As an anonymous coward has mentioned, Progect is a good one for palm. This is very close to pen-and-paper simplicity (as are most of the best PalmOS software). It's the only thing that threatens my use of paper todo lists. Yet it sports:
flexible hierarchical organization. In fact, I end up using it as a general purpose outlining tool as well (are there even any good ones under Linux, outside of a word processor?)
manual sorting (I really hate trying to sort by meaningless arbitrary "priority" numbers like in just about every other PIM sw)
several simple forms of progress & completion reporting
HandyShopper is another good one for tracking non-hierarchical things that have costs and quantities associated with them. It does nice things like let you tally up totals, as well as maybe schedule recurring need-to-do/buy items. It's bizarre that it doesn't really have a desktop equivalent yet:/
For the Linux desktop, you might want to take a look at MrProject, a nice Project clone that's part of GnomeOffice. I've only played with it a little bit under Mandrake, but it looks fairly competent when you want to add hierarchical schedule and resource loading data to your task list. Sadly, there's little else that I've seen that comes anywhere close, and I've been searching for one fairly recently for a project management class I took last semester. Oddly enough, I don't even like MS Project for doing this kind of thing, it just doesn't give me enough flexibility in rearranging things, scheduling parallel activities, automatically sequencing constrained resources, etc.
Anyone know where to find these kinds of benchmarks for Linux software RAID systems? I almost always set up 2-disk RAID 0 and 1 on my Linux boxes, and haven't run into as many problems as they describe here. The performance scales up fairly linearly.
I've always wanted to compare the Linux SW RAID to the HW RAID controllers, to see if it's worth the extra CPU cycles. My guess is that it is, but it'd be great to have some numbers to back this up.
I suppose I could do it myself with hdparm and bonnie++ if it really came down to it, though... any interest in that?
My netscape mail has been completely cleaned out at least twice already, including all of my folders. Anyone else have this experience there? I mainly use it as my junk/product mail address, so I only check it, like, once a month or so... maybe that's a factor?
In the mean time, I've been changing my junk/product mail to yahoo.com, since I can download it into my maildir using fetchyahoo.pl . That way, at least it goes through their spam filters once before going through my local spamassasin daemon.
Netscape's webmail also really sucked in that you could only delete spam a pageful of 25 at a time:P
Just so that I'm marginally on topic, I've been able to avoid hotmail ever since they got bought by MS way back when. I take it this data loss means they finally succeeded in migrating from FreeBSD to Win** Server?:P
Yeah, unfortunately the moderation system ends up promoting a certain status quo of opinion in a particular community. The simple answer to this is for the "repressed" groups to start their own blog / community. The code is out there. No one is forcing all of us to behave as one.
An interesting exercise for the future would be how to get these disparate communities to interact with each other.
Weblogging as a direct digital democracy tool
on
On Collaborative Weblogs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
How long until these technologies can be used for running a government / community? With just a few minor enhancements, such as e.g.:
better security through heavier use of digital signatures
polling / voting, complete with:
discussion forum logs
the ability to change your vote as time goes on
the ability to delegate your vote out to people you trust to uphold your interests
all of that other auditability, transparency, and anonymity stuff you need
issue ranking / prioritization / tracking
taxation / donation / fund allocation / redistribution
it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to allow everyone to perform collaborative decision making mediated through a good blog-based "community operating system".
This goes a little bit beyond simply "e-voting", but not too much given all of the other technologies available. It would also be funny to have a public record of all the flamewars that erupt in the process of sausage-making:P . But particularly because all that frank discussion would be there and wouldn't have to be revisited later down the line.
FreeS/WAN to the rescue. With built-in opportunistic encryption, it will automatically negotiate encrypted transfer for all traffic between hosts that support it.
Just need to add a good anonymizing network and we'd be all set...
In Asia, video game sales were driven by demand, whereas here, it's driven mainly by marketing.
I lived in Thailand for a few years, which pretty much mainly tracked Japanese entertainment products. Interestingly, all of the games went for market prices... when a cart (this was for the SNES, or "Super Famicom" back then) came out, it would be priced high if it was at the top of the charts, and begin to decline as it dwindled down in rankings. They would also start at different price points depending on how much memory the carts needed, so 4MB ROMs were more expensive than dinky little games that only needed 640KB chips.
