Yeah, Perl can be obtuse. Personally, I find that less-experienced programmers write clearer Perl code. Basically, there are many idioms and shortcuts that, used sparingly, can create extremely readable and intuitive code. However, just as using the same pronoun to mean several different things in the same sentence, using too many of these features makes code hard to read.
Take $_, for example. I am relatively inexperienced at Perl (I have used it a lot, but I don't know a ton about it), and I usually don't use $_ unless I'm absolutely sure it will be what I think it is. Often, I prefer to use a specific variable name in constructs like foreach where the variable will be used several times in the loop, just because it makes things a little clearer.
Personally, what I like about Perl is that, in the same way that PHP has functions for everything on earth, Perl has every data structure on earth built in. It's nice not to have to worry about how to organize data. Perl also just seems very intuitive to me. In my opinion, and inevitably opinions on this will differ, Perl makes concepts like pointers/references, hash tables/associative arrays, and arrays/lists simple enough that you can use them without extra effort, but versatile enough that you aren't stuck reinventing the wheel when you want a slightly different structure. That's basically one of the things that makes me prefer Perl to C--in C, I have to do so much stuff by hand: conversions, array insertions and such, but in Perl, everything does what it should without extra effort. Of course, Perl isn't for everyone or everything, since these built-in features come at a performance cost, but, for what I use it for (little scripts and such), it doesn't matter.
Maybe the ease of working with data is what makes the rest of Perl programs so sloppy or cryptic sometimes... I guess when you have to create and manipulate data structures by hand, you can (and must) put more thought into what the data structures should look like.
Digital cameras have a "portrait" mode, and they can be used to take pictures of naked kids, so are digital camera manufacturers inducing people into making kiddie porn? Yes! We *must* ban these evil devices!
My stereo has a dual tape deck with a fast-dubbing feature, so is it encouraging me to copy tapes? Yes! We have to ban *these* too!
...and so on. GET A CLUE: BAN THE ACTION (PIRATING/STEALING/SHARING/LIBERATING MUSIC), NOT THE METHOD!
Look at murder: Only items with a purpose completely dedicated to hurting people (guns, etc...) are regulated. I can kill someone with a pair of scissors, but they're not banned because you can kill people with them! <sarcasm>OH, won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!</sarcasm>
But I digress...
Re:which are the best of the....
on
Linux Unwired
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· Score: 1
Have you used the Netgear WG-511 at all? I am considering one of these for my laptop I will buy soon./p.
It happens because "Spam", along with "Inbox" and "Starred", are real labels that Gmail uses internally to organize those folders. It's nice to see that they use a standard way of storing that kind of information.
Basically all incoming mail gets either the "Inbox" or the "Spam" label, and starred messages have a "Starred" label. Adding them by hand is useful to see the number of messages, and you can also add manual spam filters.
Using Caps Lock *instead* of Shift!
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 4, Funny
I have a cousin who comes over to my house for holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc...), and he used to run a web page. I was showing him some stuff, and he went to go update the page. I noticed he was typing pretty slowly, especially around capitals, and then I looked down at the keyboard...
He was using Caps Lock twice for each capital letter!
Like instead of [SHIFT]H[/SHIFT]ello, world! he would do [CAPS LOCK/]H[CAPS LOCK/]ello, world!...
It was truly painful to watch. So, I told him, you shouldn't use the Caps Lock key like that, because that's what Shift is for! At the time, he got annoyed at me and said something like, I've already learned it this way, it's quicker for me...
Lo and behold, the next time he runs into me, he says thanks, I can type much faster now... it's now become a sort of joke between the two of us...
I can't figure out where he would learn that from, though... any ideas?
I actually wanted to make a "Font Scanner" once that would take an image of text and the actual text and compare it with all the fonts on a system to find the closest match.
You have given some kick-ass advice in aboout 1/10 the space most people use! I actually have a page, Thinking in Binary, which I have written entirely from scratch in XHTML (using Template Toolkit's ttree to insert nav bars and such). Feel free to take a look and criticize--nobody reads it yet anyway.
True, but why go to the bother of compiling a CGI script as a DLL? Most of them are written in interpreted languages anyway, and, if not, wouldn't.exe be better?
Lots of CLICK HERE links. Most people miss the mouseovers and don't really understand hyperlinking. And make those mouseovers VERY different. Invert the colors of the link when there is a mouseover event.
I think you miss the point of an accessible website. It's supposed to be written in a way that makes it possible to access the content on any browser, including screen readers, and possible to change user preferences (font size, colors, etc...) without adverse consequences.
