I couldn't quite fit the title in the space allowed for the subject.
One of the most important things that you need to do to make a website accessible is to use valid markup. This is also important to allow interoperability with standards-based browsers like Opera and Mozilla.
You can ensure your site has valid markup by using a validator to check your HTML. You will find that you have an easier time writing valid markup after working with a validator for a few pages, after that you'll find very few mistakes, and they will be easy to fix. Don't let the validator's complaints about your first attempts scare you.
Maintaining server responsiveness while under heavy user load is important for basic usability for any user. You can test how your application responds to heavy traffic by testing with a load generator.
Yes, I know I posted this yesterday. Please read the essay before you mod me as redundant or something. I feel that what I have to say is important for people to hear.
What is the effect of posting the link here and the whole thing at k5? For most of the last year I have had about 300 people a month read my essay. For far this month, I have had 1665 page views for my copy, and I'm sure many more than that for the K5 copy.
I'm going to keep posting the link until it makes a real difference.
Check out the
comparitive review at
barefeats in which they conclude that the WiebeTech product performs better than the competition.
Note that if you don't have firewire hardware on your box, you can get a PCI or Cardbus card to do it. There is a compatibility list at
www.linux1394.org.
I'm using one of the Belkin cards in my PC, and it works well.
Disclaimer, so you don't think I'm astroturfing: WiebeTech is my current consulting
client.
The Live Picture graphics file format stores a tiled multi-resolution version of the original tiff file.
FlashPix is similar with OLE Structured Storage thrown in to get Microsoft to participate (much to the agony of anyone who's ever tried to write a FlashPix file parser). PhotoCD is similar except I think it might not be tiled - Kodak was a major partner to Live Picture and even though the original LP format would have worked fine, Kodak wanted something proprietary:-/
It stores the original resolution, only in tiles whose size are about what would fit on a typical monitor. Then it stores half that resolution, tiled again, and so on. I think there are six levels of decimation. The total file size is about twice the normal full-resolution file.
The advantage of this is that you can pan and zoom to any portion of the image quickly. Only a modest amount of scaling would be needed to get to the view the user selected.
The really sexy thing about Live Picture (a high-end grahics editor) is that it never applied time-consuming graphics operations to the full image. Instead it would only render what was necessary to show the results to the user on the screen.
All of the edit commands were saved in a display list, and re-rendered every time you changed the view or edited in some way. You could save your display list in a file that linked to the graphics, and in effect have infinite undo that could be continued across launches of the program.
Each kind of operation you could do to an LP image was a layer - there were monochrome paint layers, multicolor paint layes, distortion layers and so on. You could composite images with image insertion layers. I understand Adobe got the idea for putting layers into Photoshop from Live Picture.
The final rendering to a TIFF file was time consuming, yes, but could be left until the end of the day and ran as a batch job overnight, or offloaded to a separate machine.
This made Live Picture a very complex program to work on. It had about 70 MB of really arcane C++ source code at the time I worked there in 1997.
But it made Photoshop look like a kids toy, because it could easily and very responsively handle the compositing of a half-dozen 200 MB images on a 150 Mhz PowerPC 604 Mac 8500 with 32 MB of RAM - I had machines like that both for my main development machine at the office, and coincidentally I had an identical machine at home (which I'm typing on now, although it's been upgraded several times).
While Live Picture as a company had great technology, unfortunately it failed to compete as a business against Adobe.
Read more about it in:
After its bankrupcy, Live Picture was acquired by MGI Software of Canada. Later MGI was acquired by Roxio, the Adaptec spin-off that publishes toast and easy cd creator. Roxio publishes a bundle of inexpensive graphics utilities, but I don't think Live Picture is included. That is a sad end for a powerful graphics application that once retailed for $4000.
Power consumption. PowerPC's use very little power compared to any x86 processor, and generate very little heat.
Thinking of building a beowulf cluster in your home?
