willing to use non-Free software might easily find an off-the-shelf package to get around the PS/PDF hurdle.
DocBook to PS/PDF isn't too hard. If you can find a generalised XSL:FO engine you would be able to use an arbitrary XML document provided you have a stylesheet for it. Failing that, a browser, CSS print media rules and an option to print to a PS file would probably be ok; converting PS to PDF shouldn't be a problem, and CSS can style any XML document you like.
Generally large scale software upgrades are avoided in a -STABLE branch. That means prefering to backport patches than upgrade to the latest and greatest (OpenSSH was somewhat of an exception because patches were not available at the time). Those who need to version chase can use ports and have a much greater choice and level of control over how things are set up and which versions to go for (gcc3, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 are in ports, perl 5.6 and 5.8 too, as are latest OpenSSH, OpenSSH, sendmail, etc).
This keeps cvs deltas down as imports are much more rare (hence making updates smaller) and helps keep only well tested and well known code in base.
I do know when I see a language which does not have an intuitive syntax or grammar.
Intuitive is highly subjective. Ruby comes from the perspective of objects and method calls and passing code blocks around.
While the "5.times" is rather obvious, if not leaving one wondering why a "." is needed
"times" is a message sent to the 5 object; a Fixnum instance. Ergo it is the same as:
class Foo
def times
# some code
end end
i = Foo.new i.times
The code block being passed to it (the {|i|.. }) is incidental, and seperate from the method call itself.
|n| would be read by your average degreed professional developer as "the absolute value of n", given its visual similarity to the well known and standard mathematical notation for this operation
That's a SmallTalk thing; Ruby chose to reuse it. Typical use is more like:
[1,2,3,4].each do |i|
# do something with i end
It's also fairly common to see:
{'a' => 1, 'b' => 2}.each do |key, value|
# do something with hash element end
I guess the alternative would be something like:
hash.each do(key, value)
#... end
But since you can also use braces, you'd then get:
hash.each {(key,value).. }
Which looks a bit nasty to me.
Anyway, it doesn't take much to work out what it means even if you've never seen SmallTalk and friends. People are very good at handling different meanings in different contexts.
Actually, I just tested this, and we're both wrong. I haven't found a browser that does that string manipulation, and I also haven't found a server that does a redirect.
You can't have looked very hard. Both Opera, IE6 and Mozilla normalise the URL before sending; even wget does. curl was the only client I use which doesn't.
If NS4 doesn't, fine, more fool it. Several months ago my copy started coredumping every time I tried to run it, so it no longer gets tested:)
No need to packet sniff, anyway; server logs work just as well.
I'm not sure how well this works, because such string manipulation would become more difficult with UTF-8 and URI-encoding (where there's more than one representation for a character).
Um, why would it?
The rules are pretty simple; when you see a.., back up to the next / and try again. How would UTF or URL encoding make this more difficult?
Actually, now that I think of it, this is probably what these things are trying to exploit:
GET/scripts/..%255c%255c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+ dir HTTP/0.9
Thousands of years in the future, archeologists and server admins will boggle at these mysterious requests that continue to hit their webservers;)
For instance, this thread in/. is http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/1 0/02/ 1946224&mode=flat&tid=95 -- why couldn't it just be http://developers.slashdot.org/thread/02-10- 02/194 6224.html ? Or even http://slashdot.org/developers/02-10-02/User_Cente red_URL_Design.html ?
Well, they're not great URL's either. Better would be something like:
With this, you can add../ to the right most side of the URL and get listings for the day/month/year/forever, and you can guess it'll be the same for/poll/, etc. The ID number might be frowned upon somewhat; you could shorten it to just the article number for the day, or even further categorise by time. You might try something like user_centered_url_design, but that takes a bit more work to generate and map to a database.
I'd probably try to think where the best spot for developer is too; in front of the article number at the end? After/article? Before?:)
I'd love to have some tips from various folk on how to use Perl and PHP with Apache in fancy ways to simplify and avoid these clunky URLs.
I just use mod_rewrite to pass the entire path to my scripts, ala:
and it also creates a redirect, like not including the final slash
Uhm, no it doesn't.
The UA does not request "../foo/" from the server; it looks at the current URL and strips off the last directory and appends/foo/ to it, resulting in exactly the same URL you would have got using absolute links.
It costs a few extra string operations, not an extra HTTP request:)
I'm not certain about that. I thought it was actually the other way around.
