It's stuff that I don't have a specific place for (interesting magazine articles, stocking stuffers, videogame tchotskes, mail) that piles up and requires great effort (and great levels of nagging by my SO) to deal with.
I have found a kindred soul! Does anyone else find paper mail to be the most difficult thing to deal with? While my career, book shelf, tool box, etc are wonderfully organized, paper mail brings me to my knees. Perhaps a comparison with my email process is in order:
Email:
Scan inbox, delete junk
Click on "real" messages, scan message.
If the message is interesting, flag for later re-reading/replying and move on to next message
Get coffee, do other work
When I feel like a break later, go back and reply to flagged messages
Paper Mail:
Scan mailbox, pull out mail if any, carry to house
delete obvious junk: fliers, anything from Comcast (I don't have a TV or cable modem)
look at the large remaining pile of things.
Open any obvious personal correspondence
look at the large remaining pile of things. These may be bills, advertising, or those damned credit-cheques that Capital one sends out all the time. No way to know without opening them.
stuff mail in a "to look at bin" since the rest of the "pre-authorized offers" or statements need shredding and everything else requires some sort of action.
Once SO complains enough about the "to look at bin" overflowing, deal with the rest of mail and write many cheques and do much shredding
After writing all of that, the processes don't seem that much different, but the key thing in my mind is the ability to quickly scan the subjects of my "flagged items" in the email program, while dealing with paper mail at a later date requires complete reevaluation of each item.
By the way, living with my very neat SO means that my "stuff I don't have a specific place for" must be put into boxes. Its only been two years and I am now on 3 shoeboxes and several larger boxes, preventing me from having any idea of what is contained in any of them. That said, the house does look nice....
For those willing to forgo drag-and-drop interfaces, the shared hosting account is a much better storage deal for the buck. The better companies will provide in excess of 100GB for $5-8 per month with regular off-site backups. Oh, and you get web hosting too.
No need to forgo drag-and-drop. I use Apache-WebDAV over SSL for off-desktop storage. OS X allows you to connect to a WebDAV share just like you would a samba share, and at that point all applications just think it is another drive. There are also a number of dedicated WebDAV clients that can handle all of the file management and permission-setting.
Granted, getting this set up the first time was quite a pain and you also have to do the work maintaining your own server. Once up and running though, it works like a charm.
As can be seen in this reference, none of those great CSS2 properties are supported by IE. As much as I would love to use them, they simply do not work for the 50%+ of one's audience that uses IE.
Hence, we are STILL stuck with table-based layouts as they are often the only thing that can reliably stretch to fit arbitrary content in a pleasent way. Sure divs and CSS1 work well for a lot of content where you know the sizes-of-components/lengths-of-text, but for building generic CMSs in which users can add arbitrary ammounts of content, often tables are the only (IE-supported0 option.
The day an IE that supports CSS2 comes out (or IE market share drops to <25%) is the day I remove table layouts. I wish I could do it sooner, but I can't. That said, I can still make sites that validate against XHTML Strict && CSS1/2, I just have to use tables for layout.
Privateye is a tool that our network security admin here at Middlebury College, Mike Halsall, wrote to automatically quarentine computers into a VLAN (that stays with their mac address) that only has access to a help page, anti-virus tools, and windows update.
Due to the use of this and campus manager (I believe it's the software that actually manages the VLANs, could be wrong), viruses have gone from taking down the campus network several times a year, to being a non-issue. From the project page:
Privateye came into being to satisfy the tedious task of corrolating event data being gathered from disparate security sensors (Snort, HoneyNet, IPS) and automatically take action on the sources generating the alerts.
Example 1: You have an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that is dumping its alerts to a log file. Privateye is reading in this log file, in real time, and watching which alerts are being thrown by which IP addresses. Now, let's also say you have a user registration system, allowing each user's name to be associated wit h their current IP address. One of your users gets a virus that starts doing Bad Things; this virus starts scanning for open shares on your network (which, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily mean something is amiss) AND connects to an IRC server out on the Internet. Privateye's configuration (all done through one powerful configuration file) has a trigger that specifies, "if I see one of 'my users' perform 50 NetBIOS scans in 60 seconds AND connect to an IRC server, I'll run an external script to do something to that user." That "do something" could be shutting down the switch port the computer is connected to, flipping it into a quarantine VLAN, or just sending the user an email letting them know their machine probably has a virus.