Think again. You may need special power wiring and air conditioning to handle a rack with any significant number of CPUs in it.
But one should be able to build a PowerPC beowulf cluster that is powered by household AC and still get a significant number of CPUs on the rack, and not have to add air conditioning to the room.
Headhunters and contract brokers are a large part of the problems we have, expecially with older workers not being valued for their experience - they only want the latest buzzword.
I'm a software consultant, I deal exclusively with the end client, because I feel that brokers don't serve my needs, or (in my honest opinion) the needs of my clients.
Headhunters are a pestilence on the face of high-tech. Join me in boycotting them.
What can you do if you're looking for a perm job? Apply directly to the company. Most open positions are never advertised. Just send your cover letter and resume to companies you think you might want to work for, regardless of whether a position is advertised.
This page has some tips on job hunting, it's most useful to people from Santa Cruz but the methods are helpful to anyone.
The "dot.com downturn" has been challenging for me as well as everyone else - but I have continued to work and be able to support myself and my wife throughout it. An I have done so without the help of headhunters.
I always post in HTML. But sometimes the little menu below the text entry box that allows me to select "HTML formatted" is set to "plain old text" and I don't notice.
The bug is partially that slashdot doesn't seem to always remember the way I like to post, and partially that it doesn't notice I have already entered <p> tags and it goes ahead and enters its own markup anyway.
You would think that if a post contained markup, that "plain old text" would either strip out the markup, escape it as entities, or flip the selection to "HTML formatted" and not add markup of its own, but it doesn't do any of that. Instead, it enters paragraph breaks on top of the ones I already have, and so you get the widely spaced posts.
Lots of other people get this problem too, not just me.
I've been programming for a long time. I'm good at it, and I suppose if I really put some time into coding for a Free Software project, I could do a lot of good.
But most of my contribution to Free Software has really been in the form of writing. I have also written a lot of stuff which is not copylefted, but posted publicly on the web.
here some more as well as
this.
I have contributed some to
zoolib, but that's mostly in the form of qa, project management (for the initial open source release) and marketing.
One reason I prefer to contribute by writing is that my normal programming work is so hard, that when I get time to take a break from it, it's difficult to work up much enthusiasm to write more code, no matter how fun the project might be. I imagine that's a common problem.
Another reason is that I feel that any contribution I could make to Free Software, at least in the limited time I have, would be small. I could fix some bugs, add some features, do some testing. But how many people would benefit from my personal contribution? I don't think that many would, at least not until I had the time to develop a really serious package, and I just don't have the energy for that. I have lots of ideas, but no time.
But I feel that passing on my experience by writing can benefit others far out of proportion to the effort I put in. That is because I aim my writing to enable others to do better. By writing well, I enable many other developers to code a little better, and many users to do better testing and bug reporting.
I could lead by example by writing good code, but how many people would learn by reading it? When's the last time you studied the source for some package you weren't really actively involved with? Prose is much more accessible.
This is all the more important because so few engineers of any sort are good writers. When my father was a civilian electrical engineer for the Navy, the shipyard sent him to a writing class so he could write better test plans! The man has a master's degree! But the Navy put lots of people through that class because so many of their engineers didn't know how to write.
What is funny is that I find writing much more difficult than programming. With software, you know when you're wrong. It's not always so clear with writing. The main reason I write so well is because most of my effort is put into editing - and I still find lots of mistakes later.
Even more ironic is that I used to hate writing with a passion. One major reason is that I have terrible handwriting - I can't read my own handwriting, and can't imagine how anyone else could. But the schools always used to require handwritten essays. They used to send me to remedial handwriting classes, which I really hated because they made my hand hurt. It's painful for me to write much by hand.
What did it for me was two things - a composition class I took at the community college during the summer when I was sixteen, that was just really well taught, and being able to type. I type really fast now, and there's no pain.
