But really, how bizarre, posting something in a low level printer file format. We'll have people posting
documents in PCL5 next.
Not bizarre at all. Is it bizarre that people post things in PDF format? Should they drop PDF and just post using MS Word instead, since Word is a far more universal and portable method for distributing professionally typeset documents?
What's the relationship between PostScript and PDF? Look into it and you'll see PDF was created just to deal with a couple of issues that distributing PS files has, and PDF is not far removed from PS.
Search the web for any mathematics papers, and you'll find most of them in PostScript. Recently, I've seen some people using PDF for this purpose, but PS is far more prevalent in the math and CS communities.
Years ago, there was a move to make the IETF standardize RFCs in PostScript format since it was almost as universal among the intended audience as plain text (the current format for RFCs).
PostScript is not a stupid low-level printer language like PCL. PostScript is a beautiful, full-fledged powerful programming language, and contains programming constructs that are far more "high-level" than, for instance C or C++ (like equivalance of data and code, something you usually don't find in procedural languages). It's been loved by computer professionals for years.
If you're interested, do a google search and you'll find the "blue book" the "red book," etc. Learning PostScript will change the way you think about programming, which should really be the important reason for learning a new language.
I don't think my ISP likes to have people sending mail from their own computers, I get name resolution
errors from sendmail when attempting to send email (but have no problem with DNS for web), so I think
that perhaps the ISPs DNS servers refuse to give up MX records.
This may also be a reverse DNS resolution problem. Check that your IP resolves to your hostname and that your hostname resolves to your IP. If not, some sendmail installations will reject your mail. Also, make sure your sendmail is sending out the correct hostname - eg, you can set up your machine so that it thinks its hostname is something.domain.com instead of some-long-crap-dsl-023-094.domain.com where something.domain.com is not an actual DNS record. This works fine for everything except when sendmail starts sending out emails claiming something.domain.com as originator.
Another thing you can do is configure sendmail to send all mail addressed to "user+any_arbitrary_string@domain.com" to "user@domain.com". This is useful since I don't have to do anything to generate a new email address. Search google.
I'll add that giving out a separate email addy for every company works beautifully. It also lets you know when some company sells your email address, something they will never admit to doing otherwise. I now get zero spam in my inbox.
How do you choose not to participate in Windows XP's Product Activation?
Oh, I remember now, you can't!
Oh, but I have a way to avoid Windows XP Product Activation. I've been using it ever since Windows XP was released. It's very intuitive and it's even legal!
What is this amazing method, you may ask? A mix of superior technology and an astute legal team?
So I have lots of mp3s too. Here's how I organize them (they're served off my main FreeBSD box, this won't work in windows):
I organize them into subdirectories, etc. with a standard naming convention. Nothing new here; everybody does this.
The problem I found is that my playlists would break whenever a renamed or moved a file.
Solution:
Create a directory/mp3/lists
Create a subdirectory for each playlist:/mp3/lists/touchy-feely,/mp3/lists/hard core-punk, etc.
Each song for a playlist is symlinked into the playlist directory. Eg,
"/mp3/lists/hardcore-punk/Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK.mp3" points to "../../70s/Sex Pistols/Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK.mp3".
NB the relative, not absolute, symlink: this allows me to serve up the lists over NFS, SMB, etc.
I have another directory/mp3/lists/md5 which contains the md5 sum of every actual file and every symlink. Point being: when I rename a file, I get a stale link. I can fix the link by comparing the MD5 of the old link to every other MD5.
I have a nice perl script that automates all of this, so that whenever I add, delete, rename, move an mp3, all the playlists get automatically updated once I type "cd/mp3/lists ; make". It also does other miscellaneous things like creating the "all.m3u" playlist automatically and randomizing the playlists. It's actually a bit more complex than this since I've optimized it (eg, the MD5s are sorted for quick search and are never needlessly regenerated, etc).
Altogether a very easy, powerful and flexible system. If something goes wrong, it's just standard files and directories, so I can fix it without editing inodes or dropping into an SQL shell.
A trick you should also know is that just taking the MD5 of an mp3 does work very well since the ID3 is also part of the mp3 and it might change. So I take the MD5 of the last megabyte of mp3 files (the ID3 tag is near the beginning of the file).
One could easily extend the perl script to use ID3 tags to generate directories and playlists. Oh, and the reason I do it this way is because Konqueror is a very nice visual file manager and it allows creating symlinks easily (albeit absolute ones, but my script fixes that).
Anyway, hope these ideas help. Taking the problem down to the filesystem level introduces all sorts of complexity while the problem can easily be solved by a couple hundred lines of perl (writing perl scripts is much easier than kernel work, trust me). Right tool for the right job and all that. This only took me one night to throw together (this includes organizing the actual playlists, which took the most time).
I also have lots of pr0n, and I'm working on ways to automate pr0n management. Let me know and I can get back to you once I've solved the problem.
You don't understand his point. The OS X registration process does not have a "quit" menu option. In fact, there isn't even a menu bar. There is no way to escape temporarily to another program. There are no buttons other than "Next". Is that intuitive enough for you?
The point is it's just as easy to tell a friend in need to type "rpm -Uvh" as it is to say "doubleclick this file".
Surely you gest.
(a) recognition and memorization are completely different cognitive abilities, and (b)
you need to actually work with these people to figure out what the parent poster is talking about. I'll talk about (b).