Example 2: You have a Snort box that alerts on SSH connections from the Internet to some of your internal hosts. You know that SSH brute-force attacks are prevalent, as every day your logs show thousands of login attempts from many machines on the Net. You configure Privateye such that if any external host (to your network) attempts more than 5 SSH logins in a minute, Privateye will run an external action that blocks the offending host from accessing your network for 2 hours at your firewall. If, when the 2 hours is up, they return, they'll then be blocked from accessing your network for 4 hours. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This article goes to some length discussing the historical basis for copyrights and how those may or not still be valid for creative works in the 21st century as the cost of making and distributing copies has effectively gone to zero. The author comes to the conclusion that no matter what laws are made or desires are had by publishers (or authors) technologically, the "copy" has ceased to be acontrollable thing that revenues can be squeezed from.
An interesting thing will be how authors and artists of the late 21st century will make their livings. Already many performing artists [musicians] are moving towarddistributing their recordings under CreativeCommons licenses that allow them to begenerally free to the public.* They then can increase their following and make a better living selling tickets to performances as well as taking donations and selling easy accessto their music.
The 'donation' aspect of this new model is one that I find particularly interesting. It remains to be seen how it would work out, but I can imagine a day when a music group or author puts up a 'new album/book fundraiser' on their website. Fan donations could build until the cost of the production is met, at which point the group/author makes their work and provides it for download free of additional charges (as it has already been paid for). This "donations/payment upfront" model would strongly encourage increased production by artists (the purpose of copyright), while also providing a mechanism to support smaller/niche artists. I imagine that this model would not produce the huge incomes of current (<2%) superstars, but it should provide reasonable incomes for the vast majority of artists.
As a example of this model in use is the musician "Cargo Cult". I downloaded his albums (for free in 128kbps mp3 format) and listened to them on my MP3 player for several weeks. After a while I found that I really liked his music and went back to Magnatune and gave him $8 for the CD-Quality version of the tracks. Also, I sent him an email asking about his experience giving away his music under CreativeCommons. He replied back with a short message that basically said "Before I didn't make any money with my music, now I do." Where might we (and our culture) be if this was the dominant model.
- Adam
I was going to post a longer example from by iTunes library, but this is all that i could squeeze past the lameness filter. Basically as the parent said, its quite annoying to try to translate to other more usable formats.... <dict> <key>115</key> <dict> <key>Track ID</key><integer>115</integer> <key>Name</key><string>Violently Happy</string> <key>Artist</key><string>Björk</string>...
I was actually hoping that Apple would release the server side items necessary to allow independent hosting companies to host.mac-like services. Apple would still be able to sell iWeb as the means for easy desktop publishing and still have it's own.mac accounts.
As far as I know, much of.Mac is just a WebDAV server with Apple's own additional authentication added onto it. These instructions tell how you can spoof your Mac (with your own IP for mac.com) into thinking that your own webdav server is.Mac.
I ended up setting up an 'rdiff-backup'-based backup system instead, so I never bothered to do the.Mac thing, but it looks pretty do-able. I just wish that Apple would make the setting of your own WebDav/.Mac server an easy configuration. Those of us who already paying for our own hardware aren't going to fork over more $$ for.Mac, so just let us do our own thing without hassle.
One of the nice perks about attending the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is all the manufacturers tries to load you up with free stuff.
[image of backpacks, PSPs, and a whole bunch of T-shirts and other small stuff] You want free stuff? Man, do I have free stuff!
Yes it's true. Everything shown in the above photo was given to me for free! Some of the more noteworthy free stuff includes 1GB of OCZ RAM, an Ultra computer tool kit, CES laptop roller bags and two Sony PSP game consoles. And these are just the stuff that I haul back home with me. Bigger free stuff are being mailed.
There is a good chance that if you attended the CES you won't make off with as much free stuff as I did. This could be because you don't know the art of getting free stuff. Well, you're in luck because I'm going to give you the step by step to getting tons of free stuff at CES, or any other trade show for that matter.
Step 1 - Ask For The Free Stuff
If you want something you have to ask for it. Don't just walk up to a booth and expect them to hand free stuff out to you. It isn't going to happen. And if it does, it normally means some cheap free stuff like a notepad or a pen. If you don't ask, you don't get. If you're too shy to ask then go to the next step.