Here, of course, we're heavily driven by marketing. The distributors fix a price, at say, $50, and they hold onto that for pretty much the entire life of the cart, until it's so obscure that finally ends up in the bargain bin a few years later. The price doesn't really officially fluctuate with supply shortages, or how well the game does in the ratings, or anything like that. Mostly it depends on how much the producers spend on advertising (and a bit on development costs).
Each system has its good points and bad points... In Asia, you can usually expect to have to pay more for good products in high demand (even if they were relatively cheap to produce and market). Here, you just have to be more careful about paying more for overhyped crap.
If you want to try driving one on your PC, there's a mod for Grand Theft Auto Vice City that includes it:
Ultimate Vice City
Unfortunately, GTA III / VC seems to have the most accurate physics of any driving simulator I've played with, and I've gone through a lot. Kinda sad, since they purposefully exaggerate towards comical movie physics a lot.
I actually had no idea the Ultimate Mod's Bugatti was a real car until reading about it just now... I thought that the really insanely fast car in the mod was just rice'd up and given artificially high stats!
vim - I'm not even a VI guy, but it's fast and has nice hooks into explorer and I'm too lazy to deal with registering TextPad or whatever. JEdit's also nice, but way too slow for casual use... I usually go straight to emacs for that kind of editing.
MultiDesk - usable multiple desktops for Windows... like getting that 10% productivity improvement for having dual monitors without having to pay 100% more in displays. If only it had a visual pager...
There are a few scientific explanations for the miraculous stuff alluded to in biblical times. Some theories:
The Great Flood was inspired by the creation of the Black Sea. Before 5600BC, it used to be a much, much smaller lake below sea level. In short order, the Mediterranean broke through and flooded vast amounts of farmland. This is the kind of event that could trigger enough content for an epic. Unfortunately, the best reference I can find on this at the moment is this amazon link.
There have been similar studies done on other events, such as how Moses parted the Red Sea. It was on Discover or one of those shows, where some university was attempting to explain how a specific combination of high winds and tidal forces combined with the shape of the bottom of the Red Sea could have possibly temporarily cleared a wide channel/sandbar across the way. Sounds a bit more tenuous, and I can't find an online reference, but it seems plausible that someone with mastery of astronomical calendaring back then could have predicted an extremely low tide and used to to pull off such a feat.
The Bible was certainly written over interesting times... back when books were made by hand of expensive materials (vellum doesn't come cheap, back at a time when wealth was expressed in livestock). Having something written down in a book laborously by monks was just as well as having it carved in stone -- it had enough proofreading and checking to have been taken as the ultimate truth. There was a time when judges used to literally carry around The Book of The Law, and pass judgements based strictly on what was written.
After inventions like the Gutenberg press made books, journals, and newspapers a commodity, did people realize that what was written was not always true, and begin to look at such things critically as they should.
For some reason, the religious communities have managed to shield their sacred texts from the same sort of transformation in the way we deal with sources of information. But it's doing what they're good at, aligning and organizing people along some lines of belief to accomplish some goal that they probably wouldn't have attained on their own or if they were liberals:P
I like the way Neal Stephenson presents this kind of idea in Snow Crash. A bit exaggerated and fantastical, but altogether tangible and chilling.
Dude, the library isn't about books, it's about information. Creating a society where people without the means to access information stored in books or online bars them from advancement and self-improvement. It's about making sure everone has the opportunity to improve their situation, whether they take it or not. And even though in the end it might just be an exercise in clearing the conscience of all of us that had this stuff while growing up, it does provide a degree of equality that make it all the more apparent when the privileged upper classes still keep their positions closed to their social circles due to factors other than strictly "meritocratic" criteria.
Distress and Eustress. One is bad, and makes you unhappy. The latter is good, and helps you stay motivated and energized. So the trick is to try to figure out how to convert one to the other.
Stuff that helps:
Track your tasks Nothing's more distressing than having a whole bunch of things overwhelm you. If you always feel like you have things you need to get done, but can't really remember what they all are, it's much worse that having 4-5 things you know you have to do. Write things down... putting it on paper will help offload your worries. You can do it on a PDA, but I prefer just writing it down in a small notebook that I carry around. Things I have to do, I put a small box in the margin. When I finish it, I put a check through it. That gives you positive feedback that you're actually getting stuff done. Other times, I find I tend to put checkboxes by things I'll probably never be able to finish (like "improve website"), which you learn to recognize and cross out completely. This keeps you from worrying about things you shouldn't be worrying about, and only taking on things that can actually be completed.