I knew this guy in college - physics major, really smart guy. He was doing numerical analysis in Fortran and he decided he needed his own Linux box instead of just using the iron the physics department offered. He bought a system from VA (this was a while ago).
Mein Gott, the problems this guy had. He never bothered to look up the rpm command. He just used the KDE feature where it would install an rpm once you double-clicked on it. If you think the "neophyte user" will remember that command you're completely wrong. If you think the neophyte user will do a google or apropos search for the rpm syntax, you're wrong. The neophyte user will never even see a demonstration of the rpm syntax.
One day, he decided to use GNOME instead of KDE. I get a phonecall when he wants to go back to KDE from GNOME. The Hell I went through that day.... No he wasn't using gdm, kdm, just plain xdm. Forget trying to guide him through editting.xsession. I ended up physically going to his machine and fixing it myself. Fortunately, I also enabled ssh that day.
Week later, I get another phone call. He can't log in using xdm. It took a while to get a good explanation of what was really going on, but I finally figured that logging into xdm was just spitting him back to the xdm prompt. So I tell hime to give me his passwords, and I log into his box. Nothing seems wrong - his.xsession is fine, I tried it myself remotely. Everything in his user account looked peachy. Then I did a "df -h". Turns out he had like 20 gigs empty in/home, but the 4 gigs in / were all filled up. This guy never used the user account that the VA setup program must have created for him. Double-clicking on rpm files requires root privs, so he would always log in as root. Thus,/root was full of crap and/home was completely empty (VA had a nice partitioning scheme which I understood). Problem is, this guy didn't have any idea of what a user even is, so the lecture about not logging in as root probably did nothing.
Now, you might call this guy clueless. Regarding unix administration, yes, he was completely clueless, but the stuff he was doing in his fortran programs was way over my head. This guy definitely knew his physics, so he wasn't stupid. Problem with us unix folks is that a lot of time we lump in people who don't understand Unix as idiots.
Me? I love/usr/ports, CVSup, the whole lot. Makes my job easier and more fun. But I know this stuff is not for everybody, and I'm OK with that - I'm not going to install Linux on my aging mother's win98 PC and if my colleague likes using MacOS, that's fine by me - no need to force Unix on everybody.
I think I heard some people complaining about how Apple changed this in some version of MacOS. I'm pretty sure I remember in OS 7 the upper-left corner opened the Apple menu. I'm VNCed into an OS X box right now and I can tell you that OS X gets it wrong (upper-left corner does nothing, but that doesn't matter since the Apple menu is completely useless in OS X (I can't even figure out how to add my own stuff to it)). Upper-right corner does nothing as well (opposed to OS 7/8/9 where you could use it to switch apps fairly quickly). There's actually something like a 10 pixel dead area between the corner and the active spot, put there just to annoy us.
I actually wrote my own window manager (just for myself, never released it - very fun project if you ever have the time), and one of the reasons I did it was because all the modern window managers I tried added a one-pixel border to titlebars. With my window manager, I middle click on the titlebar to close windows. I agree a misplaced left click could be disasterous (ameliorated if your window manager and app both use WM_DELETE_WINDOW), so I bound it to middle click. Quite useful - if I have seven netscapes open, all maximized, I can kill them all very quickly with seven poorly-aimed middle clicks instead of fumbling for the keyboard. I also force all netscape windows to be placed at the very top of the screen, just so I can kill them off more quickly. It's even more useful on my laptop where the touchpad makes precision mousing difficult.
Your redaing comprehension has already disqualified you.
Drea Sir Anonymous Coward,
Yur astut obzervations on teh parent psoter's ENglish leds me to beleive taht I may prehaps need to inhance my English redaing comprehension and wirting skills in ordre to find a Job in our gouvernment.
I wirte to you in ordre to have yur advice. WHere can I obtina teh same levels of wirting and comprehension which yuo demnstrate?
The fullscreen mode (which I never
use) takes that a step further.
Funny you should mention that, as I thought of another similar example. Try using, for instance, Visual Studio in its full-screen mode (or perhaps an Office app, I haven't used Office in a while so I don't know if they have this feature yet). Even in fullscreen mode, where the menu bar is at the very top of the display, the menu bar still has a row of pixels at the top which are unclickable. Completely destroys the point of the menu bar at the top.
I probably didn't explain very well what I meant by the toolbar buttons in IE: the smaller buttons are harder to click, and the space they save doesn't add up to much. Most people who bother to customize their browser, which size of button do you think they choose? They'll choose the small one, of course, even though it actually hurts them: it'll take longer to find the buttons with the mouse and leads to a slower overall experience. That was my point behind the IE example: most users will usually make very bad UI choices. Only the stopwatch can determine what's a good UI choice. Some customibility is, however, good. For example, a web developer would probably have a real need for a "view source" button, but my mother really doesn't need that button. So, apps should be customizable to the point that different users have different needs from the app, but apps shouldn't leave usability design decisions to the user (since the same usability principles apply to all users). I'd say a lot of open source projects have this idea completely backwards.
Aside from a couple of things, I'd agree with you that recent version of MSIE are pretty good examples of informed usability choices.
Most X11 projects nowadays are concerned with aesthetics, not usability. What I will attempt to show in this post is how, most of the time, aesthetics and usability are not compatible.