Step 2 - Attend The Press Conferences or Product Demos
One of the easiest way to getting free stuff is to simply attend the many press conferences or product demos that companies put on during the CES. They almost always have something good to give everyone who attends. And many will hold a contest for some really big prizes. Yes you have to sit through a demo to get your stuff but hey, it's free!
So to save money I need to buy a new car and move to a new house closer to work?
Actually, yes, that would be a reasonable thing to do. Maybe not if you already have your living situation set up, but if you are moving anyway why not move close to your place of [potential] employment.
The big reason for so much traffic, smog, fuel-use, et cetera is that [American] people seem to want urban employment and urban ammenities while thier home is in a rural location. To make that dichotomy be possible, people drive enormous amounts. Instead of bitching about the cost/hassle of travel traffic, move downtown. You don't have to move to a city, a small town is urban too, just of a lesser extent.
No, you won't get the same amount of yard for equivalent price of rural or suburban environment, but you do get the ability to walk to a restaurant or bar, get completely hammered, then stumble home without wreaking a car. As well, you can walk to work, the grocery store, your children can walk to school. Maybe your household keeps one car, but gets rid of the two others reserved for the spouse and children.
Nothing is going to be a pancea for all dreams and desires, but accepting the realities of the world (limited resources) and making choices to live within those limits can lead to a more fulfilling life with less worry about the latest fluctuation in fuel prices.
I don't use Windows, so I haven't been able to try Google's client, but I honestly can't see why anyone would want to use anything other than Gaim or one of its derivatives (i.e. Adium). One Gaim client can support unlimited [I am assuming] accounts using AIM, Jabber (GoogleTalk), Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Zephyr, Novell Groupwise,.Mac, Lotus Sametime, and somthing called Gadu-Gadu. Why bother with different clients for each messaging protocal?
an excellent book at that: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
Having just taken Ralph Johnson's excellent Object Oriented Programming and Design class (CS598) at U. of Illinois, I'd just like to second the quality of the material in Design Patterns.
While professor Johnson's class gave me a love for Smalltalk, I make heavy use of the patterns in my daily work developing PHP apps. Though PHP4 has a comparatively crappy object sytem, they patterns are still workable for the most part. I'll definately have to give this book a read as we transition to PHP5 as it sounds like it could be a nice refresher. As well, having examples in one's target language can be really useful.
Since you brought up vaction, this is one of my favorite benefits of working at a small college. We don't get paid holidays or close for 3-day weekends on national holidays (except Thanksgiving and Christmas), but over the course of the year we rack up at least 6 work-weeks worth of "Combined Time Off". This time is for any sick days and/or vaction. You could spread it out over the national holidays if you wanted and then take a 3 week vacation, or you can do as I do and work on Memorial Day, New Years, Presidents Day, etc and then take one big 5-week chunk. Very nice and flexible.
I'm only 3 years into a university career, but I couldn't agree more. As you say, while the pay may be numerically lower, the low stress, realistic expectations and great benefit plans make up for that and then some.
I started off scraping by as an intern at student wages, but have done good work and [after waiting for two years of burocratic slowness] have seen my salary more then double in a six-month period. I'm still not making a killing, but life is good in so many other ways that my desires for raw cash are superceded by my desires of a "good life" that might come in various forms.
As well, the university doesn't have to worry about me leaving in the middle of my [several-year] project as there is so much room to direct and grown my work that it has become my baby, not just something I do for the pay.
I heartily agree though that its tough to use only one after being using several. I like to use
- one monitor for filebrowser/terminal
- one for code
- one for output/debugger
- one for IM/email
Yeah, the IM/email monitor is excessive, but if you have spares laying around...
One other note: As long as people have PCs, there will be a PC gaming market. I need a PC for other reasons, and since I have one, I see NO reason to spring the $$$ to buy a console.
As well, there are those of us who, believe it or not, don't have TVs. I have a 21-inch LCD which is more than adequate for watching movies, playing games, or doing just about anything else. As there is absolutely nothing on television that I consider worth adding to my life*, I have zero need for a crappy 620x480px television for playing games.
If the console could do everything my PC can, then I might consider the switch. If the console could do everything the PC can do, then it would be a PC.
<rant> * One of the neatest experiences I've had has been the [almost] complete removal of advertisements from my life. I live in Vermont (were we don't allow billboards), don't have (or otherwise watch) TV, use Ad-Block to remove Web-Ads, and only listen to CDs, college radio, or NPR. As such, then only advertising I see on a weekly basis is that in magazines and newspapers.
