I have an (admittedly older) Blackberry for work, and still find myself doing all the interesting things on my aging PalmTX.
The only things I use the Blackberry for, in order:
* Google Maps : Verizon disabled my built-in GPS, but I can highly recommend the i-Blue 820 bluetooth receiver / datalogger.
* E-mail : the only reason Blackberry is popular in the first place
* G-mail / Yahoo : limited and slow, but functional interfaces to your email accounts as well as some light news and flickr
* Opera Mini : For accessing heavy websites that the internal browser chokes on.
* MidpSSH as you mention. It really is a decent client as in it's not too impossible to display decent ansi using screen, and send all the weird keystrokes you might need. http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/
* Tethering (use the Blackberry as a wireless modem for your laptop) : I think they've really tried to stop people from using this, though. I think I have one of the last models / plans that allow this, and it works awesome.
Aside from those basic and indispensable functions, I really kinda hate my blackberry, and use my Palm TX for all of my personal work and entertainment.
My essential Palm TX apps:
* Plucker : I use Sunrise to pull a compressed copy of all my favorite websites that I frequent or e-books so I can read them on the subway or wherever. It's much, much faster than using a browser and supports pictures and everything.
* TCPMP : plays mp3s, ogg, and fullscreen videos in various with minimal transcoding woes. I use a 4GB SD card for my library. By no means an iPod replacement in terms of quality or UI, but it gets the job done well enough for me with minimal hassle.
* PIM : syncs with JPilot on Linux, haven't really seen anything else that I can use with my Linux box. I use goosync to publish stuff to my google calendar as well.
* Keyring / CryptoPad : for encrypted info
* Office Documents, PalmPDF : actually allows me to do light office file editing and relatively featureful spreadsheets, my blackberry only lets me view email attachments and it does a piss-poor job formatting that makes it next to useless.
* tejpWriter : with a portable keyboard, you can get some serious typing done with this text editor.
* Progect / HandyShopper / HappyDays / etc. : great little productivity tools that are extremely well designed and I haven't even found usable equivalents for on full-blown desktop systems.
* OperaMini : Also for accessing heavy websites the internal browser chokes on.
* pssh / PalmVNC : Quite usable. Haven't had much luck controlling VNC through my Blackberry.
* Games : Popcap has a lot of very interesting games ported. Also lots of great freeware / OSS diversions.
Anyway, too bad Palm seems to have really flubbed the future of their platform. Right now if I had to replace my TX, I'd probably get a Nokia N810 which seems to have a good PalmOS emulation layer: http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Other than for Google Maps, my Blackberry has strictly been relegated to a device that tethers me to work in a limited fashion.
I know this is beyond your target budget, but that was about the age that I purchased my first graphing calculator. It was a simple TI-83 or similar, but I read the manual from cover to cover and tried to learn to exploit every macro, graphing, solving, and programming feature it had... something that would have been next to impossible on, say, a full-blown PC with mathematics software. I spent a lot of time playing with it on the bus or in class trying to get it to do interesting things, and while I didn't end up an excellent assembly programmer or anything, it really did help me think about and grasp a lot of the calculus, physics, and algebra I had to tackle later on, and made a lot of tedious homework a snap as I programmed a small library of simple functions to do stuff for various classes.
Driving in neutral or with the clutch engaged is also illegal in many states.
That said, I do do it sometimes when the coast is clear and it looks safe. It's a bit harder now that I usually drive an automatic... have to get the rpms at the right place before putting it back in D... never got my wife to learn to drive standard).
Also note that engine braking is absolutely necessary in mountainous / hilly terrain. When your brakes overheat from riding them down a long hill, they kinda stop working. Then your wheels catch fire.
But when it's safe to do so, certainly use your brakes rather than your engine. Engine braking doesn't really use fuel, but it's better to wear down your brake pads as opposed to wearing down your engine.
Ideally, you want to try to drive such that you don't use your brakes at all. After all, braking means you're converting your kinetic energy into heat (unless you're lucky enough to drive a hybrid with good regenerative braking). If you never brake, then that means you're never hitting the gas more than you need to, so you're not wasting.
Anyway, if you also make sure your tires are inflated properly, and make sure you always drive in the highest gear you can as much as possible, you should already be in pretty good shape.
I kinda don't like the OS X dock... maybe because I'm too used to menus and quicklaunch icons. I can't get over the fact that running applications look pretty much the same as quicklaunch icons. And to be honest, it doesn't really help me manage multiple windows or desktops or even see what my system is doing (other than when an icon is jumping up and down to say that something's loading, or the silly arrow that shows that an application is loaded in memory even though it has no windows open).
It is weird that I really like the WindowMaker dock, which almost works the same way. I like the paperclip dock that changes depending on which desktop you're on. I like having a different set of quicklaunch apps depending on whether I'm on my main workspace, or my graphics, network app, or sysadmin workspace.
I kinda wish someone would make the ultimate dock for Linux, though... I've played with AWN and don't like it pretty much for the same reasons I don't like the original Mac OS X dock. Right now I'm using a collection of separate apps to do what I want:
GKrellm : systems monitoring... I'm really interested in seeing if an app is racing, how many cpus are pegged, what my disk and network throughput are, and whether anything is overheating when it shouldn't be loaded. I haven't found any dockapps for any window manager that even comes close... they're always missing something I find essential like the disk I/O meter or a clock that shows both analog + digital, or multiple volume controls.
Gnome-panel : I don't like the default layout, but I shrink it down to a corner under GKrellm and have a few widgets that I use... mostly the menu system, a drawer with icons for my favorite apps, and a dedicated icon to launch a terminal. I wish there was a way to make the icons 1/4 of the size of the dock, like in the Gnome 1.4 days. I don't mind the notification area terribly much, but try to avoid apps that use / clutter it up. I leave the clock, but only because it pops up a calendar. I also like the workspace switcher (the tiny icon showing the currently focused app, and opens a menu to all running apps), but disable the window list thing that reminds me of the Windows-like taskbar.