My senior year Advanced Placement English Teacher asked me to drop the class because of my poor handwriting. He was quite taken aback when I started screaming at him. I'd had enough of teachers criticizing my handwriting, I didn't need to hear it again when I was seventeen years old.
He was concerned that I couldn't pass the exam (which could get me college credit) because the judges wouldn't be able to read my essays.
He proposed a compromise. He suggested that I block print.
I had no problem with that. And at the exam at the end of the year, I turned in my exam neatly block-printed in all capital letters. I just used bigger capitals for where a capital was really required.
I was the only student in my school that year to get a 5 on the english AP exam (a perfect score).
PS. I meant to post the LinuxQuality links as MichaelCrawford, but I used a different computer that still had a cookie that logged me in as goingware. I want to be known online by my own name now.
It's a scary thing to do, but you would also benefit from recompiling glibc for the 486. The scary part is when you replace the old one, if you screw up your box stops working.
You should boot of a CD and mount your root volumne in/mnt on the ramdisk you're running when you do this - if you replace glibc on a running system and you break it, then you can't issue any commands anymore!
I have an old 486 laptop that I plan to install on sometime soon. I had originally intended to install Debian Woody, but Debian's minimum disk space after you've run dselect the first time is bigger than this thing's whole hard drive. Slackware doesn't have that problem.
Apple employees used to get a once-in-a-lifetime free macintosh under their loan-to-own program.
I got my Power Macintosh 8500/150 while I was a senior engineer in the OS Integration team of the traditional OS department.
Some amount of the quality of Mac OS Systems version 7.5.2 and 7.5.3 came from my efforts to debug them and tune their performance in my role as
debugmeister.
Despite what you may think of it, my 8500 is six years old and still works great. I've never had any trouble with it. I leave it on day in and day out as my main desktop machine & internet gateway.
So yes, I am in fact stupid enough to buy a fucking Mac.
OS X doesn't work so well on such an old machine (although Linux works great). For my OS X work I bought an iBook a few months ago.
Why was parent modded off-topic? It's not a troll
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 1
Believe me, I want Mozilla to succeed. That's why I went to so much trouble to write a detailed explanation of how Mozilla is failing to deliver for regular users.
There needs to be a greater emphasis placed on reliability. Mozilla has lots of features already.
The parent post was not by any means a troll.
Please Understand Why My Wife Can't Stand Mozilla
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
My wife has been doing a lot of HTML coding lately. She also does a lot of general browsing on the net.
She can't stand Mozilla. She understands very well why she should avoid IE. But she only uses Mozilla when she absolutely has to, for example to check for interoperability after completing a web page that she wrote while using mostly using IE.
Why? Because she experiences so many bugs with it. The bugs make Mozilla unusable to her. She's not a software developer. She's a regular user of the sort that applications like this are targeting.
She understands very well that her machine can get hacked if she uses IE. But crashes and usability problems happen to her several times a day when she uses Mozilla. The risk of getting hacked seems somewhat theoretical and remote. The crashes and loss of data (for example, forum postings being composed in web forms) are frequent and completely intolerable.
Today I sent her a link to that BBC article that said you shouldn't use IE because of the security holes that are used by spyware and adware. I had observed her using IE a lot lately and wanted her to really understand why she should avoid it. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate how she would react.
She was completely distraught. I looked over at her sitting at her computer this evening and she had tears running down her face, quietly crying. The reason was that she didn't know how she was going to be able to browse the web anymore, because I had just told her in quite a loud way (using the BBC article) why she shouldn't use IE, but she also finds Mozilla completely useless.
I had put her in a bind. She didn't see a way out.
The way I consoled her and resolved the bind was to tell her to go ahead and use IE. She doesn't have much data on her drive that would be a problem if someone stole it, and if she gets hacked I'll reformat the drive and reinstall Win2k.
Meanwhile I told her I would download the new mozilla and test it for her. I was pleasantly surprised to find 1.2 released tonight - I hadn't wanted to give her a beta. So I got it downloaded before the rush.