What was most shocking to me was not the lack of advertisements (I honestly didn't notice they were gone for 5 years), but rather -- having become re-sensitized over years -- how insulting advertisements seem when confronted with them again while traveling/visiting friends.
All advertisements are trying to sell you their product, implying that your life would be better were you to buy their product. While this may seem benign (and may be with simple notifications such as, "Joe's pizza: opening Saturday"), the flip-side is that they are implying that your life is not full/rich/rewarding and that their product can make it so.
Think about that one for a minute. It seems to say that the difference between an an un-fulfilling life and a fulfilling one is the advertised product. If my dreams, goals, career, family, friends, etc couldn't make my life fulfilled, but this item can then they must be worth roughly the same. If this wasn't the implication (lets say them implication was that friends are a hundred times more valuable than items), then I should quit wasting my money and just go out and make one new friend every year.
So, if this advertisement implies that I will be fulfilled having purchased something, then they are in effect implying a monetary value on the rest of my life. I am insulted that anyone would tell me that the worth of even a single family member is as little as that of a Ferrari (and you don't see many advertisements for Ferraris). </rant>
what often happens is that the parts then get shipped to China, where 8 year olds identify plastics by heating them with a lighter and sniffing the fumes (no kidding), salvageable parts get recovered, and the solder-covered motherboards get dumped in a canal.
A friend of mine has been working for the past year for a small, non-profit* electronics recycler run by an environmentalist, their site has lots of white-papers, publications and links on this. One of the main thrusts of their work has been working make standards of "due diligence" in order to allow those who need to recycle computers to be able to know which recyclers investigate their sale and disposal chain to make sure that all of the material is disposed of in a responsible way.
Who recycles the computers is a rather big problem. Due to the money to be made by collecting recycling fees and the lack of standards and accountability in the electronics recycling industry, many companies simply "recycle" computers by shipping them off (mixed working, non-working, and garbage) to China, India, and other places where often they are picked through and dumped. The BBC has article with a good picture of the results.
As an aside, a lot of Retroworks/Good-Point Recycling's white-papers are on the environmental impact difference between [even toxic] recycling and mining. As you may imagine, mining turns out to be vastly more toxic to the world than even burying computers in landfills.
* (They are run as a non-profit, but aren't registered as one since the paperwork isn't worth the tax-savings on their small revenues.)
Re:At least they're taking extra precautions...
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So, these are the guys that buy those "space blankets"...
Jests aside, those Mylar "space blankets" really do work. A few years ago a friend and I were climbing Ben Nevis in December in a [failed] attempt at some winter mountaineering. To make a long story short, our shitty mountaineering-club tent leaked through the top and bottom and we spent a very long (13-hour) night laying awake in 2 inches of water on the side of the mountain.
Putting one of those Mylar blankets inside of my sleeping bag was the difference between shifting about uncomfortably all night and hypothermia.
definitely works on my powerbook, and is QUITE difficult to fix once youve changed it, as the option disappears and you have to quit/relaunch system preferences to get it to come back, as the mouse is now rotated and i think inverted too.
Ahh, now its working on my PowerBook (17" Al). Good call on the restarting the Preferences. Once I did that I was able to get it to come up.
Its definately much easier to reset using an external mouse. Wrapping my mind around the directional change on the touchpad was tough.
Tiger (10.4) has a built-in feature that allows you to rotate the screen.
Go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled "Rotate". Select it and you will see your screen rotate.
Hmm... Not working on my PowerBook. Maybe it only works with external displays...
Who cares about SVN when SourceForge's statistics engine has been down for 4 months. Really difficult to know what is being downloaded.
I'd just like to throw in a "Me too!". I love SourceForge and have several big projects there, but this is getting to be ridiculous. Luckily our main project finished its last day in the 90-something percent activity range, so I'm guessing that people are still finding it, but the lack of stats is making it much harder to find new projects that are developing rapidly.
As far as I can remember, I've only once seen a 747 at the Burlington, Vt airport
Somebody flew a 747 to Burlington???? Holy crap.:-)
For those who haven't had the pleasure of flying out of our [very pleasent] little airport, it only has two movable ramp things and three additional "walk out on the tarmac" gates. Here is a satellite photo.
I've never seen anything larger than 50 seats fly out of Burlington, though they must from time to time. Last time I flew out of Burlington it was on one of those dinky little jets with 3 seats per row.