Enlightenment desktop pagers : This is the only pager I like, in that the thumbnails of each application actually match what they're showing on screen. Actually the old Gnome 1.4 pager used to do this too, but they removed it from 2.x . Anyway, if WindowMaker had these little guys and supported compositing (I like translucent gnome-terminals), I'd be using WindowMaker instead of e16 with the NeXTStep-ish theme.
Enlightenment iconbox : I don't really iconify anything, thanks to multiple desktops... but if I did, the e16 compositing engine shows a thumbnail sized rendition of your app.
All my "dockapps" are basically pushed to the left edge of my desktop. I hate taskbars that span across the top and/or bottom of the screen - seems to waste more space, especially with all these new widescreen displays. The less vertical scrolling I have to do to read a page the better!
It seems like I'm always on the wrong side of the ATi / nVidia fence when it comes to Linux drivers.
So a few months ago when I rebuilt my primary Linux box based on the "$500 gaming rig", I plunked down $250 for an nVidia 8800GT. Unfortunately, the current 173 drivers don't seem to be able to perform anywhere near the level of even 7000-series nVidia cards under Linux. See this post:
The nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1 trick does do a lot to temporarily fix 2D performance. I'm starting to consider plunking down another couple hundred $ for a windows gaming box to put the 8800GT into for the time being, and getting a cheap PCIe card for my Linux box instead... but I'm not terribly excited about spending that kind of money just for entertainment value.
Five or so years earlier, I had bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder sometime just after one of those several times that ATi pledged to commit to open source driver development. That never really panned out, but at least due to the excellent work of the excellent GATOS project, I could at least use the TV tuner and rudimentary OpenGL acceleration (without any FSAA or the like). When ATi finally came out with their proprietary FGLRX drivers, I don't think they included TV tuner drivers, and my aging 7500 fell just short of the cutoff for supported cards anyway.
Anyway, looks like I can't win:P Hopefully newer nVidia drivers will fix these performance issues with Linux drivers, until then, I can't really recommend 8000 or 9000 series cards to anyone planning on using them for Linux.
Alpha means that it's under "development" and the code or application probably runs on the developer's test machine. The underlying code and libraries might change at any time.
Beta means that it's undergoing "testing" and there's more configuration control on the underlying code, libraries, and OS. So it has a stronger "version", and you're working out kinks and incompatibilities between particular pieces of the system. Also, it's running on a dedicated set of test servers, and it's a bit harder to get software changes reviewed and approved to install on a test server.
Production means that the software is fully deployed on a production system and changes should not be made without going through a full set of tests. No new features should really be introduced into a production release, just bug fixes. And a major updated production release should really go on a completely separate system or server.
In this day and age of rapid spiral development, where minor versions are pushed out monthly, I can see why no one really wants to call their service production ready. For one thing, it eliminates a lot of the freedom you have to add and improve things. So I can see why Google might not want to stand up a separate set of production servers to host applications that they know they're not done with yet because they still have features on their list of things to implement.
You're looking for a PDA. Too bad no one really makes them anymore. The creators behind the Palm Pilot expressly designed the thing to compete with a pen-and-paper rather than the other digital organizers that were available at the time.
I have a work-provided blackberry, but I still find myself doing everything (except for checking email or using google maps) on my Palm TX.
I use tejpwriter to edit documents on SD cards, it's one of the few things that can grapple with large documents. With an portable IR or bluetooth keyboard you can actually do some serious editing with it, then sync up with your real computer later.
Also useful utilities such as PalmPDF allow me to proofread and refer to finished documents and presentations for research / rehearsals. All my other information comes in through SunRise + Plucker. It also comes with a stripped-down rudimentary MS-Office compatible Documents thingy, but I haven't found it very useful beyond the spreadsheet application.
For very quick notes I just use the "notes" scribblepad thing, and then transcribe it into the correct application later.
I wish they succeeded in porting Palm OS to Linux. Supposedly the Nokia N810 tablet has a working Palm Garnet VM that reportedly works pretty well. http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/ Seems like the best option so far for a "modern" PDA, though it wasn't expressly designed as one.
OK, maybe it's because I actually didn't pay much attention to them, but they seemed consistent with Bill Gates' sense of humor. Remember the "Da da da" ad with the he and Ballmer driving around and finding a discarded SUN workstation?
I can't really imagine what a "good" Microsoft ad would possibly look like, so I think the WTF ads we got were kind of neat, considering they came from the former richest man in the world probably as part of some ego-stroke / lifelong dream.
Of all the things we've seen and expected from Bill Gates, I'd have to say this ranks as "cool" . Strange, but cool.
I did my master's thesis in eric3 and enjoyed it very much. I originally started my project using emacs, but migrated over when I needed integrated debugging tools.
eric added the visual debugging you were asking for. You can set breakpoints all over the place, step through the source, and navigate through the variable hierarchy. Good stuff.
I think the only thing that annoyed me somewhat about eric was I couldn't set a light on dark theme, so my late night coding sessions wouldn't annoy the mrs. But that's just cosmetic.
Bonus points if your name happens to be Eric, I suppose.
You might get better mileage out of improving airflow through your rack rather than beefing up your HVAC. You want to focus on removing heat rather than directing cool air into your racks.
Look at racks (such as Chatsworth CPI) that have options for heat ducts that evacuate hot air from hot spots (it typically means a vented front door and a solid rear door, and yes, you have to dress your cables so you can actually close them!). You could exhaust the hot air elsewhere outside, as long as you have a clean filtered intake. But even if you just return the hot air to the HVAC intake, the existing AC should operate more efficiently.
Anyway this should be much more cost effective than doing a raised floor with AC vents, trying to force the cool air to rise.
A sociologist, a psychologist, and a engineer were discussing the consequences and implications of a married man's having a mistress. The sociologist's opinion was that it is absolutely and categorically unforgivable for a married man to forfeit the bond of matrimony, and engage in such lowly and lustful pursuits.
