Firefox is great and has been for some time my primary browser. Or was until a recent release (0.8, I think). The tabbed browsing extension package suddenly didn't work with much of anything - cookies did not work, I could not even log in to some sites. The tabbed browsing extension is seriously deprecated by the developers, so bugs that involve it are immediately rejected.
But I've also seen the developers say that they're not likely to add in the tabbed browsing extensions to the main browser as the extension package is already there.
So I now use the Mozilla browser most of the time because it works well with the tab extensions.
I wish I were in a position to toss some money at firefox to support mainstreaming the tab extensions.
I don't think its a statement about bureaucracy at all, but instead of a long explanation, how about a poem?
This is by Stephen Crane.
The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. "Ha," he said, "I see that none has passed here In a long time." Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads."
I agree that knowing how to code at the assembler level is often the hallmark of the best programmers.
But I'd turn the premise around - I think that the best programmers learn how to code at the lowest because they want to and are interested in it. Then they learn about both the benefits and complications (pipeline stalls, cache effects...).
But on another level, teaching assembler in college is increasingly difficult. Students in many CS programs are hard pressed to learn much more than Java and C# - very few know any language other than those in the C/C++/Java/C# family plus Perl and Python. Instead they learn all about GUI's, IDE's,.NET and so on.
I'd love to see students really learn assembly language (though ideally it would be for something other than the plug-ugly x86 series architectures), but then I'd also love to see them learn Lisp, Haskell and a few more languages, as well as Unix, Windows, VMS and a few more OS's, as well as HTML, XML, TeX and a few more ways to mark up information, as well as OpenGL, Postscript, X windows library calls and a few more graphics systems, as well as Calculus, Linear Algebra and a bit more math, as well as.... (well, you get the idea).
I've not read this book completely, but in general Chaitin's work which manages to mix computability and randomness in all kinds of interesting ways is well worth reading.
It is rarely so technical as to terrify and his sense of humor and careful exposition makes reading his stuff enlightening and fun all at once.
While the idea of a 3d crossword is intriguing, it seems like it would be very complicated and tough to work out - both for the compiler and the solver.
There are some other fun things you could do that would end up with interesting crosswords and still fit nicely in two dimensions.
First there are all the variants on cryptic crosswords. See The Atlantic Monthly for some very nice ones (and some very tough ones). If you look around a bit Stephen Sondheim (yup, the guy who writes Broadway Musicals) also published a book of fun (and challenging crosswords).
Then there are cross number puzzles - there are some simple ones, but I'm thinking of one like
this . It is fairly small but very fun to solve. (This would probably be of most interest in a school with a distinct science/math orientation.)
I've thought a couple of times about building a crossword that would translate letters into differently colored squares (using only a couple of colors and simple patterns) so that the correctly solved problem would make a picture but ended up trying to find a fun program that would take a completed crossword and an image and find a decent mapping to make the crossword look like the image. (There are some interesting ways to fiddle this idea - the checked lights might only match in shape/color,letters might map to multiple shapes, you might have to determine the mapping of letters to shapes (perhaps matching lines/colors in adjacent squares as clues)....)
Dont forget, if there is the possibility of putting people behind bars for such (um) "offenses", the prison industry (including the construction folks, the guards and everyone else who profits from it) will be for it.
Even if prison time is not in there, it might be on the next pass through, and you can't forget the other "justice" related industries - lawyers, those who sell bail bonds and so on.
I was in the Peace Corps years back and learned some Swahili. For a long time my passwords were words or short phrases in Swahili - resistant to a dictionary attack (at that time at least) and easy enough to remember.
I now use the mnemonic passphrase (with odd character changes) for the most part - for example after a script kiddie attack I used "K0!ybftgh" (Keep O(0)ut ! you bastards from teenage geek hell).
As I've been given to understand, the current tax system in the US is seriously biased in favor of either not doing R&D or doing R&D that pays off in the short run.
If we revamped the tax system so that long term R&D gave a better tax break we'd probably see more of it.
Personally I'd like to see better tax breaks for longer term investment (in R&D and other things) and similar tax breaks for long term profitability and the like in order to encourage the bean counter types to work in that direction.