The makers of little planes have nothing to worry about.
The problem is usually functions that are too long and are not orthogonal. Write short, orthogonal functions and you'll see your need for heavy commenting go away along with the need for long variable names.
Choice of language has a lot to do with the readability and lack of, or need for heavy commenting.
Using java, PHP, Perl, etc, I find that I have a hard time writing methods that are much less than 25 lines long just due to the syntax required. PHP has the additional annoyance of not allowing method returns to be used in-line, requiring many temporary vars.
Something like the following in, say Java:
public Int sumResults (Int id, String managerName) {
Int sum = 0;
results = Managers.getManager(managerName).getStorageMethod( ).getResultsById(id);
for (Int r : results)
sum = sum + r; }
Granted, this is just a dumb example, but in practice I've found it vastly easier to write understandable, orthogonal methods in Smalltalk than in any other language I have tried. Combined with a good following of naming guidelines (that are followed pretty strictly in Smalltalk libraries) and its pretty easy to avoid spaghetti code.
Slashdot Mirror
I have found a kindred soul! Does anyone else find paper mail to be the most difficult thing to deal with? While my career, book shelf, tool box, etc are wonderfully organized, paper mail brings me to my knees. Perhaps a comparison with my email process is in order:
Email:
Paper Mail:
After writing all of that, the processes don't seem that much different, but the key thing in my mind is the ability to quickly scan the subjects of my "flagged items" in the email program, while dealing with paper mail at a later date requires complete reevaluation of each item.
By the way, living with my very neat SO means that my "stuff I don't have a specific place for" must be put into boxes. Its only been two years and I am now on 3 shoeboxes and several larger boxes, preventing me from having any idea of what is contained in any of them. That said, the house does look nice....
- Adam
No need to forgo drag-and-drop. I use Apache-WebDAV over SSL for off-desktop storage. OS X allows you to connect to a WebDAV share just like you would a samba share, and at that point all applications just think it is another drive. There are also a number of dedicated WebDAV clients that can handle all of the file management and permission-setting.
Granted, getting this set up the first time was quite a pain and you also have to do the work maintaining your own server. Once up and running though, it works like a charm.
As can be seen in this reference, none of those great CSS2 properties are supported by IE. As much as I would love to use them, they simply do not work for the 50%+ of one's audience that uses IE.
Hence, we are STILL stuck with table-based layouts as they are often the only thing that can reliably stretch to fit arbitrary content in a pleasent way. Sure divs and CSS1 work well for a lot of content where you know the sizes-of-components/lengths-of-text, but for building generic CMSs in which users can add arbitrary ammounts of content, often tables are the only (IE-supported0 option.
The day an IE that supports CSS2 comes out (or IE market share drops to <25%) is the day I remove table layouts. I wish I could do it sooner, but I can't. That said, I can still make sites that validate against XHTML Strict && CSS1/2, I just have to use tables for layout.
- Adam
Privateye is a tool that our network security admin here at Middlebury College, Mike Halsall, wrote to automatically quarentine computers into a VLAN (that stays with their mac address) that only has access to a help page, anti-virus tools, and windows update.
Due to the use of this and campus manager (I believe it's the software that actually manages the VLANs, could be wrong), viruses have gone from taking down the campus network several times a year, to being a non-issue. From the project page:
- Adam
This article goes to some length discussing the historical basis for copyrights and how those may or not still be valid for creative works in the 21st century as the cost of making and distributing copies has effectively gone to zero. The author comes to the conclusion that no matter what laws are made or desires are had by publishers (or authors) technologically, the "copy" has ceased to be acontrollable thing that revenues can be squeezed from.
An interesting thing will be how authors and artists of the late 21st century will make their livings. Already many performing artists [musicians] are moving towarddistributing their recordings under CreativeCommons licenses that allow them to begenerally free to the public.* They then can increase their following and make a better living selling tickets to performances as well as taking donations and selling easy accessto their music.
The 'donation' aspect of this new model is one that I find particularly interesting. It remains to be seen how it would work out, but I can imagine a day when a music group or author puts up a 'new album/book fundraiser' on their website. Fan donations could build until the cost of the production is met, at which point the group/author makes their work and provides it for download free of additional charges (as it has already been paid for). This "donations/payment upfront" model would strongly encourage increased production by artists (the purpose of copyright), while also providing a mechanism to support smaller/niche artists. I imagine that this model would not produce the huge incomes of current (<2%) superstars, but it should provide reasonable incomes for the vast majority of artists.
