Interface Builder is fairly bizarre, but it starts to make
sense after a while. It does. Really.
My primary reference for iPhone development has been Erica Sadun's book, but I may pick this one up too.
BTW: people may bitch about code signing, but Apple gave me my signature when I asked for it.
This is minor compared with what was necessary when
my employers wanted to do
Brew development. I considered going the jailbreak route,
but ended up not doing so.
I attended a talk by Jaymie Matthews last night on MOST and
some of the very cool things they've
found out with it.
He argued that historians 400 years from now will look
back on our time as a time of great scientific progress, just
as we look back on Galileo's time 400 years ago. In 30
years we have gone from a general relativity universe made
of matter and energy to an accelerating universe made
of mostly dark matter and dark energy. While we have our
suspicions on dark matter, we don't have a clue (yet)
on dark energy.
We are studying the universe in unprecedented
detail and learning new things about it, but we are finding new mysteries too. Almost makes me want to go back to school
and be a part of it.
Why can't they just buy a new 747?
I'm not saying it's the best choice if they need a bigger plane, but it is a solution.
A new 747 is one of the options.
In Canada the Prime Minister flies around in a CC-150 Polaris, an Airbus A310 derivative. The Canadian Forces fly a fleet of such planes for VIPs, troop transport and similar functions.
So what's left? Two things. First, the government wanted to sell off the bandwidth that normal TV uses. Second, the *AA lobbies loved the idea of digital because they could put their "broadcast flag" in it and implement DRM.
I thought it was pretty obvious that these
were the motivations. I guess I'm just cynical or
something...:-)
The cable companies here in Canada have managed
to completely snow people in to believing
that you must have cable to get HD. I get five digital signals over the air with the converter
box I brought back with me from a recent trip
to Oregon (what they had at Radio Shack on a
Saturday afternoon, $US49.99), three of which have significant levels
of HD programming. The over-the-air quality is
actually better than cable, because it's
not as heavily compressed.
Canada is not planning The Big Switchover
until 2011, BTW.
Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
I agree wholeheartedly. This wasn't a get rich quick story. It was somebody who worked hard to become rich.
The story is actually more interesting than
the Wired story says. For years geologists had
been finding raw diamonds in the NWT, and had been
going nuts trying to find where they were coming from. The real breakthrough was
realising what a kimberlite pipe would look
like out in the tundra, sorting out the geology that went along
with it, then examining likely sites. Many of these
are now well-known names, like Ekati and Diavik.
The way to look at the Slackware "distribution" is to see it as a bare bones, vanilla-type system.
I view Slackware as a construction set for building Linux boxes. You can build anything you want with it - desktop, server, whatever. This is different from
other distros that are a Linux box in a can. Open the can, pour out the contents, go.
I also like the fact that Slackware doesn't try to hide the fact that it's Unix. Many
other distros are trying too hard to look like
Windows.
My very first Linux box was Slackware. I've used Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, and messed around with
the embedded stuff on teeny tiny computers. But for
general day-to-day use, I always come back to Slackware.
Because it works.
Yes, I'm typing this on a Slackware box. Three cheers for Slackware! Thanks, Patrick!
Knowing Broadcom, they probably won't even divulge
the package size unless you sign an NDA.
The trend nowadays seems to keep all the juicy
technical information confidential, and not to even
sample the component unless you work for a very
important company. This eliminates any hobbyist
use of the part. Can't have people experimenting
with this stuff. Think of the children!
I'm typing this on a Linux box. It works
just fine. It's
a powerful development platform and I've
developed all sorts of cool stuff on it.
We make extensive use of Apache, MySQL, and related goodies. One of my recent applications
was my first foray in to Django. It too works just fine.
Now we're looking at VoIP, based on Asterisk.
I downloaded the current source tarball,
built it, am using the O"Reilly Asterisk book
to figure out how it works. It works. I just
phoned a test extension and left voicemail.
Great. What is
not great is trying to get any
hardware to use with it. Nobody in town has VoIP
anything, except for Vonage boxes (ugh). I ordered a SIP phone to
play with from some clowns on the internet
who never bothered
telling me that it was back-ordered/discontinued
(they seem unable to decide themselves) until
I phoned them today (2 weeks later) wondering
where the hell my phone was.
This is starting to raise a flag. The software is fine,
but if we can't get hardware to play with it, what's the point?