The psychologist's opinion was that although morally reprehensible, if a man MUST have a mistress to achieve his full potential as a human being, then -- well -- he may go ahead and choose to have a mistress, as long as he is considerate enough to keep this secret from his wife.
The engineer then interjected: "I also believe that, if necessary, a married man is entitled to a mistress. However, I do not see why the affair should be concealed from the wife. On the contrary, if the affair is out in the open, then on Friday evenings he may tell his wife that he is going to see his mistress, tell his mistress that he is going to be with his wife, then go to his office and get some work done!"
So it's a Flash game, and you need the internet to post your design and see other people's designs. But it was pure joy.
FWIW, on the forums they're having a design contest for the official level 21. Deadline is this Friday 8/26, though, and you need to be a $10 registered user to create your own levels.
I don't actually use the google stuff all that much... but I set up gmail to forward all mail to my home account.
Also I have goosync publish all my calendar and contact data from my palm onto the site. I guess I could use it to go the other way as well.
Don't know what to do about google docs, other than to export everything to local files. I really haven't used it, though the collaboration features seem interesting.
Well, for a security test environment, I'd find it quick and easy to set up a bunch of virtual machines on an isolated network (that is similar to your production network, with proxies and firewalls to the big bad internet where appropriate, etc.). This will make your test environment easy to clone & reset to a known configuration.
Then you want to place a sniffer (wireshark) where you can see all traffic between the virtual machines. This gives you some idea of what a piece of software is "doing"... what remote servers it's trying to connect to, whether it bothers to use any type of encryption or at least obfuscation when it sends data around in the network, etc. Might want to run portscans (nmapfe) as well to see what vulnerabilities the software opens up on your host, and whether you can exploit them using commonly available hacker tools.
Finally, it'd also be informative to have an intrusion detection system (such as snort + acidlab) on that network (as well as on you production network) to help catch and interpret suspicious network activity.
So there are some basic things you can do to easily assess what risks your applications pose from the outside. It will help you catch basic hacker attacks such as IRC / VNC backdoors and stuff. More sophisticated attacks (which might conceal traffic to the outside via sneaky TCP-over-DNS or the like, or hide backdoors using port-knocking) would be harder to detect... for those you'd just have to have an accountability trail back to your suppliers of that software, especially if you have no way to inspect the source code for that kind of malicious embedded trojan.
It's good for engineering geeks, lots of right angles, physics, and sometimes weapons. Practicing kata can often resemble programming in logo.
There's plenty of stuff for your mind to focus on, so it's not boringly repetitious like I find other sports like jogging or going to the gym.
If you're not into competition, try to find the more traditional "ITF" style, which is more into practical self defense. The "WTF" style ("world taekwondo federation") is more focused on scoring points in competitions.
A lot of the meditation and focus stuff resembles overclocking your body... if you think about it, you're only using a fraction of your lung and brain capacity most of the time. So if you start with concentrating on breathing fully, you'll find that you get more control of the involuntary bodily functions such as circulation to your brain, internal muscle tension, and how to clear out that and other blocks that just add stress and impede you.
Since there isn't much software out there in the way of satisfying the original request, I kinda take this Ask Slashdot as a design challenge.
By "modern" (or maybe he means "contemporary" but not quite well-adopted yet) it seems like the approach a developer might take to tackle this problem in this day in age would involve some mix of:
* XHTML + CSS backend * MathML for equations (computer generated, not directly human edited) * should be able to grab the MathML equations and paste them directly into Mathematica or Octave or whatever and start feeding it data or tweaking plots that are displayed as figures. * ditto with spreadsheets / databases for processing tabular data. * SVG for freeform annotation of figures (which could be imported in any format with the help of a conversion pipeline... it was pretty annoying trying to remember the pipeline I used to generate each.eps figure I imported into latex, which I'd have to perform again each time I had to make a minor edit to a figure). * version control with svn or something that would also allow collaborative papers or comments on peer reviews * output targets to tex / pdf / wiki-like site * presentation output target
-- I did my MSSE in lyx until it was time to convert it into the university latex template; finally finished it up in straight emacs and had a bunch of Makefiles to compile the document to several targets. Used OpenOffice for hand-annotated summary spreadsheets and graphs, dia for figures, and octave+gnuplot for batch-produced data plots.
Using Openoffice Calc was a pain... I had to tweak several options disabling features in my xorg.conf to prevent it from randomly crashing my xserver when I opened menus, and it would crash if I manipulated graphs a certain way, such that I'd have to redo all my work from the last saved working backup because the autosaved on crash one was horked.
Surprised that no one mentioned that such a system was basically featured in the film Minority Report. One of the interesting bits was that some of them would convert to a conventional car at the edge of the city and you could drive it out to the country like a regular car.
I am in full support of this vision. However (and unfortunately), I think the practical answer will resemble robotic trains more than robotic cars operating on the current network of roads. Plus, the main benefits of an improved transportation system will involve restructuring the way cities and communities are built when they are not sliced apart and divided by acres of roadways.
First of all, while there has been some limited success in building autonomous cars, but we can't even get autonomous airplanes accepted into our air transportation system even though planes have practically been able to fly themselves for decades. Hell, most cities can't even get people to accept conductor-less subway trains, and have to hire college students or bums to sit in the front cabin.
The robotic vehicle would have to be completely isolated and separated from unpredictable human traffic and other sources of interference, if only for liability issues.
The best first step in widespread use of robotic cars might just be on the interstate highway system, where they could construct a special lane designed only for robotic vehicles. So you could drive your car/truck onto an interstate, auto-merge into the robotic lane, set the autopilot for your destination exit, and take a nap or otherwise entertain yourself until an alarm wakes you up to exit.
For incursions into urban areas, you'd want something similar to the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems everyone was investigating in the 70's. Take a look at the CabinTaxi system at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/cabintaxi%20photos.htm . There are modern PRT systems finally being planned for deployment recently in Heathrow and Dubai... however, they seem to be limited to airport shuttles and aren't really large enough to meet the promise of a large distributed network with many stations.