As a example of this model in use is the musician "Cargo Cult". I downloaded his albums (for free in 128kbps mp3 format) and listened to them on my MP3 player for several weeks. After a while I found that I really liked his music and went back to Magnatune and gave him $8 for the CD-Quality version of the tracks. Also, I sent him an email asking about his experience giving away his music under CreativeCommons. He replied back with a short message that basically said "Before I didn't make any money with my music, now I do." Where might we (and our culture) be if this was the dominant model.
- Adam
*Some, such as theAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlikelicense that I use for mywebsiteallow free use only for non-commercial uses.
and tickets to Spamlot...
Off topic, but I saw it last May; Spamalot was amazing!
- Adam
I was going to post a longer example from by iTunes library, but this is all that i could squeeze past the lameness filter. Basically as the parent said, its quite annoying to try to translate to other more usable formats. ... ...
<dict>
<key>115</key>
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>115</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Violently Happy</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Björk</string>
I was actually hoping that Apple would release the server side items necessary to allow independent hosting companies to host .mac-like services. Apple would still be able to sell iWeb as the means for easy desktop publishing and still have it's own .mac accounts.
.Mac is just a WebDAV server with Apple's own additional authentication added onto it. These instructions tell how you can spoof your Mac (with your own IP for mac.com) into thinking that your own webdav server is .Mac.
.Mac thing, but it looks pretty do-able. I just wish that Apple would make the setting of your own WebDav/.Mac server an easy configuration. Those of us who already paying for our own hardware aren't going to fork over more $$ for .Mac, so just let us do our own thing without hassle.
As far as I know, much of
I ended up setting up an 'rdiff-backup'-based backup system instead, so I never bothered to do the
- Adam
Get Your Free Stuff Here!
One of the nice perks about attending the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is all the manufacturers tries to load you up with free stuff.
[image of backpacks, PSPs, and a whole bunch of T-shirts and other small stuff]
You want free stuff? Man, do I have free stuff!
Yes it's true. Everything shown in the above photo was given to me for free! Some of the more noteworthy free stuff includes 1GB of OCZ RAM, an Ultra computer tool kit, CES laptop roller bags and two Sony PSP game consoles. And these are just the stuff that I haul back home with me. Bigger free stuff are being mailed.
There is a good chance that if you attended the CES you won't make off with as much free stuff as I did. This could be because you don't know the art of getting free stuff. Well, you're in luck because I'm going to give you the step by step to getting tons of free stuff at CES, or any other trade show for that matter.
Step 1 - Ask For The Free Stuff
If you want something you have to ask for it. Don't just walk up to a booth and expect them to hand free stuff out to you. It isn't going to happen. And if it does, it normally means some cheap free stuff like a notepad or a pen. If you don't ask, you don't get. If you're too shy to ask then go to the next step.
Step 2 - Attend The Press Conferences or Product Demos
One of the easiest way to getting free stuff is to simply attend the many press conferences or product demos that companies put on during the CES. They almost always have something good to give everyone who attends. And many will hold a contest for some really big prizes. Yes you have to sit through a demo to get your stuff but hey, it's free!
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So to save money I need to buy a new car and move to a new house closer to work?
Actually, yes, that would be a reasonable thing to do. Maybe not if you already have your living situation set up, but if you are moving anyway why not move close to your place of [potential] employment.
The big reason for so much traffic, smog, fuel-use, et cetera is that [American] people seem to want urban employment and urban ammenities while thier home is in a rural location. To make that dichotomy be possible, people drive enormous amounts. Instead of bitching about the cost/hassle of travel traffic, move downtown. You don't have to move to a city, a small town is urban too, just of a lesser extent.
No, you won't get the same amount of yard for equivalent price of rural or suburban environment, but you do get the ability to walk to a restaurant or bar, get completely hammered, then stumble home without wreaking a car. As well, you can walk to work, the grocery store, your children can walk to school. Maybe your household keeps one car, but gets rid of the two others reserved for the spouse and children.
Nothing is going to be a pancea for all dreams and desires, but accepting the realities of the world (limited resources) and making choices to live within those limits can lead to a more fulfilling life with less worry about the latest fluctuation in fuel prices.
More net users, more porn, more dead kittens :)
;-)
If God has to kill a kitten every time, then He must do what He has to do; just so long as there are still a few left over for bonsai.