My fear, though, is that her bugs are not fixed. There are just a few bugs that give her repeated trouble. Tonight she had a repeated crash, one time when she had sixteen windows open while researching medical journal literature, and she had hard time finding her pages again.
Talkback kept popping up and made her really upset because it made it so she couldn't just relaunch Mozilla. I knew that the talkback logs would help the developers get the bugs fixed, but if my wife was to use Mozilla at all I had to show her how to disable talkback.
I'd like to make the polite suggestion that the Mozilla developers focus somewhat less on flashy features and somewhat more strongly on stability and basic usability.
I've got lots of bugs in both reliability and usability on the Linux mozilla I use on my Mac, but I have a greater tolerance for it because I'm a developer, and I'm committed to making open source work. My wife, on the other hand, uses Mozilla because I plead with her to do so. It would be nice if Mozilla didn't make her life miserable.
I convinced her recently to make a serious try at switching from windows to Linux. That's a big step - I've been trying to do that for several years. She hasn't tried it yet because I'm going to have to spend some time configuring a system with the right setup to be able to accomplish all the tasks she wants while also being very usable and reliable. I'm going to really spend some time trying to make her transition as comfortable as possible.
While she was upset tonight she told me that the reason she said she would try Linux was to make me shut up about IE vs. Mozilla, and it hadn't worked - I kept pushing her to use open source tools, and they are unusable for her.
Bonita did file one actual bug report with bugzilla. That's the last she'll ever do, because she found the whole process extremely confusing. I think the big problem is that if you try to file a bug, and don't have a bugzilla account, after your account is created, you're presented with the expert interface and not the simplified one.
I think it would be helpful if there was a dead-simple bug report form that just had a couple lists for the platform and version, and one free-form text input field where the reporter could describe their problem. Then the person who fields the bug reports could translate this into a proper bugzilla report. Don't present people who aren't developers with the bugzilla query page - like Bonita, that will be the last report you ever get from a regular user.
It would also be very helpful if the very first page of the talkback wizard presented the option of disabling it and making it just go away. Having to click through several pages before being allowed to quit talkback is really frightening for someone who just lost all their windows and just wants to launch it again so they can find the pages that just disappeared from their screen.
How about Flash for PowerPC Linux?
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is it that commercial vendors who say they support linux only provide packages for Red Hat?
Last I heard, Red Hat only ran on x86. Or actually I remember they had an S/390 distro too.
On other x86 distributions, you at least have the hope of using alien to switch the package format. But I use Debian on a PowerPC Macintosh.
I'm pretty sure Macromedia wrote software for the Macintosh before they even had any products for Windows. Flash right now is supported on the Macintosh, so the software is supported on PowerPC architecture.
How about getting us a Flash for Debian PowerPC Linux?
The "Red Hat" only mentality is why I think there isn't much hope of companies succeeding in shipping proprietary products for Linux. People on other distros or architectures get particularly irritated that they can't do whatever the product provides and write an open source replacement, where they wouldn't have bothered if the commercial app supported all the platforms.
If a bunch of volunteers working for no pay can support, what is it? 8000 packages on eleven architectures, why can't a commercial vendor support all the major Linux distros and architectures?
Most likely it was a politically motivated attack by someone who likes Windows.
I bought "Inside Windows 2000" a year and a half ago, and it's a good introduction for someone completely unfamiliar with the system, but is sorely lacking for critical details. It also is very politically-correct, in terms of advocating the Microsoft way.
The icing on the cake was the shrink-wrap EULA on the enclosed CD. After having spent a lot of time working with Linux, I found it positively insulting.
My experience has overwhelmingly been that big computer books are a poor investment. I guess big books sell better, which is why one sees so many in the bookstores, but I have learned to skip over them and look for the little books.
Why?
Big computer books are often filled with fluff, such as large illustrations, fancy typography or sidebars that don't add much meat.