Speaking of Dubai, the biggest obstacle will be financial, of course. The road and highway system is expensive, but a lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the user in purchase and maintenance of their own personal vehicles. While the city as a whole would find the entire system cheaper if the government would purchase and maintain a smaller number of shared vehicles, good luck convincing them to finance both the network and the vehicles if they can just build the network and have the users pay for their own vehicles. Of course, car sharing companies such as Flexcar / Zipcar offer something of a shared vehicle, they only have limited potential unless they'd allow one-way rentals... where you can pick up a Zipcar at one "station" and drop it off at another "station", where someone else could make use of it. You'd need some way of getting the cars back to empty stations, but that would realize benefits in terms of reducing the area of pavement needed for parking if everyone had their own personal vehicle.
However, I don't think advanced transportation is the magic bullet that will solve all of our problems... I think much greater benefits will be realized by redesigning cities to be denser, more human friendly, and carfree (check out http://carfree.com/ ), so people simply don't need to travel so far from a nice home to a nice place to work.
So yes, I'm an Arcology nut (check out my MSSE thesis on my homepage). I think the Dantzig / Saaty "Compact Cities" book from 1971 had the most comprehensive plan for constructing a city that I have seen in my research (you'll have to look it up in a good library, it's fairly rare).
In any case, I agree that this kind of development should be a national priority, since there is a *lot* of room for improvement. But since improving the place you live and how you get around are kinda mundane, "infrastructure" issues, I figure we'll see little to no advances in the Western world until China develops the technology and discipline and manages to dust us with their production efficiency, and maybe eventually a high standard of living (said only half-jokingly).
Meh, if price was that much of an issue, they'd sell cheap 'n' light plug-in "laptops" without batteries. Most of my laptops usually turn into that anyway once the batteries get old and fail:P
Plus, if the battery was built into the switch / router / PC power supply, you wouldn't need an inverter to go from DC to AC only to go back to DC again./Plus/, all of the environmental sensors that go with the UPS for voltage, load, battery charge, temperature, etc. could be directly interfaced to the motherboard, rather than having to connect a separate USB / serial cable.
So there's still room for this kind of improvement in the PC segment. Of course, all this stuff is already done in laptops, and it probably isn't too much longer until laptops / tablets somehow manage to make traditional PCs completely obsolete.
UPS units are relatively cheap, it's well worthwhile to invest in one, not just to protect from data loss:
* Hardware loss: I've seen a lot of hardware blown up from power interruptions. Do you trust your power company that much to provide clean power to you? Sure surge protectors help a bit, but a decent UPS costs maybe twice as much as a good surge protector.
* Time lost restoring your session after blackouts / brownouts: OK, maybe you're used to restarting your computer every morning anyway. But I like to leave things open and return to my desktop just the way I left it arranged.
* Stats: Using NUT and Munin, you get to monitor and log your power, so you can see things like exactly when your electricity went out and for how long, what load your PC is drawing after that last upgrade, etc. e.g.: http://hairball.bumba.net/cgi-bin/nut/upsstats.cgi?host=apc@localhost
* Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you'll be coming back once it's restored.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised a backup battery isn't built into PC power supplies already, so they'd work a bit more like laptops. Same with networking gear.
I find Apple products nice, but I've always run into some extremely frustrating limitation... e.g. the iPod Nano I bought for my father-in-law won't display images unless you upload them through iLife's iPhoto. So at least I have some idea what to get him for next year:P
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing your workflow with the iPod Touch / iPhone... I think I'd prefer it to any of the WinCE smartphone/PDAs. Right now my main flow is something like:
Palm T|X * sync/backup PIM with PC using jpilot * goosync to publish to my Google Calendar * pSSH for access to screen on my PC for IRC, email, centerim etc. * VersaMail IMAP access to my Courier mail spool for offline email viewing. * PalmVNC for doing anything else not supported (I rarely use it, but it's indispensible for those few times) * Sunrise + Plucker for daily reading material * TCPMP for music / video playback * Progect for tracking checklists of things * Keyring + CryptoPad for secure info * tejpWriter + IRkeyboard for writing/editing text * PalmPDF for reviewing slides * Documents for light office work, spreadsheets * Mapopolis for offline map viewing outside of network coverage * games & other toys, nice engineering calculator, dictionary/thesaurus, astronomical guide, etc. that I've found handy over the years
Blackberry (from work) * sync email & PIM with Exchange * Google Maps with external Bluetooth GPS Datalogger * MidPSSH for ssh access to things * Browser for the occasional google search However, that's pretty much all the Blackberry is good for... it does a good job of that handful of things, but I hold on to the T|X for everything else.
I've also been toying around with an old Ipaq h5450 which running familiar Linux, but it doesn't quite work well and the touchscreen on it has become flaky anyway. Been waiting for Palm to finally finish porting their OS to Linux, but looks like they gave up on it.
So I've kinda been sitting around waiting for a nice smartphone that can take over most of that functionality to come out at a price point of ~$200 (I'd rather not put anything much more expensive than that in my pocket) or for full laptops to come down in size for them to be pocketable. High hopes for OpenMoko / Google Android, but it will be a few years until they reach that level.
Don't understand this obsession with tablets / webpads... once it's too big to fit in your pocket and have everywhere, you might as while drag a full laptop around:P
Slashdot Mirror
I have an (admittedly older) Blackberry for work, and still find myself doing all the interesting things on my aging PalmTX.
The only things I use the Blackberry for, in order:
* Google Maps : Verizon disabled my built-in GPS, but I can highly recommend the i-Blue 820 bluetooth receiver / datalogger.
* E-mail : the only reason Blackberry is popular in the first place
* G-mail / Yahoo : limited and slow, but functional interfaces to your email accounts as well as some light news and flickr
* Opera Mini : For accessing heavy websites that the internal browser chokes on.