Take extra time to enjoy your work Throw in humor wherever you can... in comments, in easter eggs, whatever. Because if you don't enjoy what you're doing for a living, well, that's pretty bad. If you're a perfectionist, put in the little extra to tweak things as you like. Your manager probably won't like it, since it's their job to pinch pennies and not to understand or appreciate your skill or craft or talent. If that's the case, do it on your own time. Otherwise, you'll have no pride in your work, and you won't want to talk about it when you inevitably interview for a better job:P
Get along with your co-workers... no matter what! Nothing can stress you out more like a sour workplace. Try to make people happy, and don't feel bad about taking a hit yourself sometimes.
Good luck! It's kinda your job to make sure you're happy with your work, no matter where you're working.
Actually, what might be neat once all of our cars are wire(less)d up with bluetooth / wifi would be some type of "moderation" system. Cars that are hooked in to this wireless network could chat with each other (probably not good:P ) or virtually "tag" cars that they notice driving recklessly. Cars could probably be identified via RFID tags that will no doubt be on our registration stickers by then. Then other participants would be notified when cars tagged as reckless approach.
Cops could certainly go after drivers that get marked as "reckless" by enough other respondents.
What I don't get is at the end of the movie after he offloads what he was holding, all of his childhood memories come back. But I guess that it's already hokey enough that they already have to rely on human brains for data transfer via sneakernet.
Hey, you get the best of both worlds... easy install, maintenance, uninstall; plus everything is optimized and you still get to say that you build from source "just because you can".
We'll make a Debian package maintainer out of you yet!
If the recording studios don't sell music under terms you like, simply don't do business with them. There's plenty of good music you can get for free or from independent records. Expand your horizons.
Try time-shifting... just download and save to disk one of the radio streams from icecast.org or shoutcast.org
slashdot.wml hasn't been updating since 10/03... does no one really use it?
T-Mobile apparently started allowing all their subscribers unlimited WAP usage a few months ago, which is the only reason I've played with WAP enough to notice this. How about fixing up your RSS -> WML export?:>
Try FIRE. I've only used it once, but it seems to have a lot of interesting stuff (though it has a bit of a different, more security oriented focus). A look at the "Tools Available" list is educational all by itself.
There are two ways to assure quality work, both in manufacturing & software.
One is to have inspectors look at everything and make sure they're right. QA or "testing"
The other is to actually fix the broken machines / processes that are stamping out broken widgets / buggy software in the first place. I think she's after this path.
I picked up a Samsung SCD27 at Best Buy a few months ago for around $400, and it pretty much does everything I'd want from a DigiCam:
* 8x optical zoom, +10x digital zoom (enough to go insane with pixelation), good image stabilization * Good low light operation: has both a headlamp and powered IR night vision, as well as slow shutter speed modes * Stereo mic * Relatively large 3.5" LCD * Can record from AV in (so you can convert other people's analog videos to DV. * Takes 640x480 jpegs & 320x160 mpegs onto Sony memory sticks (I didn't bother with this, my digital camera can do better)
You owe it to yourself to get a firewire cable and download the digital videos to your computer, though. iMovie comes free with MacOS X, and Windows Movie Maker comes free with WindowsXP from windowsupdate. All you need is a whole bunch of disk space, and maybe a CD or DVD burner to dump all of your videos to something less expensive than DV tapes. You'll have more fun with the fancy video editing than you think, and at worst, it doesn't really take that long.
Just remember that raw DV format is huge, so you'll need a lot of disk space (~15GB / 60min DV tape) before you compress your files into something more reasonable. Windows Movie Maker seems smart enough to compress on the fly if you have a fast enough machine, though...
Be careful with the zoom ratings, though. The Samsung camcorder I bought has 10x optical zoom, which sounds nice enough. However, I can never zoom out enough, and often find myself backing into the corners of rooms to try to fit enough of the action (even just to shoot two people talking to each other) into the view at once.