I visited Parkes when I went to Australia a few years ago. They had a neat display at the visitor's centre about The Dish, with pictures, and a writeup
about, as they put it, Things That Really Happened and Things That Made a Good Story. I stayed a couple
of days in Forbes NSW, the town that played
Parkes in the movie. Parkes has long since turned
in to strip mall hell, but with the right camera
angles, parts of Forbes can pass for the late 1960s.
The (real) Parkes people did a
nice writeup on
their involvement with Apollo 11.
Actually Windows NT was developed on other platforms, then ported to x86. It was originally released with support for x86, MIPS and Dec Alpha. NT 3.5 added support for PowerPC.
Yes. It was originally called VMS, and ran on VAX
hardware. I have fond memories of playing
with it.
I also tangled with NT on Alpha. My memories of
it are not fond.
I imagine that any kind of scientific exploration is viewed with distrust and quite a bit of fear.
This is certainly my experience. I mess around in a variety of areas, for fun. I develop my own film and print my own pictures - sometimes with home-made cameras. I look at the stars with telescopes. I make and use my own radio gear. The reaction is almost
invariably one of suspicion: radios are for eavesdropping, telescopes are
for surveillance, and so on.
Sad.
I can't say I was ever much of a chemist. I found chemistry
fascinating in high school, but then my 1st year chemistry prof proceeded to
do a throughly professional job of curing me of any further
interest in the subject.
Why not do what everybody else does? If it's on at a time when kids are likely to be watching,
take it easy on the profanity. If it's on later, when kids
should be in bed anyway, don't worry about it.
This works fine in other countries. Why doesn't the U.S. do it?
- Do you think the government has a real, and appropriate, interest in knowing who and what is coming in and out of the country?
- If so, why is it inappropriate to check at the borders (or at the nearest available transit points) that those crossing have their citizenship documentation or passport and visa documentation, as they are required to carry by law for all cross-border travel?
But that's the issue: the checkpoints are not at the border. They
are well within the country, long after people have completed
all
necessary customs and immigration formalities and been lawfully
granted entry to the country. They may have never left the country at all.
The U.S. Constitution sounds really good on paper, but it's the
application that is failing here. These are the principles on which
your country was founded (good ones, IMHO), and it's high time people stood up to them. You might try reading the
constitution of the former
Soviet Union as an example of what's on paper and how
it's actually applied. Article 29 is particularly amusing in
retrospect.
Here in Canada our
Constitution has an explicit opt-out clause (Section 33, commonly known as the Notwithstanding Clause), that allows governments to pass legislation that violates certain sections of the Charter, but only for a limited
time, and only certain sections. Quebec used it when their French-language
sign law was challenged in court. Alberta have threatened to
use it to block gay marriage.
Daylight Saving Time really only works (if it works at all) for a narrow range of latitudes.
Too far south and the sun sets at the same time all year anyway. Too far north
and the sun sets ridiculously late in the summer, and sets very early in the winter. Few of our southern hemisphere friends live far enough
south for this to be an issue. Anybody
here from Ushuaia?
Even here, in southern Canada (49 degrees north), the sun sets at 1600 in the winter. If we didn't mess with time zones the sun would set at 2000 in the summer, and it isn't really dark until nearly 2200. How much later do you want it to set?
I help maintain a legacy product that, for
reasons best forgotten, uses its own file system and its own
disk geometry (32 sectors per track) on 3.5 inch floppies.
Other than using the system itself, I can read and write disk
images on a Linux box with a real/dev/fd floppy drive and some creative usage of setfdprm. I'm still scratching my head over
how to do the same thing with a USB floppy drive.
I'm also still trying to find a way to convince my
boss I should write a new utility (the old one is crap)
to take a bunch of files and make a series of floppy
image files, a la mkisofs.
Modifying the firmware to read more modern devices is probably doable. Making the thing boot
off modern devices requires rewriting the
boot ROM and is probably beyond our present capabilities (it's a long story...).
Now, why most people aren't using 10.*.*.* as their internal stuff I'll never know. Since the overwhelming majority of machines on the internet aren't (and shouldn't) be directly routable, it's an awful waste to not have organizations behind NAT-ed firewalls and not drawing from the common pool of route-able IP addresses.