The point is NOT to make a web site accessible to people who don't understand web sites! This is like the icon caption: "AOL 4.0: DOUBLE CLICK TO START". Don't do that. It's okay to say "Click here to view the page I have written about foo." instead of "I have written a page about foo.", but please don't take all that advice literally.
You have basically given an example of the most unprofessional look of a website I could come up with. Big, bold headers are sometimes okay, but they're usually ugly. Separators are good, but only if they're subtle. CLICK HERE LINKS ARE VERY ANNOYING, AS ARE MOST THINGS WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. And it's really annoying when sites change thirty different things about links when you point to them. I once went to a site where links would pulsate different colors. This led to the mouse flickering between the regular pointer and hourglass, and general annoyance. Just leave the links alone. Oh, and by the way, it's not a "mouseover event", it's a:hover rather than a:link.
The V-Chip, as implemented on most TV's, is pretty crappy: the program-rating signal is only broadcast every few seconds and can be ignored by making the signal a little fuzzy, and most TV's have a bypass code for if you forget the regular one. It's something like 0071 on mine, but you enter it a second time after it says it is wrong.
None of the mirrors appear to be stocking version 0.2, and it's a hasty removal (if it was removed and not just a very new version) since you can select a mirror but all the links are 404's.
Actually, most cell phones provide a way to change the time. It's important if you're not on the network. You could try one of those atomic clocks, or another store clock that's not bad.
Call them drooling morons instead. There are instances where instructions are no good; there's a lot of vaporware; but above all it's the mentally lazy. They're in abundance like nowhere else in the US.
I hope you don't get modded Troll.
I live in the US, and I can attest to that. I don't have other countries to compare it to, but there are so many people I have met who want computer help but haven't taken the time to learn or figure out the basic principles behind a UI. I know people who still get jumpy when you maximize a window over their work, people who can't move a toolbar off a window's title bar to get to the close button,... I could go on forever.
Technology is one of the most complicated things on the planet. By its very definition, it probably is. "Normal" people expect to be able to sit down and have the computer show just the options they need (by reading their mind) in an intuitive and easy-to-use manner, while geeks expect the computer to show all the options available in an efficient but not necessarily easy-to-use interface (take emacs or vi--whichever one you don't like--and look at the keyboard shortcuts... would it kill them to show a little "cheat sheet" in the status bar?) so they can get work done easily. Attempts to combine them (the auto-changing menus in Office) have failed, since geeks don't want to dig for stuff even once, and normal people don't want a program rearranging its interface.
I don't know what the solution is, but I have a few ideas. Don't ever dumb down interfaces. In general, show both the technical and user-friendly side of things. For example, when selecting a network interface in Linux for something, don't pick it for the user (unless there's only one), show just the technical name (lo, eth0, eth1, etc...), or give them English-looking but equally useless names (Ethernet Card 1...)--look up the name of the card and display that, along with the type of card and the name... so instead of "eth0" or "Ethernet Card #1", you would see "3Com Fast Ethernet Card (10/100 Ethernet network card on eth0)" which can be understood by anyone, since it explains what the hardware is, what/dev/* it is, and what type of card it is (so you can pick it if you don't know what kind of card you have).
Another idea: Make it impossible to overlap windows. I've never seen a useful purpose for covering part of one window up with another. Showing multiple windows on screen is essential, but I never cover them up with each other. There are two simple reasons why they shouldn't overlap: you almost never need to see part of a window--you either need to see the content, so you tile the windows, or you don't need to see the content, so you maximize the windows, and the second reason is that it's much easier to work with windows when you don't have to switch between them all the time, i.e. if they are tiled.
Ho hum. Someone needs to say "screw backwards compatibility" and rebuild the computer industry from the ground up with reverse polarity protection in hardware, DIP switches for hard drive setup, or better yet, automatic detection, an install and uninstall system that's intuitive and easy-to-use for a novice, but offers options for others (i.e. the usual "Typical" or "Custom" choice), and is powerful and robust behind-the scenes. I could go on for hours, but (like a typical American) I'm going to sit on my lazy ass and wait for someone else to do it;-)
I actually wrote a Perl script to modify a selection of phrases in the DLL (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\1033\WW9Intl.DLL) the paper clip uses. It now asks:
It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help with that?
There were already versions of EMACS, and/or he probably used ed. EMACS was just a set of Editing macros, and all RMS did was make a standard version of them. He probably used his own macros and swapped them out for the "real" ones as he wrote them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Perl can be obtuse. Personally, I find that less-experienced programmers write clearer Perl code. Basically, there are many idioms and shortcuts that, used sparingly, can create extremely readable and intuitive code. However, just as using the same pronoun to mean several different things in the same sentence, using too many of these features makes code hard to read.