Thinking about how this kind of thing interacts with patents and other IP issues just kind of makes my brain complain. Sigh.
In response to a FOIA request it can now be revealed.
Justices T---, R--- and S--- (full names redacted as part of the FOIA review) are indeed patented and licensed in perpetuity. They've been genetically modified to have narrow minds and to be susceptible to hypnosis and implantation of suggestions - but only by the F-- (FOIA editing again) News Network and republican occupants of the White House.
The patents have been held in secret, having been classified as "essential to national security".
In a secret project funded by the republican party and headed by biologists from (name removed in FOIA review) University these genes have been modified to insert themselves into your bloodstream (and hence the rest of your cells) when you eat M--- (named removed in FOIA review) patented grains.
Eventually these will take over all the coding parts of everyone's DNA and it will finally be true for most people that :
That sounds like a poll idea, or an ask slashdot. But I don't think this comes anywhere near qualifying. Still, it does make me want to go rummage around a bit to see what might qualify.
I agree with most of what you say, but SAR is a slightly different thing. When SAR is called out, usually a person is missing, or there is some other kind of report of trouble.
Then the nice SAR people (usually volunteers) leave their jobs, fill their cars with gas, get food and drive out somewhere, often at night and in the rain or snow, and spend as long as it takes to try to find the person. A big search can involve hundreds of people, hundreds of miles of driving, air support, law enforcement and who knows what else.
I don't want to watch over you. I dont want to make decisions about your life. I don't want you to watch over me or make decisions about my life.
But when I'm out on a search, I can imagine wanting that kind of information.
On the original subject hough, I'd have to say that on the whole I'm agin it. Many people go out into the wilderness and don't stay on trails (hunters are a prime example) and I don't think this would kind of information would be worth the devices needed to support it or the potential problems it would raise.
In most of the US SAR is volunteer and most teams are always ready to welcome newcomers.
You don't usually need a radio license but you'll almost certainly be required to do some training with the team you join and that will typically include first aid, map reading and other useful skills.
Depending on the team your time committment can be pretty light except for searches. For example I was associated with a team that met once a month for a couple hours and did a training day or weekend maybe once every two months (sometimes more, sometimes less).
It is a good thing to do, can be a lot of fun (when people are safe) and you'll learn more about the wilderness than you might think. It can also be emotionally draining (when they are not).
I've done the SAR thing and cell phones are interesting.
I've been on searches where the lost person has a cell phone. More than once the person has reported being lost to someone else and then stayed on the line for a while draining the battery completely - but not giving us any information that would really help us to find him.
I have a genetic programming based midi file generator that allows a user to build, rate and breed (so to speak) grammars that generate midi files. It is written in java and uses an external midi file player (in linux it defaults to timidity) to play the files. Find it
here .
As the page shows it also can be used to generate pov files and other kinds of oddness. There is a current running version at this page that is generating "plants" and selecting them for "how well they compete for sunlight" (sort of).
Don't tell me the UI is terrible. I know. I'm more interested in what I can make it do and playing with the innards. Currently I'm working on "poetry", event generation for testing java programs and finding a way to import grammars that generate other music - so I could possibly produce music(???) that is the b-st-rd offspring of Mozart and Madonna (say).
As I understand it, the trend in industry to doing primarily short term R&D has been exacerbated by two trends - one is penalizing long-term payoffs vs short term payoffs in the tax structure, and the other is stockholder/market pressure to have short term payoffs to make the stock go up faster.
The same two things have been cited as influences on the way high ranked executives get paid.
Since these guys are (or claim the word) artists, wouldn't it have been much more fun to grab images from lots of icky web sites and by resizing and placing them appropriately build a big mosaic image of something.
So if you had a 500 by 500 image built up of 10 by 10 images it would be 2500 images loaded on every page load.
I'd eliminate the tax part and just base it off the fees. The first copyright would be free and last 10 years. At that point the copyright could be re-registered and would cost (say) $1000. This gives the author essentially twenty years of copyright for nominal fees. After that the price goes up exponentially for each ten year period - that is, each ten years thereafter the price for re-registering the work would increase by a factor of 1000. So the next step would be $1,000,000 and the one after that would be $10^9.