Look at MacOS X. I've ranted about it before, so I won't repeat most of my gripes. For now, just take one example: the scalable icons in the dock. They look great, I'll grant you that. However, it means things in the dock move back and forth. There is absolutely zero spatial reference: if you want to find something in the dock, you have to carefully position and "hover" your mouse; you can't throw your mouse in a general direction and expect it to go somewhere useful (contrast this to the butt-ugly, but useful, "dockable" finder windows in MacOS 9).
More relavantly, let's look at our newest X11 toolkits. They are all "themable" as that's what the Oh-so-omniscient users want nowadays. News flash: what users "want" is not always what's best for the users. Look at users who wanted smaller toolbar icons in MSIE: these smaller buttons are a usability nightmare, but MS put them in because users demanded it. Tip: leave the UI design to the UI designers who've studied users and formal UI ergonomics/cognitive science, not the users who want only aesthetics.
What does "themability" give you? Well, let's take a specific example: checkboxes. The best, most usuable checkbox would be one that's immediately visible, using both color and shape. Images are difficult to recognize quickly, but colors and geometric shapes are more quickly recognized. These "themes" give you multi-colored images for checkboxes instead of a simple square (shape) with an immediately visible on/off state (best recognized with color). Extend this example to any other widget.
Same problem with Apple's Quicktime player for Windows and, more recently, newer versions of the MS media player. People want eye candy, not usability, so the Quicktime player looks nice, but is completely unusable (use google: "usability review Quicktime player"). Of course, users never notice when they take half a second more to do some repetetive action, so the themable media players are popular; that's why MS copied the idea (at least MS is nice enough to give us an option for a normal-looking media player). Also look at the myriad of mp3 players, like KJofol (or whatever it's called). Completely unusable with tiny, hidden widgets in unexpected places, but wow, it looks pretty.
Why do people want shaped window borders and pixmap-based window backgrounds? Because rectangular borders and a simple, consistent color background is boring. Those of you who want those transparent, shaded xterms with outrageous borders: talk to me in a few years when you actually use your computer to do real work, and not simply to impress the girl across the hall in your dorm.
Look at Mozilla. It has this damned complicated "themable" XML-based UI. Unrequired Complexity = Bugs, OK? Now look at Netscape 4.x (for unix). Netscape had a damned fine UI. Try this with Netscape: right-drag three or four pixels down in the main window: it goes back. That's because "back" is always the first item in the context menu and there is zero delay when popping up the context menu. Mozilla has a delay with the context menu, as do other toolkits. What's the purpose of the delay? I can't figure out any purpose other than to piss me off. Also, Konqueror tries to move around the items in the context menu and it puts "forward" before "back." What's the reasoning behind that? How often do you use "back" and how often do you use "forward?"
Let's look at most window managers. Now, in X11, the very top row of pixels on the display is not used for menu bar. It will usually contain either nothing, or the titlebar of a maximized window. Same situation in MS windows. Try this with a windows machine: throw you mouse (don't position it, throw it carelessly) to the upper-right corner and click. Although it looks like your cursor is not over the "x" button, it will still close the window. You can close a window in MS windows with only a gesture, not a careful positioning. Now try the same in your favorite window manager which also has the equivalent of an "x" button in the upper-right corner. Probably won't work (doesn't work with most window managers, I've tried a whole lot of 'em). Why is this? Most likely, the titlebar has a "border" around it. This is used to distinguish the window or give it a 3-D look. MS windows has the same thing, but it's borders are internal to the window. Solution? X11 toolkits shouldn't use the X11 "border" since it's not clickable (eg, pass a border width of zero to XCreateWindow(), and do your own internal, clickable, border). People don't do this. It's even worse in KDE and GNOME when you try to have the menu bar at the top of the display, a la MacOS. The only reason to have a menu bar at the top of the display is to make it faster to access (look up "Fittz' Law" on google, this is the very first UI usability example you'll find). So, the top-positioned menu bars are completely useless in the X11 environments that have them.
I apologize for the length of this post. If you've read this far, consider yourself fortunate: you have a longer attention span than most people.
Like the other guy mentioned, PDF is more-or-less the newer version of PostScript. PDF removes a number of programming features that PostScript has. The idea behind this is so you don't have to parse an entire file to display one page (because, eg, a function is defined on page 243 and is used on page 516). PDF also defines a file format for putting in the graphics commands - it's actually a nice file format which can be easily parsed and easily generated, without going back and forth through the document.
Anyway, it's unfortunate that your post got marked up so high because it's misleading. There are very few technical differences between Display PostScript and Display PDF. The difference is more-or-less political.
Display PS and Display PDF give you the same powerful graphics primitives that don't have any near equivalent in Win32/GDI or X11. Even high-level graphics libraries built on top of these (eg, QT) don't have the same powers. For example, you can draw an image using bezier curves, rotate it, skew it, translate it, enlarge it (as a vector graphic, not a bitmap graphic), etc. Since Display PDF is built into the system at a fairly low level, most of these operations can be hardware-accelerated. If you want hardware acceleration for more than the most primitive operations (eg, rotation instead of bitblt) on win32, you need to start using DirectDraw. GDI is nothing like Display PS/PDF, and X11 is far different from these since it makes it somewhat hard to directly manipulate an image (imaging hardware can be across the network from your program, so you need to use extensions like MIT-SHM to directly manipulate your image, and these might not be available).
Anyway, point is Display PS and Display PDF are very similar technically - both are revolutionary ways to do graphics programming. NB, I'm not a Mac-head; I'm loyal to X11 programming, but I recognize that this is some revolutionary tech.