* MidpSSH as you mention. It really is a decent client as in it's not too impossible to display decent ansi using screen, and send all the weird keystrokes you might need.
http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/
* Tethering (use the Blackberry as a wireless modem for your laptop) : I think they've really tried to stop people from using this, though. I think I have one of the last models / plans that allow this, and it works awesome.
Aside from those basic and indispensable functions, I really kinda hate my blackberry, and use my Palm TX for all of my personal work and entertainment.
My essential Palm TX apps:
* Plucker : I use Sunrise to pull a compressed copy of all my favorite websites that I frequent or e-books so I can read them on the subway or wherever. It's much, much faster than using a browser and supports pictures and everything.
* TCPMP : plays mp3s, ogg, and fullscreen videos in various with minimal transcoding woes. I use a 4GB SD card for my library. By no means an iPod replacement in terms of quality or UI, but it gets the job done well enough for me with minimal hassle.
* PIM : syncs with JPilot on Linux, haven't really seen anything else that I can use with my Linux box. I use goosync to publish stuff to my google calendar as well.
* Keyring / CryptoPad : for encrypted info
* Office Documents, PalmPDF : actually allows me to do light office file editing and relatively featureful spreadsheets, my blackberry only lets me view email attachments and it does a piss-poor job formatting that makes it next to useless.
* tejpWriter : with a portable keyboard, you can get some serious typing done with this text editor.
* Progect / HandyShopper / HappyDays / etc. : great little productivity tools that are extremely well designed and I haven't even found usable equivalents for on full-blown desktop systems.
* OperaMini : Also for accessing heavy websites the internal browser chokes on.
* pssh / PalmVNC : Quite usable. Haven't had much luck controlling VNC through my Blackberry.
* Games : Popcap has a lot of very interesting games ported. Also lots of great freeware / OSS diversions.
Anyway, too bad Palm seems to have really flubbed the future of their platform. Right now if I had to replace my TX, I'd probably get a Nokia N810 which seems to have a good PalmOS emulation layer:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Other than for Google Maps, my Blackberry has strictly been relegated to a device that tethers me to work in a limited fashion.
I know this is beyond your target budget, but that was about the age that I purchased my first graphing calculator. It was a simple TI-83 or similar, but I read the manual from cover to cover and tried to learn to exploit every macro, graphing, solving, and programming feature it had... something that would have been next to impossible on, say, a full-blown PC with mathematics software. I spent a lot of time playing with it on the bus or in class trying to get it to do interesting things, and while I didn't end up an excellent assembly programmer or anything, it really did help me think about and grasp a lot of the calculus, physics, and algebra I had to tackle later on, and made a lot of tedious homework a snap as I programmed a small library of simple functions to do stuff for various classes.
Driving in neutral or with the clutch engaged is also illegal in many states.
That said, I do do it sometimes when the coast is clear and it looks safe. It's a bit harder now that I usually drive an automatic... have to get the rpms at the right place before putting it back in D ... never got my wife to learn to drive standard).
Also note that engine braking is absolutely necessary in mountainous / hilly terrain. When your brakes overheat from riding them down a long hill, they kinda stop working. Then your wheels catch fire.
But when it's safe to do so, certainly use your brakes rather than your engine. Engine braking doesn't really use fuel, but it's better to wear down your brake pads as opposed to wearing down your engine.
Ideally, you want to try to drive such that you don't use your brakes at all. After all, braking means you're converting your kinetic energy into heat (unless you're lucky enough to drive a hybrid with good regenerative braking). If you never brake, then that means you're never hitting the gas more than you need to, so you're not wasting.
Anyway, if you also make sure your tires are inflated properly, and make sure you always drive in the highest gear you can as much as possible, you should already be in pretty good shape.
I kinda don't like the OS X dock... maybe because I'm too used to menus and quicklaunch icons. I can't get over the fact that running applications look pretty much the same as quicklaunch icons. And to be honest, it doesn't really help me manage multiple windows or desktops or even see what my system is doing (other than when an icon is jumping up and down to say that something's loading, or the silly arrow that shows that an application is loaded in memory even though it has no windows open).
It is weird that I really like the WindowMaker dock, which almost works the same way. I like the paperclip dock that changes depending on which desktop you're on. I like having a different set of quicklaunch apps depending on whether I'm on my main workspace, or my graphics, network app, or sysadmin workspace.
I kinda wish someone would make the ultimate dock for Linux, though... I've played with AWN and don't like it pretty much for the same reasons I don't like the original Mac OS X dock. Right now I'm using a collection of separate apps to do what I want:
GKrellm : systems monitoring... I'm really interested in seeing if an app is racing, how many cpus are pegged, what my disk and network throughput are, and whether anything is overheating when it shouldn't be loaded. I haven't found any dockapps for any window manager that even comes close... they're always missing something I find essential like the disk I/O meter or a clock that shows both analog + digital, or multiple volume controls.
Gnome-panel : I don't like the default layout, but I shrink it down to a corner under GKrellm and have a few widgets that I use... mostly the menu system, a drawer with icons for my favorite apps, and a dedicated icon to launch a terminal. I wish there was a way to make the icons 1/4 of the size of the dock, like in the Gnome 1.4 days. I don't mind the notification area terribly much, but try to avoid apps that use / clutter it up. I leave the clock, but only because it pops up a calendar. I also like the workspace switcher (the tiny icon showing the currently focused app, and opens a menu to all running apps), but disable the window list thing that reminds me of the Windows-like taskbar.
Enlightenment desktop pagers : This is the only pager I like, in that the thumbnails of each application actually match what they're showing on screen. Actually the old Gnome 1.4 pager used to do this too, but they removed it from 2.x . Anyway, if WindowMaker had these little guys and supported compositing (I like translucent gnome-terminals), I'd be using WindowMaker instead of e16 with the NeXTStep-ish theme.