There would have to be ways to ensure that trivial changes are not enough to make the work somehow "new" enough to qualify for the cheap rates.
I'll gladly sell anyone fifty years of complete copyright protection for a trillion bucks or so.
The best debugging technique I've ever used was based on the "Contract" notion.
I used it in Sather and Eiffel, but the D language recently reported here has it as well.
In Sather, every class could have class invariants which were checked every time a public method was called or returned (private methods often muck about in the innards of an object so the object may be temporarily inconsistent). Every method (function) could have pre and post conditions defined (and these had nice syntax) and these where checked on calling and returning from the methods.
These checks could be turned on and off at compile time for every class.
Debugging time was often cut by an order or magnitude or more just by finding the right preconditions, postconditions and class invariants.
This did have a downside. I discovered quickly that I had to spend much more time thinking carefully about things like class invariants and pre/post conditions - but spending that time in the design phase usually paid off very well indeed.
If Java had this kind of support it would be ever so much more useful. (And the rather archaic "assert" facility just ain't the same.) I'm not a big fan of microsoft, but if they'd added this to C# I'd probably be an enthusiastic supporter now.
That they didn't (and that Sun did not build this in to Java early on) leaves me wondering if either company does in fact care much about software quality.
XML models could be large, very large even, but XML in general compresses well. Furthermore, it is well suited for hierarchical model building so would probably do well in 3D models.
And it is quite possible to specify an XML format which would serve as the "canonical" format for a model and specify one or more "shorthand" formats that encode the XML format more concisely with rules for transforming one to the other.
XML has several advantages - it is text based so can be easily edited by humans when necessary and there are XML editors that can simplify the process. It has many standard tools and toolchains and XSLT is maturing nicely as a transformation engine which provides for lots of additional capabilities (and don't forget XQuery, and native XML databases). Finally, it is by nature extensible, allowing for different ways to put in comments, add in vendor specific extensions that are easily ignored by other vendors (or used when possible), provide for upgrade paths and the like.
On the whole, using XML has disadvantages, but advantages as well. Given a choice between large XML and some smaller but quasi-proprietary binary format, I'll take XML every time.
My recent favorite is from the spammers that are advertising anti-spam software.
While we've surely all seen enough spam, this is about the most thorough bit of spam I've seen in
a long time. And its short - way more crap per line than usual.
Not only is it spam, it claims to be consistent with the CAN-SPAM act. How wonderful is that?
It has the usual set of junk words intended to try to disguise itself from the normal anti-spam software. And it has the usual image to load that contains my email address so it will
know I visited there. And it encourages me to send it to all my friends. And it has the usual "visit here to get off our list".
Even better, if you go to their web page you'll find a pointer to a page where they say "It has come to our attention that..." spammers are advertising their product, and you can complain by filling in a form. And, of course, giving them your email address! For those who are amused by such things, look at the source - its obfuscated to the point of absurdity and does not seem to like running under mozilla.
See my journal for more info, including the source of the mail, the urls involved and a decoding of their web page.
I've been using ntp on all the machines, but it doesn't seem to help much, there is still enough drift to cause make to fail. I'm not using any of the machines as an ntp server - though I have been thinking about that. Would that help? Especially given that one group of machines is rather a longish network trip from the rest (though only about three blocks in euclidean space).
Slashdot Mirror
So I now use the Mozilla browser most of the time because it works well with the tab extensions.
I wish I were in a position to toss some money at firefox to support mainstreaming the tab extensions.
This is by Stephen Crane.
But I'd turn the premise around - I think that the best programmers learn how to code at the lowest because they want to and are interested in it. Then they learn about both the benefits and complications (pipeline stalls, cache effects...).
But on another level, teaching assembler in college is increasingly difficult. Students in many CS programs are hard pressed to learn much more than Java and C# - very few know any language other than those in the C/C++/Java/C# family plus Perl and Python. Instead they learn all about GUI's, IDE's, .NET and so on.