Huh, so is that where the downloads for Linux & OS X will be?
.Mac, Lotus Sametime, and somthing called Gadu-Gadu. Why bother with different clients for each messaging protocal?
Linux/OS X(X11): http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
OS X: http://www.adiumx.com/
I don't use Windows, so I haven't been able to try Google's client, but I honestly can't see why anyone would want to use anything other than Gaim or one of its derivatives (i.e. Adium). One Gaim client can support unlimited [I am assuming] accounts using AIM, Jabber (GoogleTalk), Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Zephyr, Novell Groupwise,
- Adam
an excellent book at that: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
Having just taken Ralph Johnson's excellent Object Oriented Programming and Design class (CS598) at U. of Illinois, I'd just like to second the quality of the material in Design Patterns.
While professor Johnson's class gave me a love for Smalltalk, I make heavy use of the patterns in my daily work developing PHP apps. Though PHP4 has a comparatively crappy object sytem, they patterns are still workable for the most part. I'll definately have to give this book a read as we transition to PHP5 as it sounds like it could be a nice refresher. As well, having examples in one's target language can be really useful.
- Adam
Sorry, forgot about the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is both a commonwealth and an archipelago.
...yikes, the things one comes up with at 2:00am...
Along those lines, Florida is both a state and a peninsula.
3 weeks vacation a year
Since you brought up vaction, this is one of my favorite benefits of working at a small college. We don't get paid holidays or close for 3-day weekends on national holidays (except Thanksgiving and Christmas), but over the course of the year we rack up at least 6 work-weeks worth of "Combined Time Off". This time is for any sick days and/or vaction. You could spread it out over the national holidays if you wanted and then take a 3 week vacation, or you can do as I do and work on Memorial Day, New Years, Presidents Day, etc and then take one big 5-week chunk. Very nice and flexible.
- Adam
Amen.
I'm only 3 years into a university career, but I couldn't agree more. As you say, while the pay may be numerically lower, the low stress, realistic expectations and great benefit plans make up for that and then some.
I started off scraping by as an intern at student wages, but have done good work and [after waiting for two years of burocratic slowness] have seen my salary more then double in a six-month period. I'm still not making a killing, but life is good in so many other ways that my desires for raw cash are superceded by my desires of a "good life" that might come in various forms.
As well, the university doesn't have to worry about me leaving in the middle of my [several-year] project as there is so much room to direct and grown my work that it has become my baby, not just something I do for the pay.
When you've worked with dual monitors for a while, you'll never want to go back.
Why stop at two when you can have 4?
I heartily agree though that its tough to use only one after being using several. I like to use
- one monitor for filebrowser/terminal
- one for code
- one for output/debugger
- one for IM/email
Yeah, the IM/email monitor is excessive, but if you have spares laying around...
- Adam
One other note: As long as people have PCs, there will be a PC gaming market. I need a PC for other reasons, and since I have one, I see NO reason to spring the $$$ to buy a console.
As well, there are those of us who, believe it or not, don't have TVs. I have a 21-inch LCD which is more than adequate for watching movies, playing games, or doing just about anything else. As there is absolutely nothing on television that I consider worth adding to my life*, I have zero need for a crappy 620x480px television for playing games.
If the console could do everything my PC can, then I might consider the switch.
If the console could do everything the PC can do, then it would be a PC.
<rant>
* One of the neatest experiences I've had has been the [almost] complete removal of advertisements from my life. I live in Vermont (were we don't allow billboards), don't have (or otherwise watch) TV, use Ad-Block to remove Web-Ads, and only listen to CDs, college radio, or NPR. As such, then only advertising I see on a weekly basis is that in magazines and newspapers.
What was most shocking to me was not the lack of advertisements (I honestly didn't notice they were gone for 5 years), but rather -- having become re-sensitized over years -- how insulting advertisements seem when confronted with them again while traveling/visiting friends.
All advertisements are trying to sell you their product, implying that your life would be better were you to buy their product. While this may seem benign (and may be with simple notifications such as, "Joe's pizza: opening Saturday"), the flip-side is that they are implying that your life is not full/rich/rewarding and that their product can make it so.
Think about that one for a minute. It seems to say that the difference between an an un-fulfilling life and a fulfilling one is the advertised product. If my dreams, goals, career, family, friends, etc couldn't make my life fulfilled, but this item can then they must be worth roughly the same. If this wasn't the implication (lets say them implication was that friends are a hundred times more valuable than items), then I should quit wasting my money and just go out and make one new friend every year.