Yes; there are several different redirect schemes in HTTP (permanent, temporary, see other, etc), and a couple of other response codes that can edit bookmarks.
410 Gone, for instance, should be used instead of 404 if a resource used to be there but has been removed. While 404's might disappear later, 410's are explicit "this is gone, it's not coming back" notices.
(uh, and theduck.. sorry, I thought the quote ended earlier than it did and that was a dumbass bit of editorial from him, which is the way I'm used to/. going)
Author, generator, description (very important when your content doesn't look too hot in a search engine summary; hello ALA and your dumbass "this site will look much better in.." blurb), content type and the way too often overlooked text encoding, and things like DCMI.
They're also useful for keeping your documents in a form you can process later; you can, for instance, embed creation dates, CVS revisions, shorter/alternate titles and summaries for links.
<slaps timothy for spreading FUD against a perfectly useful HTML tag>
Probably because the head assembly needs to be nice and light for it to be flung across the platters in 10ms flat by a fairly cheap mechanism. There can't be much leeway to make it *that* rigid, given how close the heads fly over the platters.
You might be ok under normal operation, but I'd really want all the airflow it can get when I crack my knee on the desk and shock the whole thing:)
If you're going to use windows-1252 characters in stories, the least you can do is actually *mention* it in the Content-type or meta tags.
Well, no, the least you can do is not provide any charset data at all, which is exactly what/. does. Well done. We all really enjoy those ?'s and squares in place of em-dashes and co:)
I started with CDex; I ended up giving up when several consecutive versions nuked in XP. So I switched to EAC.
I've been perfectly happy with it since; the only features I'm missing are built in ogg encoding (rather than going through oggenc.exe), and a more configurable quality setting (it only covers integers).
There are nine seperate media types define in CSS. If you want to step outside the boundaries of HTML, you have to specify them all, or UA's will see your XML as a meaningless collection of tags. You'd get the same effect if you created your website entirely out of tags.
Even if you *do* provide for those 9 media types, what happens when a new media type arrives? Custom ones are perfectly valid, so you might not even know about them. There also isn't anything for search engines to index properly; they can't give presidence to your headings, or work out what the title is supposed to be, etc.
UA's do not have any concept of semantics outside what is programmed into them, and although in many cases you can make do without and just force a specific rendering, it's almost always a bad idea.
Your XHTML document comprised entirely of <span class="foo"> may render using your stylesheet in my browser, but if I decide you have no taste and turn off your CSS (which I do often enough), your document falls to pieces.
This is why we want a standard document format for the web; you can extend it to meet your needs, but leave enough of the original document for it to be meaningful and useful without any other information about *your* semantics.
Ehm, as a programmer you must have some aesthetic sense of design, right? Things like, say, avoiding redundancy and abstracting things away?
Instead of applying a <font> tag to absolutely every element you want to set it, you just do body { font-family: foo, bar, sans-serif; } and be done with it.
Instead of doing this on *every* page you just <link> to it, and have a single place to change the font you want to use.
Instead of 5k of tables per page, you use a few <div>'s and position/float them in your one CSS file.
Your HTML becomes much more lightweight, and you can style it progressively without going back and editing your HTML every time. Do it once, and stick to the same classes and overall structure, and you don't have to do it again next time. You can modularise your stylesheets and swap colour schemes and layouts at will and without rewriting tonnes of HTML every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Folding@Home, and it's sister project, Genome@Home
Really? Please point out where they state this. The FAQ's seem pretty innocuous:
Folding@Home FAQ:
Genome@Home FAQ:
Enable softupdates, mount your filesystems sync, and either set hw.ata.wc=0, or if your drives support tagged queuing, hw.ata.tags=1.
Of course, if power failures are that much of a worry, you could always get a UPS. Otherwise, you make sure transactions aren't interlaced and your drive *really* writes stuff out when it says it does.
My vision is fine; I don't need glasses, and I use a reasonable resolution (1280*1024 on a 17" monitor).
I find most sites like to use fonts that are smaller than I'm comfortable with; the default browser size fonts are fine, they're just right. Unfortunately most sites disagree, and like to pick defaults between 80% and 60% that size. I've even seen sites hard-code their body text to ~6px tall.
The thing is, my user.css expresses my desire to have decent size fonts:Sadly, most sites don't bother setting a base font-size in body, and instead just hardcode px values in individual elements; assuming they use CSS at all. Highly irritating.