Enlightenment iconbox : I don't really iconify anything, thanks to multiple desktops... but if I did, the e16 compositing engine shows a thumbnail sized rendition of your app.
All my "dockapps" are basically pushed to the left edge of my desktop. I hate taskbars that span across the top and/or bottom of the screen - seems to waste more space, especially with all these new widescreen displays. The less vertical scrolling I have to do to read a page the better!
It seems like I'm always on the wrong side of the ATi / nVidia fence when it comes to Linux drivers.
So a few months ago when I rebuilt my primary Linux box based on the "$500 gaming rig", I plunked down $250 for an nVidia 8800GT. Unfortunately, the current 173 drivers don't seem to be able to perform anywhere near the level of even 7000-series nVidia cards under Linux. See this post:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=115916
The nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1 trick does do a lot to temporarily fix 2D performance. I'm starting to consider plunking down another couple hundred $ for a windows gaming box to put the 8800GT into for the time being, and getting a cheap PCIe card for my Linux box instead... but I'm not terribly excited about spending that kind of money just for entertainment value.
Five or so years earlier, I had bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder sometime just after one of those several times that ATi pledged to commit to open source driver development. That never really panned out, but at least due to the excellent work of the excellent GATOS project, I could at least use the TV tuner and rudimentary OpenGL acceleration (without any FSAA or the like). When ATi finally came out with their proprietary FGLRX drivers, I don't think they included TV tuner drivers, and my aging 7500 fell just short of the cutoff for supported cards anyway.
Anyway, looks like I can't win :P Hopefully newer nVidia drivers will fix these performance issues with Linux drivers, until then, I can't really recommend 8000 or 9000 series cards to anyone planning on using them for Linux.
Somewhat old but still relevant article on some of the mathematics behind voting, circa 2000 :
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_11_21/ai_66456956/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1#
Using the links browser in a terminal with mouse support is almost exactly like using a browser with images turned off...
Witness:
http://www.jikos.cz/~mikulas/links/screenshots/png.html
Alpha means that it's under "development" and the code or application probably runs on the developer's test machine. The underlying code and libraries might change at any time.
Beta means that it's undergoing "testing" and there's more configuration control on the underlying code, libraries, and OS. So it has a stronger "version", and you're working out kinks and incompatibilities between particular pieces of the system. Also, it's running on a dedicated set of test servers, and it's a bit harder to get software changes reviewed and approved to install on a test server.
Production means that the software is fully deployed on a production system and changes should not be made without going through a full set of tests. No new features should really be introduced into a production release, just bug fixes. And a major updated production release should really go on a completely separate system or server.
In this day and age of rapid spiral development, where minor versions are pushed out monthly, I can see why no one really wants to call their service production ready. For one thing, it eliminates a lot of the freedom you have to add and improve things. So I can see why Google might not want to stand up a separate set of production servers to host applications that they know they're not done with yet because they still have features on their list of things to implement.
You're looking for a PDA. Too bad no one really makes them anymore. The creators behind the Palm Pilot expressly designed the thing to compete with a pen-and-paper rather than the other digital organizers that were available at the time.
I have a work-provided blackberry, but I still find myself doing everything (except for checking email or using google maps) on my Palm TX.
I use tejpwriter to edit documents on SD cards, it's one of the few things that can grapple with large documents. With an portable IR or bluetooth keyboard you can actually do some serious editing with it, then sync up with your real computer later.
Also useful utilities such as PalmPDF allow me to proofread and refer to finished documents and presentations for research / rehearsals. All my other information comes in through SunRise + Plucker. It also comes with a stripped-down rudimentary MS-Office compatible Documents thingy, but I haven't found it very useful beyond the spreadsheet application.
For very quick notes I just use the "notes" scribblepad thing, and then transcribe it into the correct application later.
I wish they succeeded in porting Palm OS to Linux. Supposedly the Nokia N810 tablet has a working Palm Garnet VM that reportedly works pretty well.
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/
Seems like the best option so far for a "modern" PDA, though it wasn't expressly designed as one.
OK, maybe it's because I actually didn't pay much attention to them, but they seemed consistent with Bill Gates' sense of humor. Remember the "Da da da" ad with the he and Ballmer driving around and finding a discarded SUN workstation?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrwnJDQy0ic
I can't really imagine what a "good" Microsoft ad would possibly look like, so I think the WTF ads we got were kind of neat, considering they came from the former richest man in the world probably as part of some ego-stroke / lifelong dream.
Of all the things we've seen and expected from Bill Gates, I'd have to say this ranks as "cool" . Strange, but cool.
I did my master's thesis in eric3 and enjoyed it very much. I originally started my project using emacs, but migrated over when I needed integrated debugging tools.
eric added the visual debugging you were asking for. You can set breakpoints all over the place, step through the source, and navigate through the variable hierarchy. Good stuff.
I think the only thing that annoyed me somewhat about eric was I couldn't set a light on dark theme, so my late night coding sessions wouldn't annoy the mrs. But that's just cosmetic.
Bonus points if your name happens to be Eric, I suppose.
You might get better mileage out of improving airflow through your rack rather than beefing up your HVAC. You want to focus on removing heat rather than directing cool air into your racks.
Look at racks (such as Chatsworth CPI) that have options for heat ducts that evacuate hot air from hot spots (it typically means a vented front door and a solid rear door, and yes, you have to dress your cables so you can actually close them!). You could exhaust the hot air elsewhere outside, as long as you have a clean filtered intake. But even if you just return the hot air to the HVAC intake, the existing AC should operate more efficiently.
Anyway this should be much more cost effective than doing a raised floor with AC vents, trying to force the cool air to rise.
fortune -m "get some work done"
(men-women)
A sociologist, a psychologist, and a engineer were discussing the
consequences and implications of a married man's having a mistress. The
sociologist's opinion was that it is absolutely and categorically unforgivable
for a married man to forfeit the bond of matrimony, and engage in such lowly
and lustful pursuits.