What is really worse is that it takes a lot more work for a writer to explain a complex point concisely. I imagine it also takes more works for the editors to cut down on material that doesn't really add value to the book. My experience is that the big computer books are often poorly written.
Also, I don't have enough time to read all the technical books. It simply takes less time to read a compact, well-written book than a big, verbose tome. There's also the problem of fitting a bunch of big computer books on my limited bookshelf space.
I have observed that there seem to be an awful lot of big books for windows & web programming, and Java programming. The situation seems quite a bit better for C++ programming, with such slim books as Scott Meyers' "Effective C++".
There are long books which are worthwhile, but the ones that are both big and good are covering a topic that is very broad and detailed, for example Foley, Van Dam, Feiner and Hughes' "Computer Graphics".
My wife wanted to learn to use cascading stylesheets for her web design. The bookstore had two books, a small one by O'Reilly and a much larger one that seemed to cover the same material but had lots of fancy typography and illustrations and verbose text. In the end she chose the O'Reilly book, and after using it to design
a website for some friends of ours she said she was very glad to have gotten the O'Reilly book.
On the one hand, I think I would
do a lot of good to the community if I copylefted my article. A lot of people
might read it who otherwise would never come across it. On the other hand,
allowing the only copy to be on my website generates a lot of valuable traffic
that helps to advertise my consulting business.
But on still another hand, maybe having the copylefted version in the wild would do even more to publicize my business.
John Levon suggested
that that particular article is probably best where it is. I'm thinking
now that he's probably right.
But I have other articles that
I am thinking of copylefting. I have started writing a
column on cross-platform software development. My thought now
is that I will copyleft my articles, say, six months after they are published.
The one article I have posted so far is older than that, so if I decide
to do this I will copyleft it right away.
That way there will
be traffic to my cross-platform
site from people looking for new articles, but ultimately they
will have the most positive effect if they are picked up by linux distros,
for example.
I'm still undecided about it, I probably won't make
a decision right away. Yes, I want to help people. But I'm sorry to say
that it's been challenging to be a self-employed software consultant since
the dot-com crash. My articles take a lot of work to write, and I don't get paid for writing them, in fact I take a lot of time off to write that I could spend doing billable work for my clients. They are
an effective advertising medium. The decision of whether to copyleft them
is going to have to be based in large part on what I think would be best
for my business.
Unfortunately, the dot-com crash ensued just as I was getting started, and things have been a little too hectic since then for me to do much about it.
A number of people suggested I use bugzilla, and I thought a lot about it, but didn't want to use it, at least not in its current form, because it lacks a feature that I feel is critical for a bug database that is to be used to track operating system development: storage of preset machine configurations.
Perhaps the people with the new kernel bugzilla can put this in.
What I envisisioned was a way for the user to specify the hardware configuration of their machines by drawing on a database of all known hardware. (Just making that database would be a big job in itself). The user could give a name to each configuration.
Then when reporting a bug, the user would be presented with a popup menu or scrolling list of their configuration presets. There would be a way to make variations for a particular bug report, to indicate that a board had been added or removed from the stored preset.
Then the user would upload their kernel.config file.
This would allow the kernel developers to search for combinations of hardware that is or isn't installed along with kernel config options that are selected or not set.
This would help a lot to identify situations where FooBar Corp's ethernet board doesn't work when you've got a WhizzyVideo card installed.
I would also encourage people to report the configurations for successful kernel tests. That would help to build confidence as well as to identify untested areas so more attention could be paid to them.
Unfortunately, I'm just a guy working alone and although some have offerred to help, I have been working too hard just to survive to even coordinate the development of such a database.
The OSDL was kind enough to mirror my two kernel testing articles and even translate them into Japanese. You can mirror or translate them if you like, as they are under the GNU Free Documentation License. I would be particularly pleased if any of my articles were translated into more languages.