I saw an amusing article about font sizes and readability on Microsoft's site a while ago; he was saying that people like small fonts; somewhere around 1/8th of an inch tall for a monitor (which funnily enough is about the size of 1em Verdana).
Why was this amusing? Microsoft chose to render the text of the article at about 1/16th of an inch. Without text zoom, it was next to unreadable.
Well, you can specify left and right quotes in HTML:latex2html should either use them, <q> tags, or normal double quotes. Not abusing backticks (note they don't look anything like the mirror of ' in an awful lot of fonts, including ones very popular online, such as Verdana).
Doing it TWICE to emulate double quotes means the author of latex2html is going to hell for sure (along with 1001 online newspaper editors)
Ah, yes, that's better. Better to be dependent on title and have some meaning than be dependent on order in the table of contents and have little meaning
Yes, that would be nice. WebDAV with a versioning backend like SubVersion has some potential for document management - better imo than the million-and-one forms approach.
Document formats are a little more hairy. Sometimes I feel like using something like AFT, which is pretty close to plain text. Other times I want to use XHTML, or DocBook, or my own schema. Some front-end which handles all of them would be nice
I'm not really bothered by print, but I do want my documents to be stand-alone from the website. I want navigation elements to grow dynamically from the metadata in my documents, or from some external metadata file. I also want to be able to generate documents from databases etc and have them plug in nicely with the filesystem and keep nice abstract and stable URI's.
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to write this myself. Being a professional slacker, this will likely take a while
DocBook to PS/PDF isn't too hard. If you can find a generalised XSL:FO engine you would be able to use an arbitrary XML document provided you have a stylesheet for it. Failing that, a browser, CSS print media rules and an option to print to a PS file would probably be ok; converting PS to PDF shouldn't be a problem, and CSS can style any XML document you like.
Ignoring the utterly braindead ``foo'' quotes, those filenames are ultra lame.
DocBook lets you specify a section ID which ends up being mapped to a filename when generating HTML; doesn't LaTeX haeve something like that?
Um, then you tell it, using XPath, or even better; generate the listview using an XSLT like IE and Mozilla.
Generally large scale software upgrades are avoided in a -STABLE branch. That means prefering to backport patches than upgrade to the latest and greatest (OpenSSH was somewhat of an exception because patches were not available at the time). Those who need to version chase can use ports and have a much greater choice and level of control over how things are set up and which versions to go for (gcc3, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 are in ports, perl 5.6 and 5.8 too, as are latest OpenSSH, OpenSSH, sendmail, etc).
This keeps cvs deltas down as imports are much more rare (hence making updates smaller) and helps keep only well tested and well known code in base.
Yes it does; they're very tame, and no, they're not going away:Most of the time you only see @foo, and you can hide them behind accessors and just use self.foo if you don't like them. Ala:
class Foo
attr
def initialize(bla)
if (coder_hates_at?)
self.foo = bla
else
@foo = bla
end
end
end
@foo bypasses the accessor 'attr' produces, so is a bit faster.
The $1..$9, $_ etc vars are still there, but you don't have to use those either. They're sometimes handy writing quick scripts and oneliners.
Intuitive is highly subjective. Ruby comes from the perspective of objects and method calls and passing code blocks around.
"times" is a message sent to the 5 object; a Fixnum instance. Ergo it is the same as:
class Foo
def times
# some code
end
end
i = Foo.new
i.times
The code block being passed to it (the {|i|
That's a SmallTalk thing; Ruby chose to reuse it. Typical use is more like:
[1,2,3,4].each do |i|
# do something with i
end
It's also fairly common to see:
{'a' => 1, 'b' => 2}.each do |key, value|
# do something with hash element
end
I guess the alternative would be something like:
hash.each do(key, value)
#
end
But since you can also use braces, you'd then get:
hash.each {(key,value)
Which looks a bit nasty to me.
Anyway, it doesn't take much to work out what it means even if you've never seen SmallTalk and friends. People are very good at handling different meanings in different contexts.
Iterators are an expression of a deeper construct in Ruby; passing code blocks to methods. Example:
File.open('foo') do |file|
# do some file operations
# maybe raise some exceptions
end # file is automatically closed the the File.open method
Funnily enough, something Python grew after Ruby had been using it for years.
You can't have looked very hard. Both Opera, IE6 and Mozilla normalise the URL before sending; even wget does. curl was the only client I use which doesn't.
If NS4 doesn't, fine, more fool it. Several months ago my copy started coredumping every time I tried to run it, so it no longer gets tested
No need to packet sniff, anyway; server logs work just as well.