Would you guys please stop orking those poor cows?
Interestingly enough, whenever I see "coworkers" I think "cow orkers." Apparently, both "coworkers" and "co-workers" are valid, but I always use the latter as the former displeases my eye. Can't figure out a reasonable explanation for the preference.
Dude, you should log in when you have something like this to say. Your comment probably won't get modded up since it's controversial (maybe even downright wrong, I'm not sure) but it's nevertheless interesting; same thing with the grandparent comment, but more people will see it since the guy logged in. Just create a throwaway account or something so more people can read your comment.
But don't blame the guy who discovered this by trotting out that "don't tell anyone about the security hole until the vendor can fix it" pablum.
I'm assuming that was a typo and you meant pabulum, insipid ideas, yes?
In reply to the content of your comment: I'm not too great on my NT security, but I understand (from my own experimentation) that IE (at least parts of it) runs in the "system" context under win2k. Is this true? Does anyone care to explain why this is necessary? Why does it require elevated privileges?
What the hell is this crap!? Damned thing takes resizes itself to the entire monitor resolution and proceeds to draw a swirly line or some crap. I think god-damned netscape grabbed the keyboard or something because my window manager wouldn't respond for a good minute or so. Even then, netscape wouldn't play nice and had to be euthanized.
Is this supposed to be some artsy crap or something? BUGGER OFF AND LEAVE MY BROWSER ALONE.
Hate to reply to my own comment, but after some more research, it appears that the word is originally related to the Latin censura, which the dictionary tells me means "judgment" (or "judgement," depending on your take on the issue) (and my Latin sucks, so I can't research this issue further).
In any case, it appears the evidence points to the hypothesis that "censorship" does not specifically mean "censorship by the government" unless (a) you're extremely pedantic and (b) you follow one very specific derivation of the word and ignore all nuances and alternatives.
Look it up in a dictionary before you say something like this.
The dictionary will never give you a true understanding of the word. The word "censorship" comes from the French censure (feminine noun), which means exactly censorship by the government in modern French. My point is that this requires more research than a simple look into a dictionary of modern English.
The earliest definition of the word which I can find is in the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française, from 1694. Interestingly enough, in that dictionary, the word means "correction, reprehension" (example given: Je soûmets mes escrits & mes actions à vostre censure. subir la censure de quelqu'un.
souffrir la censure. s'exposer à la censure).
In the 1798 version of the dictionary, they have the same definition, except they give an alternate definition of "ecclesiastical" censorship. I'm not sure what the Academy's political/ideological views were at the time, but from the dictionary, I get the impression that they were more loyalist (contrasted, for example, with Diderot and d'Alembert, who were writing only a little earlier).
By the 1835 version, they have multiple definitions, saying the specific meaning of the word is censorship by the government, with a "more ordinary" definition of correction, répréhension.
Interesting stuff. I'm eager for someone more versed in linguistics and etymology to correct me (je me soumets à votre censure!).
While I agree that the colleagues you describe would probably not benefit from such a course, you don't know for sure that his students are like this.
I once TAed a graduate course in web programming under Unix (using perl, php, python, java, etc.). Most of the users had full-time jobs in industry, some computer-related, some not computer-related (eg, one guy was a police officer, another worked for the USPS). None of them had touched Unix before.
I was fortunate because all of them were more-or-less open-minded. We were probably fortunate that few of them had programming jobs, as this kept them open to new ideas. By the end of course, some of them were quite excited about Unix and were using it in capacities outside of the course - that is, the course was a success.
The question you have to ask is why your students have no experience with Unix. Your colleagues seem to be close-minded, Microsoft-indoctrinated users. They had plenty of chances to try to learn about Unix (eg, that AIX box), but they chose not to do so.
There are other kinds of students, however. If you've never gone to a traditional CS program at a real university or you've never worked in the areas of IT where Unix is actually useful (eg, you've only had to use a computer for web, email, Word, or some corporate database app someone else wrote), you've never had a chance to learn about Unix. If you had the motivation, you could have installed Linux on your home PC, but there are few reasons why you would need to do this. These students are not close-minded, they've just never had the chance to play with Unix, and starting out can be very intimidating. That's the reason they work with Unix gurus: just to get a start.
I've had great success introducing Unix to everyone I've had a long-term relationship with: former ASP/VB Microsoftie colleagues who are now PHP/MySQL experts, people who couldn't program outside of their friendly Visual Studio environment who are now happily programming Emacs Lisp, hardcore Mac-heads who wouldn't touch a Linux or BSD box even if you paid them large sums of money who are now Solaris admins.
I believe the secret is attitude. Never be condescending; always be gentle and polite. Don't complain about how it's hard or impossible to do a certain task on Windows; implement the same thing on a spare Linux box, and don't flaunt it to everyone, just let it sit there and do it's thing quietly. Advocate by example, not by argument.
do not mod puns up please. It makes you look as stupid as the guy that made the "joke".
The original post was NOT a pun. Dammit, that's why it was so funny. People like me get it, but people like you don't get it. It deserves to be modded up because it's extremely funny to anyone with a decent grasp of English orthography.
Heroin is a narcotic.
A Heroine is a female hero.
Heroineware must have something to do with female heros, because heroine has nothing to do with the opiate.