This is exactly how the company I work for does it. We use one public IP address, and our computers (all private IPs, as they should be)
are NATted behind
our router. I do the same thing at home, partly
to circumvent how many computers my ADSL provider will
let me plug in to their connection without giving them more money.:-)
If everybody did things like this we would need a lot fewer IP addresses.
The GPS in a phone can tell indeed tell you how fast you are going. They take all the information they can get (including cell
tower data), since their primary requirement is an extremely robust fix
under all circumstances (cf 911 dispatch).
I've done work with GPS location stuff under Brew, and two things come to my mind immediately: applications need the equivalent of root privilege to alter the phone call progress, and GPS fixes cost money. At least they did on Sprint when we were testing. Maybe they don't cost as much any more. We spent lots of time fiddling with how often we got a fix to track things that
were happening but not bankrupt the customer
in the process.
Add photos that you aren't in and tag them as you.
This isn't just FaceBook and friends: there is nothing to prevent you from
posting any false information you like on the Internet. It's your information. Do with it what you will. Make up what you like.
...laura who has slipped some doozies in to some online question and answer sites
I know Nissan are bringing the GT-R to North America, including
Canada, but I have yet to see one in real life. I see lots of
older Skylines
around town, and saw an S-Cargo van on my way home from
work today. The GT-R is going to appeal to a very different
sort of driver than an R32.
I see from their web site that
they're planning to bring the Cube in next year. Cool!
Now if we could only persuade Mitsubishi to bring in the
D:5 Delica we'd be all set. Same engine/chassis/driveline as
the Outlander SUV, but much, much cooler.
Slashdot Mirror
Interface Builder is fairly bizarre, but it starts to make sense after a while. It does. Really.
My primary reference for iPhone development has been Erica Sadun's book, but I may pick this one up too.
BTW: people may bitch about code signing, but Apple gave me my signature when I asked for it. This is minor compared with what was necessary when my employers wanted to do Brew development. I considered going the jailbreak route, but ended up not doing so.
...laura
I attended a talk by Jaymie Matthews last night on MOST and some of the very cool things they've found out with it.
He argued that historians 400 years from now will look back on our time as a time of great scientific progress, just as we look back on Galileo's time 400 years ago. In 30 years we have gone from a general relativity universe made of matter and energy to an accelerating universe made of mostly dark matter and dark energy. While we have our suspicions on dark matter, we don't have a clue (yet) on dark energy.
We are studying the universe in unprecedented detail and learning new things about it, but we are finding new mysteries too. Almost makes me want to go back to school and be a part of it.
...laura
Why can't they just buy a new 747? I'm not saying it's the best choice if they need a bigger plane, but it is a solution.
A new 747 is one of the options.
In Canada the Prime Minister flies around in a CC-150 Polaris, an Airbus A310 derivative. The Canadian Forces fly a fleet of such planes for VIPs, troop transport and similar functions.
...laura
So what's left? Two things. First, the government wanted to sell off the bandwidth that normal TV uses. Second, the *AA lobbies loved the idea of digital because they could put their "broadcast flag" in it and implement DRM.
I thought it was pretty obvious that these were the motivations. I guess I'm just cynical or something... :-)
The cable companies here in Canada have managed to completely snow people in to believing that you must have cable to get HD. I get five digital signals over the air with the converter box I brought back with me from a recent trip to Oregon (what they had at Radio Shack on a Saturday afternoon, $US49.99), three of which have significant levels of HD programming. The over-the-air quality is actually better than cable, because it's not as heavily compressed.
Canada is not planning The Big Switchover until 2011, BTW.
...laura
There had been some suggestions in the U.K. that maybe they should have a female Dr. Who this time around. That could have been interesting.
The names floating around included Helen Mirren and Judi Dench. Imposing, powerful women. Just the way it should be.
...laura
Seems a little unfair to call the guy a 'rogue' or 'absent minded'. He's an intelligent bloke who applied his knowledge and intellect to a problem, spent nearly a decade doing the necessary legwork, and eventually hit the big time when it all paid off. That's not 'rogue' behaviour, that's hard work. I'd have given up. Well done to him. He deserves it.
I agree wholeheartedly. This wasn't a get rich quick story. It was somebody who worked hard to become rich.