So, if this advertisement implies that I will be fulfilled having purchased something, then they are in effect implying a monetary value on the rest of my life. I am insulted that anyone would tell me that the worth of even a single family member is as little as that of a Ferrari (and you don't see many advertisements for Ferraris).
</rant>
what often happens is that the parts then get shipped to China, where 8 year olds identify plastics by heating them with a lighter and sniffing the fumes (no kidding), salvageable parts get recovered, and the solder-covered motherboards get dumped in a canal.
A friend of mine has been working for the past year for a small, non-profit* electronics recycler run by an environmentalist, their site has lots of white-papers, publications and links on this. One of the main thrusts of their work has been working make standards of "due diligence" in order to allow those who need to recycle computers to be able to know which recyclers investigate their sale and disposal chain to make sure that all of the material is disposed of in a responsible way.
Who recycles the computers is a rather big problem. Due to the money to be made by collecting recycling fees and the lack of standards and accountability in the electronics recycling industry, many companies simply "recycle" computers by shipping them off (mixed working, non-working, and garbage) to China, India, and other places where often they are picked through and dumped. The BBC has article with a good picture of the results.
As an aside, a lot of Retroworks/Good-Point Recycling's white-papers are on the environmental impact difference between [even toxic] recycling and mining. As you may imagine, mining turns out to be vastly more toxic to the world than even burying computers in landfills.
* (They are run as a non-profit, but aren't registered as one since the paperwork isn't worth the tax-savings on their small revenues.)
So, these are the guys that buy those "space blankets"...
Jests aside, those Mylar "space blankets" really do work. A few years ago a friend and I were climbing Ben Nevis in December in a [failed] attempt at some winter mountaineering. To make a long story short, our shitty mountaineering-club tent leaked through the top and bottom and we spent a very long (13-hour) night laying awake in 2 inches of water on the side of the mountain.
Putting one of those Mylar blankets inside of my sleeping bag was the difference between shifting about uncomfortably all night and hypothermia.
- Adam
definitely works on my powerbook, and is QUITE difficult to fix once youve changed it, as the option disappears and you have to quit/relaunch system preferences to get it to come back, as the mouse is now rotated and i think inverted too.
Ahh, now its working on my PowerBook (17" Al). Good call on the restarting the Preferences. Once I did that I was able to get it to come up.
Its definately much easier to reset using an external mouse. Wrapping my mind around the directional change on the touchpad was tough.
Tiger (10.4) has a built-in feature that allows you to rotate the screen.
Go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled "Rotate". Select it and you will see your screen rotate.
Hmm... Not working on my PowerBook. Maybe it only works with external displays...
Who cares about SVN when SourceForge's statistics engine has been down for 4 months. Really difficult to know what is being downloaded.
I'd just like to throw in a "Me too!". I love SourceForge and have several big projects there, but this is getting to be ridiculous. Luckily our main project finished its last day in the 90-something percent activity range, so I'm guessing that people are still finding it, but the lack of stats is making it much harder to find new projects that are developing rapidly.
As far as I can remember, I've only once seen a 747 at the Burlington, Vt airport
:-)
Somebody flew a 747 to Burlington???? Holy crap.
For those who haven't had the pleasure of flying out of our [very pleasent] little airport, it only has two movable ramp things and three additional "walk out on the tarmac" gates. Here is a satellite photo.
I've never seen anything larger than 50 seats fly out of Burlington, though they must from time to time. Last time I flew out of Burlington it was on one of those dinky little jets with 3 seats per row.
The makers of little planes have nothing to worry about.
Choice of language has a lot to do with the readability and lack of, or need for heavy commenting.
Using java, PHP, Perl, etc, I find that I have a hard time writing methods that are much less than 25 lines long just due to the syntax required. PHP has the additional annoyance of not allowing method returns to be used in-line, requiring many temporary vars.
Something like the following in, say Java:Becomes, in PHP:Contrast both of these with an equivalent in Smalltalk:Granted, this is just a dumb example, but in practice I've found it vastly easier to write understandable, orthogonal methods in Smalltalk than in any other language I have tried. Combined with a good following of naming guidelines (that are followed pretty strictly in Smalltalk libraries) and its pretty easy to avoid spaghetti code.
Oh well. time for bed...