Not whoring, just pointing out that moderators aren't doing their jobs correctly (when I mod, I read -1 threshold, flat, newest first). If you don't have the time to mod, turn off the option. Don't want to sound like I'm whining, but there's lots of good stuff floating around at 1 or 2 whereas a mod point toward a 4 does little good.
I put my email address in a jpeg image. Haven't found a spambot yet that can decipher that.
But neither could blind internet users...
Add an alt tag that describes how to email you. Eg, "The first part of my email address is 'username' and the second part is 'host.com' - the two parts are separated by an '@' sign." I've been doing the jpeg thing for three years; works great.
If you run your own mail server you can do this stuff yourself - I mean "one-time acounts" and so on
Also, if your provider is running qmail, you get an unlimited number of account aliases by default (user-amazon@host.com, user-slashdot@host.com). Sendmail can also be coerced to do this. Takes absolutely no extra resources - I wish more ISPs would do this (and tell their customers about it).
VM under Emacs - just uses Emacs's completion stuff ("dabbrev", by default mapped it to M-/). Very nice package - if I type "internationalization" somewhere and later type "intM-/" it does the right thing. Also, VM (and its author) is very cool, but you'll have to like emacs first.
I respectfully disagree. There's a real need to abbreviate this word and i18n seems fine with me, even if it's a little cryptic. Consider that a lot of places don't have tab completion (my MUA does it, but does yours?).
If you don't know what i18n means, just type it into google and hit the feeling lucky button. First page that pops up explains it.
Outside of the i18n community, I haven't seen this style of abbreviation anywhere.
If you have a better suggestion for an abbreviation, we'd be happy to hear it.
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Not bizarre at all. Is it bizarre that people post things in PDF format? Should they drop PDF and just post using MS Word instead, since Word is a far more universal and portable method for distributing professionally typeset documents?
What's the relationship between PostScript and PDF? Look into it and you'll see PDF was created just to deal with a couple of issues that distributing PS files has, and PDF is not far removed from PS.
Search the web for any mathematics papers, and you'll find most of them in PostScript. Recently, I've seen some people using PDF for this purpose, but PS is far more prevalent in the math and CS communities.
Years ago, there was a move to make the IETF standardize RFCs in PostScript format since it was almost as universal among the intended audience as plain text (the current format for RFCs).
PostScript is not a stupid low-level printer language like PCL. PostScript is a beautiful, full-fledged powerful programming language, and contains programming constructs that are far more "high-level" than, for instance C or C++ (like equivalance of data and code, something you usually don't find in procedural languages). It's been loved by computer professionals for years.
If you're interested, do a google search and you'll find the "blue book" the "red book," etc. Learning PostScript will change the way you think about programming, which should really be the important reason for learning a new language.
Don't diss PostScript.
This may also be a reverse DNS resolution problem. Check that your IP resolves to your hostname and that your hostname resolves to your IP. If not, some sendmail installations will reject your mail. Also, make sure your sendmail is sending out the correct hostname - eg, you can set up your machine so that it thinks its hostname is something.domain.com instead of some-long-crap-dsl-023-094.domain.com where something.domain.com is not an actual DNS record. This works fine for everything except when sendmail starts sending out emails claiming something.domain.com as originator.
Another thing you can do is configure sendmail to send all mail addressed to "user+any_arbitrary_string@domain.com" to "user@domain.com". This is useful since I don't have to do anything to generate a new email address. Search google.
I'll add that giving out a separate email addy for every company works beautifully. It also lets you know when some company sells your email address, something they will never admit to doing otherwise. I now get zero spam in my inbox.
Oh, I remember now, you can't!
Oh, but I have a way to avoid Windows XP Product Activation. I've been using it ever since Windows XP was released. It's very intuitive and it's even legal!
What is this amazing method, you may ask? A mix of superior technology and an astute legal team?
No.
I choose not to deploy Windows XP.
I organize them into subdirectories, etc. with a standard naming convention. Nothing new here; everybody does this.
The problem I found is that my playlists would break whenever a renamed or moved a file.
Solution:
NB the relative, not absolute, symlink: this allows me to serve up the lists over NFS, SMB, etc.
Altogether a very easy, powerful and flexible system. If something goes wrong, it's just standard files and directories, so I can fix it without editing inodes or dropping into an SQL shell.
A trick you should also know is that just taking the MD5 of an mp3 does work very well since the ID3 is also part of the mp3 and it might change. So I take the MD5 of the last megabyte of mp3 files (the ID3 tag is near the beginning of the file).
One could easily extend the perl script to use ID3 tags to generate directories and playlists. Oh, and the reason I do it this way is because Konqueror is a very nice visual file manager and it allows creating symlinks easily (albeit absolute ones, but my script fixes that).
Anyway, hope these ideas help. Taking the problem down to the filesystem level introduces all sorts of complexity while the problem can easily be solved by a couple hundred lines of perl (writing perl scripts is much easier than kernel work, trust me). Right tool for the right job and all that. This only took me one night to throw together (this includes organizing the actual playlists, which took the most time).
I also have lots of pr0n, and I'm working on ways to automate pr0n management. Let me know and I can get back to you once I've solved the problem.
You don't understand his point. The OS X registration process does not have a "quit" menu option. In fact, there isn't even a menu bar. There is no way to escape temporarily to another program. There are no buttons other than "Next". Is that intuitive enough for you?
Surely you gest.
(a) recognition and memorization are completely different cognitive abilities, and (b) you need to actually work with these people to figure out what the parent poster is talking about. I'll talk about (b).