The story is actually more interesting than the Wired story says. For years geologists had been finding raw diamonds in the NWT, and had been going nuts trying to find where they were coming from. The real breakthrough was realising what a kimberlite pipe would look like out in the tundra, sorting out the geology that went along with it, then examining likely sites. Many of these are now well-known names, like Ekati and Diavik.
I too wish these folks well.
...laura
The way to look at the Slackware "distribution" is to see it as a bare bones, vanilla-type system.
I view Slackware as a construction set for building Linux boxes. You can build anything you want with it - desktop, server, whatever. This is different from other distros that are a Linux box in a can. Open the can, pour out the contents, go.
I also like the fact that Slackware doesn't try to hide the fact that it's Unix. Many other distros are trying too hard to look like Windows.
My very first Linux box was Slackware. I've used Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, and messed around with the embedded stuff on teeny tiny computers. But for general day-to-day use, I always come back to Slackware. Because it works.
Yes, I'm typing this on a Slackware box. Three cheers for Slackware! Thanks, Patrick!
...laura
Knowing Broadcom, they probably won't even divulge the package size unless you sign an NDA.
The trend nowadays seems to keep all the juicy technical information confidential, and not to even sample the component unless you work for a very important company. This eliminates any hobbyist use of the part. Can't have people experimenting with this stuff. Think of the children!
...laura
Vista boots in 4 GB? I'm impressed!
:-)
...laura
I'm using Xlite and it works fine. But I want a phone, dammit!
:-)
...laura
I'm typing this on a Linux box. It works just fine. It's a powerful development platform and I've developed all sorts of cool stuff on it.
We make extensive use of Apache, MySQL, and related goodies. One of my recent applications was my first foray in to Django. It too works just fine.
Now we're looking at VoIP, based on Asterisk. I downloaded the current source tarball, built it, am using the O"Reilly Asterisk book to figure out how it works. It works. I just phoned a test extension and left voicemail. Great. What is not great is trying to get any hardware to use with it. Nobody in town has VoIP anything, except for Vonage boxes (ugh). I ordered a SIP phone to play with from some clowns on the internet who never bothered telling me that it was back-ordered/discontinued (they seem unable to decide themselves) until I phoned them today (2 weeks later) wondering where the hell my phone was.
This is starting to raise a flag. The software is fine, but if we can't get hardware to play with it, what's the point?
...laura
Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum,
theodcyninga, thrym gefrunon,
hu tha aethelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceathena threatum...
I think it loses something in the translation. And not just because Slashdot botches the eths and the thorns.
...laura
I visited Parkes when I went to Australia a few years ago. They had a neat display at the visitor's centre about The Dish, with pictures, and a writeup about, as they put it, Things That Really Happened and Things That Made a Good Story. I stayed a couple of days in Forbes NSW, the town that played Parkes in the movie. Parkes has long since turned in to strip mall hell, but with the right camera angles, parts of Forbes can pass for the late 1960s.
The (real) Parkes people did a nice writeup on their involvement with Apollo 11.
And it's still in the middle of a sheep paddock.
...laura
Actually Windows NT was developed on other platforms, then ported to x86. It was originally released with support for x86, MIPS and Dec Alpha. NT 3.5 added support for PowerPC.
Yes. It was originally called VMS, and ran on VAX hardware. I have fond memories of playing with it.
I also tangled with NT on Alpha. My memories of it are not fond.
...laura
I imagine that any kind of scientific exploration is viewed with distrust and quite a bit of fear.
This is certainly my experience. I mess around in a variety of areas, for fun. I develop my own film and print my own pictures - sometimes with home-made cameras. I look at the stars with telescopes. I make and use my own radio gear. The reaction is almost invariably one of suspicion: radios are for eavesdropping, telescopes are for surveillance, and so on.
Sad.
I can't say I was ever much of a chemist. I found chemistry fascinating in high school, but then my 1st year chemistry prof proceeded to do a throughly professional job of curing me of any further interest in the subject.
...laura
Why not do what everybody else does? If it's on at a time when kids are likely to be watching, take it easy on the profanity. If it's on later, when kids should be in bed anyway, don't worry about it.
This works fine in other countries. Why doesn't the U.S. do it?
...laura
But the real question is....Why would anybody do this?? Port Commodore64 BASIC to a PC?