I'd love to see students really learn assembly language (though ideally it would be for something other than the plug-ugly x86 series architectures), but then I'd also love to see them learn Lisp, Haskell and a few more languages, as well as Unix, Windows, VMS and a few more OS's, as well as HTML, XML, TeX and a few more ways to mark up information, as well as OpenGL, Postscript, X windows library calls and a few more graphics systems, as well as Calculus, Linear Algebra and a bit more math, as well as.... (well, you get the idea).
It is rarely so technical as to terrify and his sense of humor and careful exposition makes reading his stuff enlightening and fun all at once.
Highly recommended.
First there are all the variants on cryptic crosswords. See The Atlantic Monthly for some very nice ones (and some very tough ones). If you look around a bit Stephen Sondheim (yup, the guy who writes Broadway Musicals) also published a book of fun (and challenging crosswords).
Then there are cross number puzzles - there are some simple ones, but I'm thinking of one like this . It is fairly small but very fun to solve. (This would probably be of most interest in a school with a distinct science/math orientation.)
I've thought a couple of times about building a crossword that would translate letters into differently colored squares (using only a couple of colors and simple patterns) so that the correctly solved problem would make a picture but ended up trying to find a fun program that would take a completed crossword and an image and find a decent mapping to make the crossword look like the image. (There are some interesting ways to fiddle this idea - the checked lights might only match in shape/color,letters might map to multiple shapes, you might have to determine the mapping of letters to shapes (perhaps matching lines/colors in adjacent squares as clues) ....)
Even if prison time is not in there, it might be on the next pass through, and you can't forget the other "justice" related industries - lawyers, those who sell bail bonds and so on.
If you've not read the "Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" it is worth reading for the insights into technology and culture it gives.
I now use the mnemonic passphrase (with odd character changes) for the most part - for example after a script kiddie attack I used "K0!ybftgh" (Keep O(0)ut ! you bastards from teenage geek hell).
If we revamped the tax system so that long term R&D gave a better tax break we'd probably see more of it.
Personally I'd like to see better tax breaks for longer term investment (in R&D and other things) and similar tax breaks for long term profitability and the like in order to encourage the bean counter types to work in that direction.
Thinking about how this kind of thing interacts with patents and other IP issues just kind of makes my brain complain. Sigh.
Justices T---, R--- and S--- (full names redacted as part of the FOIA review) are indeed patented and licensed in perpetuity. They've been genetically modified to have narrow minds and to be susceptible to hypnosis and implantation of suggestions - but only by the F-- (FOIA editing again) News Network and republican occupants of the White House.
The patents have been held in secret, having been classified as "essential to national security".
In a secret project funded by the republican party and headed by biologists from (name removed in FOIA review) University these genes have been modified to insert themselves into your bloodstream (and hence the rest of your cells) when you eat M--- (named removed in FOIA review) patented grains.
Eventually these will take over all the coding parts of everyone's DNA and it will finally be true for most people that :
"All your base pairs are belong to us."
Nicely (and nicely succinctly) stated.
The most idiotic suggestion on Slashdot!?!?
That sounds like a poll idea, or an ask slashdot. But I don't think this comes anywhere near qualifying. Still, it does make me want to go rummage around a bit to see what might qualify.
Then the nice SAR people (usually volunteers) leave their jobs, fill their cars with gas, get food and drive out somewhere, often at night and in the rain or snow, and spend as long as it takes to try to find the person. A big search can involve hundreds of people, hundreds of miles of driving, air support, law enforcement and who knows what else.
I don't want to watch over you. I dont want to make decisions about your life. I don't want you to watch over me or make decisions about my life. But when I'm out on a search, I can imagine wanting that kind of information.
On the original subject hough, I'd have to say that on the whole I'm agin it. Many people go out into the wilderness and don't stay on trails (hunters are a prime example) and I don't think this would kind of information would be worth the devices needed to support it or the potential problems it would raise.
You don't usually need a radio license but you'll almost certainly be required to do some training with the team you join and that will typically include first aid, map reading and other useful skills.
Depending on the team your time committment can be pretty light except for searches. For example I was associated with a team that met once a month for a couple hours and did a training day or weekend maybe once every two months (sometimes more, sometimes less).
It is a good thing to do, can be a lot of fun (when people are safe) and you'll learn more about the wilderness than you might think. It can also be emotionally draining (when they are not).