I should point out that I asked a couple of the larger commercial Linux vendors to contribute to the Linux Quality Database, which would have enabled me to feed myself while developing it, but I got turned down. I find that hard to understand, as it would have benefited them tremendously. I don't want to say who it was that turned me down, as I don't think negative publicity would be productive.
But I found the OSDL's interest in my articles quite encouraging.
A lot of people are griping about not being able to file bugs anonymously with bugzilla. I had always intended to allow anonymous bug reports, although I would encourage users to log in so we could follow up with them.
Also some people are saying in other comments that bug reports that aren't emailed to the linux-kernel mailing lists won't be as good as the traditional ones. But I'd like to point out that linux-kernel is one of the highest traffic mailing lists around, and the discussions are extremely technical and often heated. Patches also fall on the floor all the time, as I found when someone posted a patch that fixed the problem I reported when I first subscribed.
I felt then and still feel that linux-kernel is too intimidating for the average linux user, so most will choose not to partipate in kernel QA. A bug database with a nice web interface where the reporter doesn't have to participate in the mailing list traffic can only encourage more people to post bugs. And a bug database would make it possible to log successes without overwhelming the list.
It would also be possible to publish an XML interface to the database, so people could log reports programmatically. That would help for identifying configuration information, for example you could run a program that would do what lspci does and upload it to your account at the bugbase.
My understanding is that Hurd works reasonably well for the hardware it's designed for. And you don't need that big a hard drive to install Debian. I have the PowerPC port of Debian on my Macintosh, and everything including/home is on a single 2 GB hard drive. The largest partition is 834 MB, well under Hurd's limit if I were to install Hurd instead.
I think everyone here is being pretty unfair to Hurd and RMS's efforts. Hurd can easily do all kinds of stuff you'll never get Linux to be able to do, like allow unpriviliged users to mount filesystems in their home directories without causing problems for security, allowing ordinary users to hack the kernel without breaking security and so on.
All of this has been a major advancement in computer science, and they simply haven't needed things like large partitions that of course would be needed for widespread acceptance. I simply don't see it as a big deal that they've taken so long to add the features needed for an end-user, because they had to take a long time to write the architectural underpinnings that are miles beyond Linux.
Intel VTune Performance Analyzer is an impressive code profiler, and can even profile Linux code (over the net, with the UI hosted on Windows), but Intel's marketing shows through clearly in the advice it gives you on how to optimize your program - by making use of assembly opcodes that are only available on Intel processors, and only the very latest ones at that.
I haven't tried, but I would be surprised if VTune ran on an AMD processor.
For the very fastest code, you can take advantage of special instruction, write stuff in assembly with the clever use of registers, etc. But the performance gains won't be portable.
Optimizing cache use could be considered a non-portable optimization, but it can be done directly in C or C++, and any processor most people are likely to use will use a cache. There will just be some variations in its size, the size of a cache line and stuff like that.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most important things that you need to do to make a website accessible is to use valid markup. This is also important to allow interoperability with standards-based browsers like Opera and Mozilla.
You can ensure your site has valid markup by using a validator to check your HTML. You will find that you have an easier time writing valid markup after working with a validator for a few pages, after that you'll find very few mistakes, and they will be easy to fix. Don't let the validator's complaints about your first attempts scare you.
Maintaining server responsiveness while under heavy user load is important for basic usability for any user. You can test how your application responds to heavy traffic by testing with a load generator.
Please read:
-
Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
Thank you for your attention.-
Is This the America I Love?
-
Copy posted at Kuro5hin which has the advantage of a (rather thoughtful) followup discussion
What is the effect of posting the link here and the whole thing at k5? For most of the last year I have had about 300 people a month read my essay. For far this month, I have had 1665 page views for my copy, and I'm sure many more than that for the K5 copy.I'm going to keep posting the link until it makes a real difference.
And I'm going to keep writing stuff like that.
Thank you for your attention.
Check out the comparitive review at barefeats in which they conclude that the WiebeTech product performs better than the competition.