Slashdot Mirror
HandyShopper is another good one for tracking non-hierarchical things that have costs and quantities associated with them. It does nice things like let you tally up totals, as well as maybe schedule recurring need-to-do/buy items. It's bizarre that it doesn't really have a desktop equivalent yet :/
For the Linux desktop, you might want to take a look at MrProject, a nice Project clone that's part of GnomeOffice. I've only played with it a little bit under Mandrake, but it looks fairly competent when you want to add hierarchical schedule and resource loading data to your task list. Sadly, there's little else that I've seen that comes anywhere close, and I've been searching for one fairly recently for a project management class I took last semester. Oddly enough, I don't even like MS Project for doing this kind of thing, it just doesn't give me enough flexibility in rearranging things, scheduling parallel activities, automatically sequencing constrained resources, etc.
Anyone know where to find these kinds of benchmarks for Linux software RAID systems? I almost always set up 2-disk RAID 0 and 1 on my Linux boxes, and haven't run into as many problems as they describe here. The performance scales up fairly linearly.
I've always wanted to compare the Linux SW RAID to the HW RAID controllers, to see if it's worth the extra CPU cycles. My guess is that it is, but it'd be great to have some numbers to back this up.
I suppose I could do it myself with hdparm and bonnie++ if it really came down to it, though... any interest in that?
My netscape mail has been completely cleaned out at least twice already, including all of my folders. Anyone else have this experience there? I mainly use it as my junk/product mail address, so I only check it, like, once a month or so... maybe that's a factor?
:P
:P
In the mean time, I've been changing my junk/product mail to yahoo.com, since I can download it into my maildir using fetchyahoo.pl . That way, at least it goes through their spam filters once before going through my local spamassasin daemon.
Netscape's webmail also really sucked in that you could only delete spam a pageful of 25 at a time
Just so that I'm marginally on topic, I've been able to avoid hotmail ever since they got bought by MS way back when. I take it this data loss means they finally succeeded in migrating from FreeBSD to Win** Server?
Yeah, unfortunately the moderation system ends up promoting a certain status quo of opinion in a particular community. The simple answer to this is for the "repressed" groups to start their own blog / community. The code is out there. No one is forcing all of us to behave as one.
An interesting exercise for the future would be how to get these disparate communities to interact with each other.
- better security through heavier use of digital signatures
- polling / voting, complete with:
- discussion forum logs
- the ability to change your vote as time goes on
- the ability to delegate your vote out to people you trust to uphold your interests
- all of that other auditability, transparency, and anonymity stuff you need
- issue ranking / prioritization / tracking
- taxation / donation / fund allocation / redistribution
it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to allow everyone to perform collaborative decision making mediated through a good blog-based "community operating system".This goes a little bit beyond simply "e-voting", but not too much given all of the other technologies available. It would also be funny to have a public record of all the flamewars that erupt in the process of sausage-making :P . But particularly because all that frank discussion would be there and wouldn't have to be revisited later down the line.
Anything like this out and about?
Just need to add a good anonymizing network and we'd be all set...
In Asia, video game sales were driven by demand, whereas here, it's driven mainly by marketing.
I lived in Thailand for a few years, which pretty much mainly tracked Japanese entertainment products. Interestingly, all of the games went for market prices... when a cart (this was for the SNES, or "Super Famicom" back then) came out, it would be priced high if it was at the top of the charts, and begin to decline as it dwindled down in rankings. They would also start at different price points depending on how much memory the carts needed, so 4MB ROMs were more expensive than dinky little games that only needed 640KB chips.
Here, of course, we're heavily driven by marketing. The distributors fix a price, at say, $50, and they hold onto that for pretty much the entire life of the cart, until it's so obscure that finally ends up in the bargain bin a few years later. The price doesn't really officially fluctuate with supply shortages, or how well the game does in the ratings, or anything like that. Mostly it depends on how much the producers spend on advertising (and a bit on development costs).
Each system has its good points and bad points... In Asia, you can usually expect to have to pay more for good products in high demand (even if they were relatively cheap to produce and market). Here, you just have to be more careful about paying more for overhyped crap.
Unfortunately, GTA III / VC seems to have the most accurate physics of any driving simulator I've played with, and I've gone through a lot. Kinda sad, since they purposefully exaggerate towards comical movie physics a lot.