I've been on searches where the lost person has a cell phone. More than once the person has reported being lost to someone else and then stayed on the line for a while draining the battery completely - but not giving us any information that would really help us to find him.
As the page shows it also can be used to generate pov files and other kinds of oddness. There is a current running version at this page that is generating "plants" and selecting them for "how well they compete for sunlight" (sort of).
Don't tell me the UI is terrible. I know. I'm more interested in what I can make it do and playing with the innards. Currently I'm working on "poetry", event generation for testing java programs and finding a way to import grammars that generate other music - so I could possibly produce music(???) that is the b-st-rd offspring of Mozart and Madonna (say).
The same two things have been cited as influences on the way high ranked executives get paid.
I can't say for sure, but it is interesting.
But what I really wanted to say was that I've seen a whole bunch of references on the web recently to Giordano Bruno. And now a reference to the Wake.
Will Giambattisa Vico be next?
Obligatory web link : Finnegans Web
So if you had a 500 by 500 image built up of 10 by 10 images it would be 2500 images loaded on every page load.
Talk about artistic slashdotting.
There would have to be ways to ensure that trivial changes are not enough to make the work somehow "new" enough to qualify for the cheap rates.
I'll gladly sell anyone fifty years of complete copyright protection for a trillion bucks or so.
I used it in Sather and Eiffel, but the D language recently reported here has it as well.
In Sather, every class could have class invariants which were checked every time a public method was called or returned (private methods often muck about in the innards of an object so the object may be temporarily inconsistent). Every method (function) could have pre and post conditions defined (and these had nice syntax) and these where checked on calling and returning from the methods.
These checks could be turned on and off at compile time for every class.
Debugging time was often cut by an order or magnitude or more just by finding the right preconditions, postconditions and class invariants.
This did have a downside. I discovered quickly that I had to spend much more time thinking carefully about things like class invariants and pre/post conditions - but spending that time in the design phase usually paid off very well indeed.
If Java had this kind of support it would be ever so much more useful. (And the rather archaic "assert" facility just ain't the same.) I'm not a big fan of microsoft, but if they'd added this to C# I'd probably be an enthusiastic supporter now. That they didn't (and that Sun did not build this in to Java early on) leaves me wondering if either company does in fact care much about software quality.
It is hardly necessary, it is however very, very Knecessary. Though I hardly kneeded to say so.
And it is quite possible to specify an XML format which would serve as the "canonical" format for a model and specify one or more "shorthand" formats that encode the XML format more concisely with rules for transforming one to the other.
XML has several advantages - it is text based so can be easily edited by humans when necessary and there are XML editors that can simplify the process. It has many standard tools and toolchains and XSLT is maturing nicely as a transformation engine which provides for lots of additional capabilities (and don't forget XQuery, and native XML databases). Finally, it is by nature extensible, allowing for different ways to put in comments, add in vendor specific extensions that are easily ignored by other vendors (or used when possible), provide for upgrade paths and the like.
On the whole, using XML has disadvantages, but advantages as well. Given a choice between large XML and some smaller but quasi-proprietary binary format, I'll take XML every time.
While we've surely all seen enough spam, this is about the most thorough bit of spam I've seen in a long time. And its short - way more crap per line than usual.
Not only is it spam, it claims to be consistent with the CAN-SPAM act. How wonderful is that?
It has the usual set of junk words intended to try to disguise itself from the normal anti-spam software. And it has the usual image to load that contains my email address so it will know I visited there. And it encourages me to send it to all my friends. And it has the usual "visit here to get off our list".
Even better, if you go to their web page you'll find a pointer to a page where they say "It has come to our attention that ..." spammers are advertising their product, and you can complain by filling in a form. And, of course, giving them your email address! For those who are amused by such things, look at the source - its obfuscated to the point of absurdity and does not seem to like running under mozilla.
See my journal for more info, including the source of the mail, the urls involved and a decoding of their web page.
I've been using ntp on all the machines, but it doesn't seem to help much, there is still enough drift to cause make to fail. I'm not using any of the machines as an ntp server - though I have been thinking about that. Would that help? Especially given that one group of machines is rather a longish network trip from the rest (though only about three blocks in euclidean space).