Note that if you don't have firewire hardware on your box, you can get a PCI or Cardbus card to do it. There is a compatibility list at www.linux1394.org. I'm using one of the Belkin cards in my PC, and it works well.
Disclaimer, so you don't think I'm astroturfing: WiebeTech is my current consulting client.
FlashPix is similar with OLE Structured Storage thrown in to get Microsoft to participate (much to the agony of anyone who's ever tried to write a FlashPix file parser). PhotoCD is similar except I think it might not be tiled - Kodak was a major partner to Live Picture and even though the original LP format would have worked fine, Kodak wanted something proprietary :-/
It stores the original resolution, only in tiles whose size are about what would fit on a typical monitor. Then it stores half that resolution, tiled again, and so on. I think there are six levels of decimation. The total file size is about twice the normal full-resolution file.
The advantage of this is that you can pan and zoom to any portion of the image quickly. Only a modest amount of scaling would be needed to get to the view the user selected.
The really sexy thing about Live Picture (a high-end grahics editor) is that it never applied time-consuming graphics operations to the full image. Instead it would only render what was necessary to show the results to the user on the screen.
All of the edit commands were saved in a display list, and re-rendered every time you changed the view or edited in some way. You could save your display list in a file that linked to the graphics, and in effect have infinite undo that could be continued across launches of the program.
Each kind of operation you could do to an LP image was a layer - there were monochrome paint layers, multicolor paint layes, distortion layers and so on. You could composite images with image insertion layers. I understand Adobe got the idea for putting layers into Photoshop from Live Picture.
The final rendering to a TIFF file was time consuming, yes, but could be left until the end of the day and ran as a batch job overnight, or offloaded to a separate machine.
This made Live Picture a very complex program to work on. It had about 70 MB of really arcane C++ source code at the time I worked there in 1997.
But it made Photoshop look like a kids toy, because it could easily and very responsively handle the compositing of a half-dozen 200 MB images on a 150 Mhz PowerPC 604 Mac 8500 with 32 MB of RAM - I had machines like that both for my main development machine at the office, and coincidentally I had an identical machine at home (which I'm typing on now, although it's been upgraded several times).
While Live Picture as a company had great technology, unfortunately it failed to compete as a business against Adobe. Read more about it in:
-
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress
After its bankrupcy, Live Picture was acquired by MGI Software of Canada. Later MGI was acquired by Roxio, the Adaptec spin-off that publishes toast and easy cd creator. Roxio publishes a bundle of inexpensive graphics utilities, but I don't think Live Picture is included. That is a sad end for a powerful graphics application that once retailed for $4000.Thinking of building a beowulf cluster in your home?
Think again. You may need special power wiring and air conditioning to handle a rack with any significant number of CPUs in it.
But one should be able to build a PowerPC beowulf cluster that is powered by household AC and still get a significant number of CPUs on the rack, and not have to add air conditioning to the room.
-
Important Note to Recruiters and Contract Agencies
Headhunters and contract brokers are a large part of the problems we have, expecially with older workers not being valued for their experience - they only want the latest buzzword.I'm a software consultant, I deal exclusively with the end client, because I feel that brokers don't serve my needs, or (in my honest opinion) the needs of my clients.
Headhunters are a pestilence on the face of high-tech. Join me in boycotting them.
What can you do if you're looking for a perm job? Apply directly to the company. Most open positions are never advertised. Just send your cover letter and resume to companies you think you might want to work for, regardless of whether a position is advertised.
This page has some tips on job hunting, it's most useful to people from Santa Cruz but the methods are helpful to anyone.
The "dot.com downturn" has been challenging for me as well as everyone else - but I have continued to work and be able to support myself and my wife throughout it. An I have done so without the help of headhunters.
The bug is partially that slashdot doesn't seem to always remember the way I like to post, and partially that it doesn't notice I have already entered <p> tags and it goes ahead and enters its own markup anyway.