Take $_, for example. I am relatively inexperienced at Perl (I have used it a lot, but I don't know a ton about it), and I usually don't use $_ unless I'm absolutely sure it will be what I think it is. Often, I prefer to use a specific variable name in constructs like foreach where the variable will be used several times in the loop, just because it makes things a little clearer.
Personally, what I like about Perl is that, in the same way that PHP has functions for everything on earth, Perl has every data structure on earth built in. It's nice not to have to worry about how to organize data. Perl also just seems very intuitive to me. In my opinion, and inevitably opinions on this will differ, Perl makes concepts like pointers/references, hash tables/associative arrays, and arrays/lists simple enough that you can use them without extra effort, but versatile enough that you aren't stuck reinventing the wheel when you want a slightly different structure. That's basically one of the things that makes me prefer Perl to C--in C, I have to do so much stuff by hand: conversions, array insertions and such, but in Perl, everything does what it should without extra effort. Of course, Perl isn't for everyone or everything, since these built-in features come at a performance cost, but, for what I use it for (little scripts and such), it doesn't matter.
Maybe the ease of working with data is what makes the rest of Perl programs so sloppy or cryptic sometimes... I guess when you have to create and manipulate data structures by hand, you can (and must) put more thought into what the data structures should look like.
Imagine what you could say...
Digital cameras have a "portrait" mode, and they can be used to take pictures of naked kids, so are digital camera manufacturers inducing people into making kiddie porn? Yes! We *must* ban these evil devices!
My stereo has a dual tape deck with a fast-dubbing feature, so is it encouraging me to copy tapes? Yes! We have to ban *these* too!
...and so on. GET A CLUE: BAN THE ACTION (PIRATING/STEALING/SHARING/LIBERATING MUSIC), NOT THE METHOD!
Look at murder: Only items with a purpose completely dedicated to hurting people (guns, etc...) are regulated. I can kill someone with a pair of scissors, but they're not banned because you can kill people with them! <sarcasm>OH, won't someone PLEASE think of the children?!</sarcasm>
But I digress...
Have you used the Netgear WG-511 at all? I am considering one of these for my laptop I will buy soon./p.
This is not {v|b}bCode... you can use real HTML.
It happens because "Spam", along with "Inbox" and "Starred", are real labels that Gmail uses internally to organize those folders. It's nice to see that they use a standard way of storing that kind of information.
Basically all incoming mail gets either the "Inbox" or the "Spam" label, and starred messages have a "Starred" label. Adding them by hand is useful to see the number of messages, and you can also add manual spam filters.
Anyone who wants a Gmail invite, email me at gmail-invite-slashdot.20.thinkinginbinary@spamgour met.org.
I have a cousin who comes over to my house for holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc...), and he used to run a web page. I was showing him some stuff, and he went to go update the page. I noticed he was typing pretty slowly, especially around capitals, and then I looked down at the keyboard...
He was using Caps Lock twice for each capital letter!
Like instead of [SHIFT]H[/SHIFT]ello, world! he would do [CAPS LOCK/]H[CAPS LOCK/]ello, world!...
It was truly painful to watch. So, I told him, you shouldn't use the Caps Lock key like that, because that's what Shift is for! At the time, he got annoyed at me and said something like, I've already learned it this way, it's quicker for me...
Lo and behold, the next time he runs into me, he says thanks, I can type much faster now... it's now become a sort of joke between the two of us...
I can't figure out where he would learn that from, though... any ideas?
That seems pretty obvious.
I actually wanted to make a "Font Scanner" once that would take an image of text and the actual text and compare it with all the fonts on a system to find the closest match.
You have given some kick-ass advice in aboout 1/10 the space most people use! I actually have a page, Thinking in Binary, which I have written entirely from scratch in XHTML (using Template Toolkit's ttree to insert nav bars and such). Feel free to take a look and criticize--nobody reads it yet anyway.
>I stand corrected. That is pretty clever!
True, but why go to the bother of compiling a CGI script as a DLL? Most of them are written in interpreted languages anyway, and, if not, wouldn't .exe be better?
You could also use SpamGourmet and give them dominos001.1.username@spamgourmet.org, dominos002, and so on...
He was saying that you should let them use whatever size they pick rather than using a pixel size:
I think you miss the point of an accessible website. It's supposed to be written in a way that makes it possible to access the content on any browser, including screen readers, and possible to change user preferences (font size, colors, etc...) without adverse consequences.