I actually had no idea the Ultimate Mod's Bugatti was a real car until reading about it just now... I thought that the really insanely fast car in the mod was just rice'd up and given artificially high stats!
Hmm, sounds neat... Unfortunately, the only thing I could think of is to set up cygwin's sshd with sshd-config and ssh to localhost :/
- Fink - get the GNU POSIX environment on!
- OSXVNC - get somewhere else
- OO.o
- Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
- Flash
- Acrobat Reader
- StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
- MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
- WS Manager - Multiple desktop manager. I'm too cheap to pay to upgrade from OS 10.2 to 10.3 for Exposé, even with my wife's educational discount.
Of course there's all the stuff from their autoupdater too. Heh, notice it's a bit smaller than the Windows list- Cygwin - get the POSIX environment on!
- PuTTY - the only terminal I've found that handles colors and stuff right.
- TightVNC - get to some other computer
- OO.o
- vim - I'm not even a VI guy, but it's fast and has nice hooks into explorer and I'm too lazy to deal with registering TextPad or whatever. JEdit's also nice, but way too slow for casual use... I usually go straight to emacs for that kind of editing.
- Mozilla / Firefox / etc. - and the plugins:
- Flash
- Acrobat Reader
- StumbleUpon toolbar - it's like having your own personalized fark (not that I read fark, but this is probably why)
- Winamp - get the groove on
- MPlayer - it handles just about all the codecs
- MultiDesk - usable multiple desktops for Windows... like getting that 10% productivity improvement for having dual monitors without having to pay 100% more in displays. If only it had a visual pager...
- Windows PowerToys - because every little option matters
Usually hit windowsupdate several times first, of course.More on Linux and MacOS X later, I guess...
The Great Flood was inspired by the creation of the Black Sea. Before 5600BC, it used to be a much, much smaller lake below sea level. In short order, the Mediterranean broke through and flooded vast amounts of farmland. This is the kind of event that could trigger enough content for an epic. Unfortunately, the best reference I can find on this at the moment is this amazon link.
There have been similar studies done on other events, such as how Moses parted the Red Sea. It was on Discover or one of those shows, where some university was attempting to explain how a specific combination of high winds and tidal forces combined with the shape of the bottom of the Red Sea could have possibly temporarily cleared a wide channel/sandbar across the way. Sounds a bit more tenuous, and I can't find an online reference, but it seems plausible that someone with mastery of astronomical calendaring back then could have predicted an extremely low tide and used to to pull off such a feat.
The Bible was certainly written over interesting times... back when books were made by hand of expensive materials (vellum doesn't come cheap, back at a time when wealth was expressed in livestock). Having something written down in a book laborously by monks was just as well as having it carved in stone -- it had enough proofreading and checking to have been taken as the ultimate truth. There was a time when judges used to literally carry around The Book of The Law, and pass judgements based strictly on what was written.
After inventions like the Gutenberg press made books, journals, and newspapers a commodity, did people realize that what was written was not always true, and begin to look at such things critically as they should.
For some reason, the religious communities have managed to shield their sacred texts from the same sort of transformation in the way we deal with sources of information. But it's doing what they're good at, aligning and organizing people along some lines of belief to accomplish some goal that they probably wouldn't have attained on their own or if they were liberals :P
I like the way Neal Stephenson presents this kind of idea in Snow Crash. A bit exaggerated and fantastical, but altogether tangible and chilling.
Dude, the library isn't about books, it's about information. Creating a society where people without the means to access information stored in books or online bars them from advancement and self-improvement. It's about making sure everone has the opportunity to improve their situation, whether they take it or not. And even though in the end it might just be an exercise in clearing the conscience of all of us that had this stuff while growing up, it does provide a degree of equality that make it all the more apparent when the privileged upper classes still keep their positions closed to their social circles due to factors other than strictly "meritocratic" criteria.
Stuff that helps:
- Track your tasks Nothing's more distressing than having a whole bunch of things overwhelm you. If you always feel like you have things you need to get done, but can't really remember what they all are, it's much worse that having 4-5 things you know you have to do. Write things down... putting it on paper will help offload your worries. You can do it on a PDA, but I prefer just writing it down in a small notebook that I carry around. Things I have to do, I put a small box in the margin. When I finish it, I put a check through it. That gives you positive feedback that you're actually getting stuff done. Other times, I find I tend to put checkboxes by things I'll probably never be able to finish (like "improve website"), which you learn to recognize and cross out completely. This keeps you from worrying about things you shouldn't be worrying about, and only taking on things that can actually be completed.