Three reasons come to mind:
1. Because it's there.
2. Because you can.
3. Because it's cool. :-)
...laura
Is this spike for real, or is it the result of increased enforcement efforts?
...laura
- Do you think the government has a real, and appropriate, interest in knowing who and what is coming in and out of the country?
- If so, why is it inappropriate to check at the borders (or at the nearest available transit points) that those crossing have their citizenship documentation or passport and visa documentation, as they are required to carry by law for all cross-border travel?
But that's the issue: the checkpoints are not at the border. They are well within the country, long after people have completed all necessary customs and immigration formalities and been lawfully granted entry to the country. They may have never left the country at all.
The U.S. Constitution sounds really good on paper, but it's the application that is failing here. These are the principles on which your country was founded (good ones, IMHO), and it's high time people stood up to them. You might try reading the constitution of the former Soviet Union as an example of what's on paper and how it's actually applied. Article 29 is particularly amusing in retrospect.
Here in Canada our Constitution has an explicit opt-out clause (Section 33, commonly known as the Notwithstanding Clause), that allows governments to pass legislation that violates certain sections of the Charter, but only for a limited time, and only certain sections. Quebec used it when their French-language sign law was challenged in court. Alberta have threatened to use it to block gay marriage.
What are the equivalent U.S. provisions?
...laura
Daylight Saving Time really only works (if it works at all) for a narrow range of latitudes.
Too far south and the sun sets at the same time all year anyway. Too far north and the sun sets ridiculously late in the summer, and sets very early in the winter. Few of our southern hemisphere friends live far enough south for this to be an issue. Anybody here from Ushuaia?
Even here, in southern Canada (49 degrees north), the sun sets at 1600 in the winter. If we didn't mess with time zones the sun would set at 2000 in the summer, and it isn't really dark until nearly 2200. How much later do you want it to set?
...laura
I help maintain a legacy product that, for reasons best forgotten, uses its own file system and its own disk geometry (32 sectors per track) on 3.5 inch floppies.
Other than using the system itself, I can read and write disk images on a Linux box with a real /dev/fd floppy drive and some creative usage of setfdprm. I'm still scratching my head over
how to do the same thing with a USB floppy drive.
I'm also still trying to find a way to convince my
boss I should write a new utility (the old one is crap)
to take a bunch of files and make a series of floppy
image files, a la mkisofs.
Modifying the firmware to read more modern devices is probably doable. Making the thing boot off modern devices requires rewriting the boot ROM and is probably beyond our present capabilities (it's a long story...).
...laura
Now, why most people aren't using 10.*.*.* as their internal stuff I'll never know. Since the overwhelming majority of machines on the internet aren't (and shouldn't) be directly routable, it's an awful waste to not have organizations behind NAT-ed firewalls and not drawing from the common pool of route-able IP addresses.
This is exactly how the company I work for does it. We use one public IP address, and our computers (all private IPs, as they should be) are NATted behind our router. I do the same thing at home, partly to circumvent how many computers my ADSL provider will let me plug in to their connection without giving them more money. :-)
If everybody did things like this we would need a lot fewer IP addresses.
...laura
The GPS in a phone can tell indeed tell you how fast you are going. They take all the information they can get (including cell tower data), since their primary requirement is an extremely robust fix under all circumstances (cf 911 dispatch).
I've done work with GPS location stuff under Brew, and two things come to my mind immediately: applications need the equivalent of root privilege to alter the phone call progress, and GPS fixes cost money. At least they did on Sprint when we were testing. Maybe they don't cost as much any more. We spent lots of time fiddling with how often we got a fix to track things that were happening but not bankrupt the customer in the process.
...laura
Add photos that you aren't in and tag them as you.
This isn't just FaceBook and friends: there is nothing to prevent you from posting any false information you like on the Internet. It's your information. Do with it what you will. Make up what you like.
...laura who has slipped some doozies in to some online question and answer sites
I know Nissan are bringing the GT-R to North America, including Canada, but I have yet to see one in real life. I see lots of older Skylines around town, and saw an S-Cargo van on my way home from work today. The GT-R is going to appeal to a very different sort of driver than an R32.
I see from their web site that they're planning to bring the Cube in next year. Cool! Now if we could only persuade Mitsubishi to bring in the D:5 Delica we'd be all set. Same engine/chassis/driveline as the Outlander SUV, but much, much cooler.
...laura