The point is NOT to make a web site accessible to people who don't understand web sites! This is like the icon caption: "AOL 4.0: DOUBLE CLICK TO START". Don't do that. It's okay to say "Click here to view the page I have written about foo." instead of "I have written a page about foo.", but please don't take all that advice literally.
You have basically given an example of the most unprofessional look of a website I could come up with. Big, bold headers are sometimes okay, but they're usually ugly. Separators are good, but only if they're subtle. CLICK HERE LINKS ARE VERY ANNOYING, AS ARE MOST THINGS WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. And it's really annoying when sites change thirty different things about links when you point to them. I once went to a site where links would pulsate different colors. This led to the mouse flickering between the regular pointer and hourglass, and general annoyance. Just leave the links alone. Oh, and by the way, it's not a "mouseover event", it's a:hover rather than a:link.
Call it by its real name, 802.11g... it annoys me how much the equipment manufacturers butcher the names of the protocols to make them sound cool.
The V-Chip, as implemented on most TV's, is pretty crappy: the program-rating signal is only broadcast every few seconds and can be ignored by making the signal a little fuzzy, and most TV's have a bypass code for if you forget the regular one. It's something like 0071 on mine, but you enter it a second time after it says it is wrong.
None of the mirrors appear to be stocking version 0.2, and it's a hasty removal (if it was removed and not just a very new version) since you can select a mirror but all the links are 404's.
Actually, most cell phones provide a way to change the time. It's important if you're not on the network. You could try one of those atomic clocks, or another store clock that's not bad.
Three words:
.
Nice demonstration... his (probably) DSL-hosted server is now slashdotted 6000 times as quickly as before!
Am I the only one who got a couple of ads for "Data Recovery Services" on the article page?
Maybe this isn't such a good idea...
I hope you don't get modded Troll.
I live in the US, and I can attest to that. I don't have other countries to compare it to, but there are so many people I have met who want computer help but haven't taken the time to learn or figure out the basic principles behind a UI. I know people who still get jumpy when you maximize a window over their work, people who can't move a toolbar off a window's title bar to get to the close button, ... I could go on forever.
Technology is one of the most complicated things on the planet. By its very definition, it probably is. "Normal" people expect to be able to sit down and have the computer show just the options they need (by reading their mind) in an intuitive and easy-to-use manner, while geeks expect the computer to show all the options available in an efficient but not necessarily easy-to-use interface (take emacs or vi--whichever one you don't like--and look at the keyboard shortcuts... would it kill them to show a little "cheat sheet" in the status bar?) so they can get work done easily. Attempts to combine them (the auto-changing menus in Office) have failed, since geeks don't want to dig for stuff even once, and normal people don't want a program rearranging its interface.
I don't know what the solution is, but I have a few ideas. Don't ever dumb down interfaces. In general, show both the technical and user-friendly side of things. For example, when selecting a network interface in Linux for something, don't pick it for the user (unless there's only one), show just the technical name (lo, eth0, eth1, etc...), or give them English-looking but equally useless names (Ethernet Card 1 ...)--look up the name of the card and display that, along with the type of card and the name... so instead of "eth0" or "Ethernet Card #1", you would see "3Com Fast Ethernet Card (10/100 Ethernet network card on eth0)" which can be understood by anyone, since it explains what the hardware is, what /dev/* it is, and what type of card it is (so you can pick it if you don't know what kind of card you have).
Another idea: Make it impossible to overlap windows. I've never seen a useful purpose for covering part of one window up with another. Showing multiple windows on screen is essential, but I never cover them up with each other. There are two simple reasons why they shouldn't overlap: you almost never need to see part of a window--you either need to see the content, so you tile the windows, or you don't need to see the content, so you maximize the windows, and the second reason is that it's much easier to work with windows when you don't have to switch between them all the time, i.e. if they are tiled.
Ho hum. Someone needs to say "screw backwards compatibility" and rebuild the computer industry from the ground up with reverse polarity protection in hardware, DIP switches for hard drive setup, or better yet, automatic detection, an install and uninstall system that's intuitive and easy-to-use for a novice, but offers options for others (i.e. the usual "Typical" or "Custom" choice), and is powerful and robust behind-the scenes. I could go on for hours, but (like a typical American) I'm going to sit on my lazy ass and wait for someone else to do it ;-)
I actually wrote a Perl script to modify a selection of phrases in the DLL (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\1033\WW9Intl.DLL) the paper clip uses. It now asks:
Pretty awesome...
There were already versions of EMACS, and/or he probably used ed. EMACS was just a set of Editing macros, and all RMS did was make a standard version of them. He probably used his own macros and swapped them out for the "real" ones as he wrote them.
Thanks, now I can fit in the last letter of "ass", as well as an exclamation point!