Um, why would it?
The rules are pretty simple; when you see a
Thousands of years in the future, archeologists and server admins will boggle at these mysterious requests that continue to hit their webservers
Well, they're not great URL's either. Better would be something like:With this, you can add
I'd probably try to think where the best spot for developer is too; in front of the article number at the end? After
I just use mod_rewrite to pass the entire path to my scripts, ala:Although it's bit of an insult to mod_rewrite's capabilities, this approach is quite effective.
Uhm, no it doesn't.
The UA does not request "../foo/" from the server; it looks at the current URL and strips off the last directory and appends
It costs a few extra string operations, not an extra HTTP request
Yes; there are several different redirect schemes in HTTP (permanent, temporary, see other, etc), and a couple of other response codes that can edit bookmarks.
410 Gone, for instance, should be used instead of 404 if a resource used to be there but has been removed. While 404's might disappear later, 410's are explicit "this is gone, it's not coming back" notices.
(uh, and theduck.. sorry, I thought the quote ended earlier than it did and that was a dumbass bit of editorial from him, which is the way I'm used to /. going)
Author, generator, description (very important when your content doesn't look too hot in a search engine summary; hello ALA and your dumbass "this site will look much better in.." blurb), content type and the way too often overlooked text encoding, and things like DCMI.
They're also useful for keeping your documents in a form you can process later; you can, for instance, embed creation dates, CVS revisions, shorter/alternate titles and summaries for links.
<slaps timothy for spreading FUD against a perfectly useful HTML tag>
EAT FLAMING DEATH TIMMY!
Probably because the head assembly needs to be nice and light for it to be flung across the platters in 10ms flat by a fairly cheap mechanism. There can't be much leeway to make it *that* rigid, given how close the heads fly over the platters.
:)
You might be ok under normal operation, but I'd really want all the airflow it can get when I crack my knee on the desk and shock the whole thing
The real question is when it will become mature. That's probably when people start using it and pushing it there with bug reports etc ;)
If you're going to use windows-1252 characters in stories, the least you can do is actually *mention* it in the Content-type or meta tags.
/. does. Well done. We all really enjoy those ?'s and squares in place of em-dashes and co :)
Well, no, the least you can do is not provide any charset data at all, which is exactly what
Most BSD's come with binary packages on the install CD(s). No need to download anything if you don't want to.
:)
Personally I prefer FreeBSD ports to dpkg/apt. And I *loved* apt when I was using Debian
I'd prolly still use a Linux for a desktop though, but for servers, Linux can go jump in a lake.
It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
I started with CDex; I ended up giving up when several consecutive versions nuked in XP. So I switched to EAC.
I've been perfectly happy with it since; the only features I'm missing are built in ogg encoding (rather than going through oggenc.exe), and a more configurable quality setting (it only covers integers).
There are nine seperate media types define in CSS. If you want to step outside the boundaries of HTML, you have to specify them all, or UA's will see your XML as a meaningless collection of tags. You'd get the same effect if you created your website entirely out of tags.
Even if you *do* provide for those 9 media types, what happens when a new media type arrives? Custom ones are perfectly valid, so you might not even know about them. There also isn't anything for search engines to index properly; they can't give presidence to your headings, or work out what the title is supposed to be, etc.
UA's do not have any concept of semantics outside what is programmed into them, and although in many cases you can make do without and just force a specific rendering, it's almost always a bad idea.
Your XHTML document comprised entirely of <span class="foo"> may render using your stylesheet in my browser, but if I decide you have no taste and turn off your CSS (which I do often enough), your document falls to pieces.
This is why we want a standard document format for the web; you can extend it to meet your needs, but leave enough of the original document for it to be meaningful and useful without any other information about *your* semantics.
Ehm, as a programmer you must have some aesthetic sense of design, right? Things like, say, avoiding redundancy and abstracting things away?
Instead of applying a <font> tag to absolutely every element you want to set it, you just do body { font-family: foo, bar, sans-serif; } and be done with it.
Instead of doing this on *every* page you just <link> to it, and have a single place to change the font you want to use.
Instead of 5k of tables per page, you use a few <div>'s and position/float them in your one CSS file.
Your HTML becomes much more lightweight, and you can style it progressively without going back and editing your HTML every time. Do it once, and stick to the same classes and overall structure, and you don't have to do it again next time. You can modularise your stylesheets and swap colour schemes and layouts at will and without rewriting tonnes of HTML every time.