I knew this guy in college - physics major, really smart guy. He was doing numerical analysis in Fortran and he decided he needed his own Linux box instead of just using the iron the physics department offered. He bought a system from VA (this was a while ago).
Mein Gott, the problems this guy had. He never bothered to look up the rpm command. He just used the KDE feature where it would install an rpm once you double-clicked on it. If you think the "neophyte user" will remember that command you're completely wrong. If you think the neophyte user will do a google or apropos search for the rpm syntax, you're wrong. The neophyte user will never even see a demonstration of the rpm syntax.
One day, he decided to use GNOME instead of KDE. I get a phonecall when he wants to go back to KDE from GNOME. The Hell I went through that day.... No he wasn't using gdm, kdm, just plain xdm. Forget trying to guide him through editting .xsession. I ended up physically going to his machine and fixing it myself. Fortunately, I also enabled ssh that day.
Week later, I get another phone call. He can't log in using xdm. It took a while to get a good explanation of what was really going on, but I finally figured that logging into xdm was just spitting him back to the xdm prompt. So I tell hime to give me his passwords, and I log into his box. Nothing seems wrong - his .xsession is fine, I tried it myself remotely. Everything in his user account looked peachy. Then I did a "df -h". Turns out he had like 20 gigs empty in /home, but the 4 gigs in / were all filled up. This guy never used the user account that the VA setup program must have created for him. Double-clicking on rpm files requires root privs, so he would always log in as root. Thus, /root was full of crap and /home was completely empty (VA had a nice partitioning scheme which I understood). Problem is, this guy didn't have any idea of what a user even is, so the lecture about not logging in as root probably did nothing.
Now, you might call this guy clueless. Regarding unix administration, yes, he was completely clueless, but the stuff he was doing in his fortran programs was way over my head. This guy definitely knew his physics, so he wasn't stupid. Problem with us unix folks is that a lot of time we lump in people who don't understand Unix as idiots.
Me? I love /usr/ports, CVSup, the whole lot. Makes my job easier and more fun. But I know this stuff is not for everybody, and I'm OK with that - I'm not going to install Linux on my aging mother's win98 PC and if my colleague likes using MacOS, that's fine by me - no need to force Unix on everybody.
I actually wrote my own window manager (just for myself, never released it - very fun project if you ever have the time), and one of the reasons I did it was because all the modern window managers I tried added a one-pixel border to titlebars. With my window manager, I middle click on the titlebar to close windows. I agree a misplaced left click could be disasterous (ameliorated if your window manager and app both use WM_DELETE_WINDOW), so I bound it to middle click. Quite useful - if I have seven netscapes open, all maximized, I can kill them all very quickly with seven poorly-aimed middle clicks instead of fumbling for the keyboard. I also force all netscape windows to be placed at the very top of the screen, just so I can kill them off more quickly. It's even more useful on my laptop where the touchpad makes precision mousing difficult.
Drea Sir Anonymous Coward,
Yur astut obzervations on teh parent psoter's ENglish leds me to beleive taht I may prehaps need to inhance my English redaing comprehension and wirting skills in ordre to find a Job in our gouvernment.
I wirte to you in ordre to have yur advice. WHere can I obtina teh same levels of wirting and comprehension which yuo demnstrate?
Best Regrads,
A felow sladhdooter.
Funny you should mention that, as I thought of another similar example. Try using, for instance, Visual Studio in its full-screen mode (or perhaps an Office app, I haven't used Office in a while so I don't know if they have this feature yet). Even in fullscreen mode, where the menu bar is at the very top of the display, the menu bar still has a row of pixels at the top which are unclickable. Completely destroys the point of the menu bar at the top.
I probably didn't explain very well what I meant by the toolbar buttons in IE: the smaller buttons are harder to click, and the space they save doesn't add up to much. Most people who bother to customize their browser, which size of button do you think they choose? They'll choose the small one, of course, even though it actually hurts them: it'll take longer to find the buttons with the mouse and leads to a slower overall experience. That was my point behind the IE example: most users will usually make very bad UI choices. Only the stopwatch can determine what's a good UI choice. Some customibility is, however, good. For example, a web developer would probably have a real need for a "view source" button, but my mother really doesn't need that button. So, apps should be customizable to the point that different users have different needs from the app, but apps shouldn't leave usability design decisions to the user (since the same usability principles apply to all users). I'd say a lot of open source projects have this idea completely backwards.
Aside from a couple of things, I'd agree with you that recent version of MSIE are pretty good examples of informed usability choices.
Look at MacOS X. I've ranted about it before, so I won't repeat most of my gripes. For now, just take one example: the scalable icons in the dock. They look great, I'll grant you that. However, it means things in the dock move back and forth. There is absolutely zero spatial reference: if you want to find something in the dock, you have to carefully position and "hover" your mouse; you can't throw your mouse in a general direction and expect it to go somewhere useful (contrast this to the butt-ugly, but useful, "dockable" finder windows in MacOS 9).
More relavantly, let's look at our newest X11 toolkits. They are all "themable" as that's what the Oh-so-omniscient users want nowadays. News flash: what users "want" is not always what's best for the users. Look at users who wanted smaller toolbar icons in MSIE: these smaller buttons are a usability nightmare, but MS put them in because users demanded it. Tip: leave the UI design to the UI designers who've studied users and formal UI ergonomics/cognitive science, not the users who want only aesthetics.