The psychologist's opinion was that although morally reprehensible,
if a man MUST have a mistress to achieve his full potential as a human being,
then -- well -- he may go ahead and choose to have a mistress, as long as he
is considerate enough to keep this secret from his wife.
The engineer then interjected: "I also believe that, if necessary,
a married man is entitled to a mistress. However, I do not see why the
affair should be concealed from the wife. On the contrary, if the affair
is out in the open, then on Friday evenings he may tell his wife that he
is going to see his mistress, tell his mistress that he is going to be with
his wife, then go to his office and get some work done!"
I just blew my free time this weekend finishing Fantastic Contraption
So it's a Flash game, and you need the internet to post your design and see other people's designs. But it was pure joy.
FWIW, on the forums they're having a design contest for the official level 21. Deadline is this Friday 8/26, though, and you need to be a $10 registered user to create your own levels.
I don't actually use the google stuff all that much... but I set up gmail to forward all mail to my home account.
Also I have goosync publish all my calendar and contact data from my palm onto the site. I guess I could use it to go the other way as well.
Don't know what to do about google docs, other than to export everything to local files. I really haven't used it, though the collaboration features seem interesting.
Well, for a security test environment, I'd find it quick and easy to set up a bunch of virtual machines on an isolated network (that is similar to your production network, with proxies and firewalls to the big bad internet where appropriate, etc.). This will make your test environment easy to clone & reset to a known configuration.
Then you want to place a sniffer (wireshark) where you can see all traffic between the virtual machines. This gives you some idea of what a piece of software is "doing"... what remote servers it's trying to connect to, whether it bothers to use any type of encryption or at least obfuscation when it sends data around in the network, etc. Might want to run portscans (nmapfe) as well to see what vulnerabilities the software opens up on your host, and whether you can exploit them using commonly available hacker tools.
Finally, it'd also be informative to have an intrusion detection system (such as snort + acidlab) on that network (as well as on you production network) to help catch and interpret suspicious network activity.
So there are some basic things you can do to easily assess what risks your applications pose from the outside. It will help you catch basic hacker attacks such as IRC / VNC backdoors and stuff. More sophisticated attacks (which might conceal traffic to the outside via sneaky TCP-over-DNS or the like, or hide backdoors using port-knocking) would be harder to detect... for those you'd just have to have an accountability trail back to your suppliers of that software, especially if you have no way to inspect the source code for that kind of malicious embedded trojan.
It's good for engineering geeks, lots of right angles, physics, and sometimes weapons. Practicing kata can often resemble programming in logo.
There's plenty of stuff for your mind to focus on, so it's not boringly repetitious like I find other sports like jogging or going to the gym.
If you're not into competition, try to find the more traditional "ITF" style, which is more into practical self defense. The "WTF" style ("world taekwondo federation") is more focused on scoring points in competitions.
A lot of the meditation and focus stuff resembles overclocking your body... if you think about it, you're only using a fraction of your lung and brain capacity most of the time. So if you start with concentrating on breathing fully, you'll find that you get more control of the involuntary bodily functions such as circulation to your brain, internal muscle tension, and how to clear out that and other blocks that just add stress and impede you.
Since there isn't much software out there in the way of satisfying the original request, I kinda take this Ask Slashdot as a design challenge.
By "modern" (or maybe he means "contemporary" but not quite well-adopted yet) it seems like the approach a developer might take to tackle this problem in this day in age would involve some mix of:
* XHTML + CSS backend .eps figure I imported into latex, which I'd have to perform again each time I had to make a minor edit to a figure).
* MathML for equations (computer generated, not directly human edited)
* should be able to grab the MathML equations and paste them directly into Mathematica or Octave or whatever and start feeding it data or tweaking plots that are displayed as figures.
* ditto with spreadsheets / databases for processing tabular data.
* SVG for freeform annotation of figures (which could be imported in any format with the help of a conversion pipeline... it was pretty annoying trying to remember the pipeline I used to generate each
* version control with svn or something that would also allow collaborative papers or comments on peer reviews
* output targets to tex / pdf / wiki-like site
* presentation output target
--
I did my MSSE in lyx until it was time to convert it into the university latex template; finally finished it up in straight emacs and had a bunch of Makefiles to compile the document to several targets. Used OpenOffice for hand-annotated summary spreadsheets and graphs, dia for figures, and octave+gnuplot for batch-produced data plots.
Using Openoffice Calc was a pain... I had to tweak several options disabling features in my xorg.conf to prevent it from randomly crashing my xserver when I opened menus, and it would crash if I manipulated graphs a certain way, such that I'd have to redo all my work from the last saved working backup because the autosaved on crash one was horked.
Surprised that no one mentioned that such a system was basically featured in the film Minority Report. One of the interesting bits was that some of them would convert to a conventional car at the edge of the city and you could drive it out to the country like a regular car.
I am in full support of this vision. However (and unfortunately), I think the practical answer will resemble robotic trains more than robotic cars operating on the current network of roads. Plus, the main benefits of an improved transportation system will involve restructuring the way cities and communities are built when they are not sliced apart and divided by acres of roadways.
First of all, while there has been some limited success in building autonomous cars, but we can't even get autonomous airplanes accepted into our air transportation system even though planes have practically been able to fly themselves for decades. Hell, most cities can't even get people to accept conductor-less subway trains, and have to hire college students or bums to sit in the front cabin.
The robotic vehicle would have to be completely isolated and separated from unpredictable human traffic and other sources of interference, if only for liability issues.
The best first step in widespread use of robotic cars might just be on the interstate highway system, where they could construct a special lane designed only for robotic vehicles. So you could drive your car/truck onto an interstate, auto-merge into the robotic lane, set the autopilot for your destination exit, and take a nap or otherwise entertain yourself until an alarm wakes you up to exit.
For incursions into urban areas, you'd want something similar to the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) systems everyone was investigating in the 70's. Take a look at the CabinTaxi system at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/cabintaxi%20photos.htm . There are modern PRT systems finally being planned for deployment recently in Heathrow and Dubai... however, they seem to be limited to airport shuttles and aren't really large enough to meet the promise of a large distributed network with many stations.