- Take extra time to enjoy your work Throw in humor wherever you can
... in comments, in easter eggs, whatever. Because if you don't enjoy what you're doing for a living, well, that's pretty bad. If you're a perfectionist, put in the little extra to tweak things as you like. Your manager probably won't like it, since it's their job to pinch pennies and not to understand or appreciate your skill or craft or talent. If that's the case, do it on your own time. Otherwise, you'll have no pride in your work, and you won't want to talk about it when you inevitably interview for a better job :P
- Get along with your co-workers... no matter what! Nothing can stress you out more like a sour workplace. Try to make people happy, and don't feel bad about taking a hit yourself sometimes.
Good luck! It's kinda your job to make sure you're happy with your work, no matter where you're working.Actually, what might be neat once all of our cars are wire(less)d up with bluetooth / wifi would be some type of "moderation" system. Cars that are hooked in to this wireless network could chat with each other (probably not good :P ) or virtually "tag" cars that they notice driving recklessly. Cars could probably be identified via RFID tags that will no doubt be on our registration stickers by then. Then other participants would be notified when cars tagged as reckless approach.
Cops could certainly go after drivers that get marked as "reckless" by enough other respondents.
Ah, the mysterious future!
What I don't get is at the end of the movie after he offloads what he was holding, all of his childhood memories come back. But I guess that it's already hokey enough that they already have to rely on human brains for data transfer via sneakernet.
Hey, you get the best of both worlds... easy install, maintenance, uninstall; plus everything is optimized and you still get to say that you build from source "just because you can".
We'll make a Debian package maintainer out of you yet!
If the recording studios don't sell music under terms you like, simply don't do business with them. There's plenty of good music you can get for free or from independent records. Expand your horizons.
Try time-shifting... just download and save to disk one of the radio streams from icecast.org or shoutcast.org
T-Mobile apparently started allowing all their subscribers unlimited WAP usage a few months ago, which is the only reason I've played with WAP enough to notice this. How about fixing up your RSS -> WML export? :>
Try FIRE. I've only used it once, but it seems to have a lot of interesting stuff (though it has a bit of a different, more security oriented focus). A look at the "Tools Available" list is educational all by itself.
There are two ways to assure quality work, both in manufacturing & software.
One is to have inspectors look at everything and make sure they're right. QA or "testing"
The other is to actually fix the broken machines / processes that are stamping out broken widgets / buggy software in the first place. I think she's after this path.
Of course, you still need both.
I picked up a Samsung SCD27 at Best Buy a few months ago for around $400, and it pretty much does everything I'd want from a DigiCam:
* 8x optical zoom, +10x digital zoom (enough to go insane with pixelation), good image stabilization
* Good low light operation: has both a headlamp and powered IR night vision, as well as slow shutter speed modes
* Stereo mic
* Relatively large 3.5" LCD
* Can record from AV in (so you can convert other people's analog videos to DV.
* Takes 640x480 jpegs & 320x160 mpegs onto Sony memory sticks (I didn't bother with this, my digital camera can do better)
You owe it to yourself to get a firewire cable and download the digital videos to your computer, though. iMovie comes free with MacOS X, and Windows Movie Maker comes free with WindowsXP from windowsupdate. All you need is a whole bunch of disk space, and maybe a CD or DVD burner to dump all of your videos to something less expensive than DV tapes. You'll have more fun with the fancy video editing than you think, and at worst, it doesn't really take that long.
Just remember that raw DV format is huge, so you'll need a lot of disk space (~15GB / 60min DV tape) before you compress your files into something more reasonable. Windows Movie Maker seems smart enough to compress on the fly if you have a fast enough machine, though...
Be careful with the zoom ratings, though. The Samsung camcorder I bought has 10x optical zoom, which sounds nice enough. However, I can never zoom out enough, and often find myself backing into the corners of rooms to try to fit enough of the action (even just to shoot two people talking to each other) into the view at once.
Do we smell a /. poll coming on??!