What does "themability" give you? Well, let's take a specific example: checkboxes. The best, most usuable checkbox would be one that's immediately visible, using both color and shape. Images are difficult to recognize quickly, but colors and geometric shapes are more quickly recognized. These "themes" give you multi-colored images for checkboxes instead of a simple square (shape) with an immediately visible on/off state (best recognized with color). Extend this example to any other widget.
Same problem with Apple's Quicktime player for Windows and, more recently, newer versions of the MS media player. People want eye candy, not usability, so the Quicktime player looks nice, but is completely unusable (use google: "usability review Quicktime player"). Of course, users never notice when they take half a second more to do some repetetive action, so the themable media players are popular; that's why MS copied the idea (at least MS is nice enough to give us an option for a normal-looking media player). Also look at the myriad of mp3 players, like KJofol (or whatever it's called). Completely unusable with tiny, hidden widgets in unexpected places, but wow, it looks pretty.
Why do people want shaped window borders and pixmap-based window backgrounds? Because rectangular borders and a simple, consistent color background is boring. Those of you who want those transparent, shaded xterms with outrageous borders: talk to me in a few years when you actually use your computer to do real work, and not simply to impress the girl across the hall in your dorm.
Look at Mozilla. It has this damned complicated "themable" XML-based UI. Unrequired Complexity = Bugs, OK? Now look at Netscape 4.x (for unix). Netscape had a damned fine UI. Try this with Netscape: right-drag three or four pixels down in the main window: it goes back. That's because "back" is always the first item in the context menu and there is zero delay when popping up the context menu. Mozilla has a delay with the context menu, as do other toolkits. What's the purpose of the delay? I can't figure out any purpose other than to piss me off. Also, Konqueror tries to move around the items in the context menu and it puts "forward" before "back." What's the reasoning behind that? How often do you use "back" and how often do you use "forward?"
Let's look at most window managers. Now, in X11, the very top row of pixels on the display is not used for menu bar. It will usually contain either nothing, or the titlebar of a maximized window. Same situation in MS windows. Try this with a windows machine: throw you mouse (don't position it, throw it carelessly) to the upper-right corner and click. Although it looks like your cursor is not over the "x" button, it will still close the window. You can close a window in MS windows with only a gesture, not a careful positioning. Now try the same in your favorite window manager which also has the equivalent of an "x" button in the upper-right corner. Probably won't work (doesn't work with most window managers, I've tried a whole lot of 'em). Why is this? Most likely, the titlebar has a "border" around it. This is used to distinguish the window or give it a 3-D look. MS windows has the same thing, but it's borders are internal to the window. Solution? X11 toolkits shouldn't use the X11 "border" since it's not clickable (eg, pass a border width of zero to XCreateWindow(), and do your own internal, clickable, border). People don't do this. It's even worse in KDE and GNOME when you try to have the menu bar at the top of the display, a la MacOS. The only reason to have a menu bar at the top of the display is to make it faster to access (look up "Fittz' Law" on google, this is the very first UI usability example you'll find). So, the top-positioned menu bars are completely useless in the X11 environments that have them.
I apologize for the length of this post. If you've read this far, consider yourself fortunate: you have a longer attention span than most people.
How so?
Like the other guy mentioned, PDF is more-or-less the newer version of PostScript. PDF removes a number of programming features that PostScript has. The idea behind this is so you don't have to parse an entire file to display one page (because, eg, a function is defined on page 243 and is used on page 516). PDF also defines a file format for putting in the graphics commands - it's actually a nice file format which can be easily parsed and easily generated, without going back and forth through the document.
Anyway, it's unfortunate that your post got marked up so high because it's misleading. There are very few technical differences between Display PostScript and Display PDF. The difference is more-or-less political.
Display PS and Display PDF give you the same powerful graphics primitives that don't have any near equivalent in Win32/GDI or X11. Even high-level graphics libraries built on top of these (eg, QT) don't have the same powers. For example, you can draw an image using bezier curves, rotate it, skew it, translate it, enlarge it (as a vector graphic, not a bitmap graphic), etc. Since Display PDF is built into the system at a fairly low level, most of these operations can be hardware-accelerated. If you want hardware acceleration for more than the most primitive operations (eg, rotation instead of bitblt) on win32, you need to start using DirectDraw. GDI is nothing like Display PS/PDF, and X11 is far different from these since it makes it somewhat hard to directly manipulate an image (imaging hardware can be across the network from your program, so you need to use extensions like MIT-SHM to directly manipulate your image, and these might not be available).
Anyway, point is Display PS and Display PDF are very similar technically - both are revolutionary ways to do graphics programming. NB, I'm not a Mac-head; I'm loyal to X11 programming, but I recognize that this is some revolutionary tech.
Interestingly enough, whenever I see "coworkers" I think "cow orkers." Apparently, both "coworkers" and "co-workers" are valid, but I always use the latter as the former displeases my eye. Can't figure out a reasonable explanation for the preference.
Dude, you should log in when you have something like this to say. Your comment probably won't get modded up since it's controversial (maybe even downright wrong, I'm not sure) but it's nevertheless interesting; same thing with the grandparent comment, but more people will see it since the guy logged in. Just create a throwaway account or something so more people can read your comment.
I'm assuming that was a typo and you meant pabulum, insipid ideas, yes?