Speaking of Dubai, the biggest obstacle will be financial, of course. The road and highway system is expensive, but a lot of the infrastructure is paid for by the user in purchase and maintenance of their own personal vehicles. While the city as a whole would find the entire system cheaper if the government would purchase and maintain a smaller number of shared vehicles, good luck convincing them to finance both the network and the vehicles if they can just build the network and have the users pay for their own vehicles. Of course, car sharing companies such as Flexcar / Zipcar offer something of a shared vehicle, they only have limited potential unless they'd allow one-way rentals... where you can pick up a Zipcar at one "station" and drop it off at another "station", where someone else could make use of it. You'd need some way of getting the cars back to empty stations, but that would realize benefits in terms of reducing the area of pavement needed for parking if everyone had their own personal vehicle.
However, I don't think advanced transportation is the magic bullet that will solve all of our problems... I think much greater benefits will be realized by redesigning cities to be denser, more human friendly, and carfree (check out http://carfree.com/ ), so people simply don't need to travel so far from a nice home to a nice place to work.
So yes, I'm an Arcology nut (check out my MSSE thesis on my homepage). I think the Dantzig / Saaty "Compact Cities" book from 1971 had the most comprehensive plan for constructing a city that I have seen in my research (you'll have to look it up in a good library, it's fairly rare).
In any case, I agree that this kind of development should be a national priority, since there is a *lot* of room for improvement. But since improving the place you live and how you get around are kinda mundane, "infrastructure" issues, I figure we'll see little to no advances in the Western world until China develops the technology and discipline and manages to dust us with their production efficiency, and maybe eventually a high standard of living (said only half-jokingly).
Heh, thanks for the concern, but 120VAC @ 60Hz is the norm here in the U.S., my good chap. /am envious of European plugs, though
Meh, if price was that much of an issue, they'd sell cheap 'n' light plug-in "laptops" without batteries. Most of my laptops usually turn into that anyway once the batteries get old and fail :P
Plus, if the battery was built into the switch / router / PC power supply, you wouldn't need an inverter to go from DC to AC only to go back to DC again. /Plus/, all of the environmental sensors that go with the UPS for voltage, load, battery charge, temperature, etc. could be directly interfaced to the motherboard, rather than having to connect a separate USB / serial cable.
So there's still room for this kind of improvement in the PC segment. Of course, all this stuff is already done in laptops, and it probably isn't too much longer until laptops / tablets somehow manage to make traditional PCs completely obsolete.
Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you'll be coming back once it's restored.
Does this assume your buddies (and the intervening) are on your UPS? Or at least an alternatively-powered network?
Oh, I'm a geek, so I mean my /online/ buddies in IRC and so forth. So yeah, the latter.
UPS units are relatively cheap, it's well worthwhile to invest in one, not just to protect from data loss:
* Hardware loss: I've seen a lot of hardware blown up from power interruptions. Do you trust your power company that much to provide clean power to you? Sure surge protectors help a bit, but a decent UPS costs maybe twice as much as a good surge protector.
* Time lost restoring your session after blackouts / brownouts: OK, maybe you're used to restarting your computer every morning anyway. But I like to leave things open and return to my desktop just the way I left it arranged.
* Stats: Using NUT and Munin, you get to monitor and log your power, so you can see things like exactly when your electricity went out and for how long, what load your PC is drawing after that last upgrade, etc. e.g.: http://hairball.bumba.net/cgi-bin/nut/upsstats.cgi?host=apc@localhost
* Graceful shutdown: you have a chance to tell your buddies that your power just went out, and you'll be coming back once it's restored.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised a backup battery isn't built into PC power supplies already, so they'd work a bit more like laptops. Same with networking gear.
I find Apple products nice, but I've always run into some extremely frustrating limitation... e.g. the iPod Nano I bought for my father-in-law won't display images unless you upload them through iLife's iPhoto. So at least I have some idea what to get him for next year :P
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing your workflow with the iPod Touch / iPhone... I think I'd prefer it to any of the WinCE smartphone/PDAs. Right now my main flow is something like:
Palm T|X
* sync/backup PIM with PC using jpilot
* goosync to publish to my Google Calendar
* pSSH for access to screen on my PC for IRC, email, centerim etc.
* VersaMail IMAP access to my Courier mail spool for offline email viewing.
* PalmVNC for doing anything else not supported (I rarely use it, but it's indispensible for those few times)
* Sunrise + Plucker for daily reading material
* TCPMP for music / video playback
* Progect for tracking checklists of things
* Keyring + CryptoPad for secure info
* tejpWriter + IRkeyboard for writing/editing text
* PalmPDF for reviewing slides
* Documents for light office work, spreadsheets
* Mapopolis for offline map viewing outside of network coverage
* games & other toys, nice engineering calculator, dictionary/thesaurus, astronomical guide, etc. that I've found handy over the years
Blackberry (from work)
* sync email & PIM with Exchange
* Google Maps with external Bluetooth GPS Datalogger
* MidPSSH for ssh access to things
* Browser for the occasional google search
However, that's pretty much all the Blackberry is good for... it does a good job of that handful of things, but I hold on to the T|X for everything else.
I've also been toying around with an old Ipaq h5450 which running familiar Linux, but it doesn't quite work well and the touchscreen on it has become flaky anyway. Been waiting for Palm to finally finish porting their OS to Linux, but looks like they gave up on it.
So I've kinda been sitting around waiting for a nice smartphone that can take over most of that functionality to come out at a price point of ~$200 (I'd rather not put anything much more expensive than that in my pocket) or for full laptops to come down in size for them to be pocketable. High hopes for OpenMoko / Google Android, but it will be a few years until they reach that level.
Don't understand this obsession with tablets / webpads... once it's too big to fit in your pocket and have everywhere, you might as while drag a full laptop around :P