In reply to the content of your comment: I'm not too great on my NT security, but I understand (from my own experimentation) that IE (at least parts of it) runs in the "system" context under win2k. Is this true? Does anyone care to explain why this is necessary? Why does it require elevated privileges?
Is this supposed to be some artsy crap or something? BUGGER OFF AND LEAVE MY BROWSER ALONE.
In any case, it appears the evidence points to the hypothesis that "censorship" does not specifically mean "censorship by the government" unless (a) you're extremely pedantic and (b) you follow one very specific derivation of the word and ignore all nuances and alternatives.
The dictionary will never give you a true understanding of the word. The word "censorship" comes from the French censure (feminine noun), which means exactly censorship by the government in modern French. My point is that this requires more research than a simple look into a dictionary of modern English.
The earliest definition of the word which I can find is in the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française, from 1694. Interestingly enough, in that dictionary, the word means "correction, reprehension" (example given: Je soûmets mes escrits & mes actions à vostre censure. subir la censure de quelqu'un. souffrir la censure. s'exposer à la censure).
In the 1798 version of the dictionary, they have the same definition, except they give an alternate definition of "ecclesiastical" censorship. I'm not sure what the Academy's political/ideological views were at the time, but from the dictionary, I get the impression that they were more loyalist (contrasted, for example, with Diderot and d'Alembert, who were writing only a little earlier).
By the 1835 version, they have multiple definitions, saying the specific meaning of the word is censorship by the government, with a "more ordinary" definition of correction, répréhension.
Interesting stuff. I'm eager for someone more versed in linguistics and etymology to correct me (je me soumets à votre censure!).
OK, yes, if you actually follow the link (I didn't). Would have been better without it.
I once TAed a graduate course in web programming under Unix (using perl, php, python, java, etc.). Most of the users had full-time jobs in industry, some computer-related, some not computer-related (eg, one guy was a police officer, another worked for the USPS). None of them had touched Unix before.
I was fortunate because all of them were more-or-less open-minded. We were probably fortunate that few of them had programming jobs, as this kept them open to new ideas. By the end of course, some of them were quite excited about Unix and were using it in capacities outside of the course - that is, the course was a success.
The question you have to ask is why your students have no experience with Unix. Your colleagues seem to be close-minded, Microsoft-indoctrinated users. They had plenty of chances to try to learn about Unix (eg, that AIX box), but they chose not to do so.
There are other kinds of students, however. If you've never gone to a traditional CS program at a real university or you've never worked in the areas of IT where Unix is actually useful (eg, you've only had to use a computer for web, email, Word, or some corporate database app someone else wrote), you've never had a chance to learn about Unix. If you had the motivation, you could have installed Linux on your home PC, but there are few reasons why you would need to do this. These students are not close-minded, they've just never had the chance to play with Unix, and starting out can be very intimidating. That's the reason they work with Unix gurus: just to get a start.
I've had great success introducing Unix to everyone I've had a long-term relationship with: former ASP/VB Microsoftie colleagues who are now PHP/MySQL experts, people who couldn't program outside of their friendly Visual Studio environment who are now happily programming Emacs Lisp, hardcore Mac-heads who wouldn't touch a Linux or BSD box even if you paid them large sums of money who are now Solaris admins.
I believe the secret is attitude. Never be condescending; always be gentle and polite. Don't complain about how it's hard or impossible to do a certain task on Windows; implement the same thing on a spare Linux box, and don't flaunt it to everyone, just let it sit there and do it's thing quietly. Advocate by example, not by argument.
The original post was NOT a pun. Dammit, that's why it was so funny. People like me get it, but people like you don't get it. It deserves to be modded up because it's extremely funny to anyone with a decent grasp of English orthography.
Heroin is a narcotic.
A Heroine is a female hero.
Heroineware must have something to do with female heros, because heroine has nothing to do with the opiate.
What about my suggestion, posted forty minutes before the above?
Not whoring, just pointing out that moderators aren't doing their jobs correctly (when I mod, I read -1 threshold, flat, newest first). If you don't have the time to mod, turn off the option. Don't want to sound like I'm whining, but there's lots of good stuff floating around at 1 or 2 whereas a mod point toward a 4 does little good.
I put my email address in a jpeg image. Haven't found a spambot yet that can decipher that.
But neither could blind internet users...
Add an alt tag that describes how to email you. Eg, "The first part of my email address is 'username' and the second part is 'host.com' - the two parts are separated by an '@' sign." I've been doing the jpeg thing for three years; works great.
Also, if your provider is running qmail, you get an unlimited number of account aliases by default (user-amazon@host.com, user-slashdot@host.com). Sendmail can also be coerced to do this. Takes absolutely no extra resources - I wish more ISPs would do this (and tell their customers about it).
VM under Emacs - just uses Emacs's completion stuff ("dabbrev", by default mapped it to M-/). Very nice package - if I type "internationalization" somewhere and later type "intM-/" it does the right thing. Also, VM (and its author) is very cool, but you'll have to like emacs first.
I respectfully disagree. There's a real need to abbreviate this word and i18n seems fine with me, even if it's a little cryptic. Consider that a lot of places don't have tab completion (my MUA does it, but does yours?). If you don't know what i18n means, just type it into google and hit the feeling lucky button. First page that pops up explains it.
Outside of the i18n community, I haven't seen this style of abbreviation anywhere. If you have a better suggestion for an abbreviation, we'd be happy to hear it.