You would think that if a post contained markup, that "plain old text" would either strip out the markup, escape it as entities, or flip the selection to "HTML formatted" and not add markup of its own, but it doesn't do any of that. Instead, it enters paragraph breaks on top of the ones I already have, and so you get the widely spaced posts.
Lots of other people get this problem too, not just me.
Why don't you come out and say who you really are?
But most of my contribution to Free Software has really been in the form of writing. I have also written a lot of stuff which is not copylefted, but posted publicly on the web. here some more as well as this.
I have contributed some to zoolib, but that's mostly in the form of qa, project management (for the initial open source release) and marketing.
One reason I prefer to contribute by writing is that my normal programming work is so hard, that when I get time to take a break from it, it's difficult to work up much enthusiasm to write more code, no matter how fun the project might be. I imagine that's a common problem.
Another reason is that I feel that any contribution I could make to Free Software, at least in the limited time I have, would be small. I could fix some bugs, add some features, do some testing. But how many people would benefit from my personal contribution? I don't think that many would, at least not until I had the time to develop a really serious package, and I just don't have the energy for that. I have lots of ideas, but no time.
But I feel that passing on my experience by writing can benefit others far out of proportion to the effort I put in. That is because I aim my writing to enable others to do better. By writing well, I enable many other developers to code a little better, and many users to do better testing and bug reporting.
I could lead by example by writing good code, but how many people would learn by reading it? When's the last time you studied the source for some package you weren't really actively involved with? Prose is much more accessible.
This is all the more important because so few engineers of any sort are good writers. When my father was a civilian electrical engineer for the Navy, the shipyard sent him to a writing class so he could write better test plans! The man has a master's degree! But the Navy put lots of people through that class because so many of their engineers didn't know how to write.
What is funny is that I find writing much more difficult than programming. With software, you know when you're wrong. It's not always so clear with writing. The main reason I write so well is because most of my effort is put into editing - and I still find lots of mistakes later.
Even more ironic is that I used to hate writing with a passion. One major reason is that I have terrible handwriting - I can't read my own handwriting, and can't imagine how anyone else could. But the schools always used to require handwritten essays. They used to send me to remedial handwriting classes, which I really hated because they made my hand hurt. It's painful for me to write much by hand.
What did it for me was two things - a composition class I took at the community college during the summer when I was sixteen, that was just really well taught, and being able to type. I type really fast now, and there's no pain.
My senior year Advanced Placement English Teacher asked me to drop the class because of my poor handwriting. He was quite taken aback when I started screaming at him. I'd had enough of teachers criticizing my handwriting, I didn't need to hear it again when I was seventeen years old.
He was concerned that I couldn't pass the exam (which could get me college credit) because the judges wouldn't be able to read my essays.
He proposed a compromise. He suggested that I block print.
I had no problem with that. And at the exam at the end of the year, I turned in my exam neatly block-printed in all capital letters. I just used bigger capitals for where a capital was really required.
I was the only student in my school that year to get a 5 on the english AP exam (a perfect score).
I work hard to write good articles. Some are very difficult to write, and take a lot of time. But I believe in doing well by doing good.
PS. I meant to post the LinuxQuality links as MichaelCrawford, but I used a different computer that still had a cookie that logged me in as goingware. I want to be known online by my own name now.
You should recompile your kernel to be optimized for 486 though. I'm not sure, but I think it could make a difference.
Here's where you get slackware.
It's a scary thing to do, but you would also benefit from recompiling glibc for the 486. The scary part is when you replace the old one, if you screw up your box stops working.
You should boot of a CD and mount your root volumne in /mnt on the ramdisk you're running when you do this - if you replace glibc on a running system and you break it, then you can't issue any commands anymore!
I have an old 486 laptop that I plan to install on sometime soon. I had originally intended to install Debian Woody, but Debian's minimum disk space after you've run dselect the first time is bigger than this thing's whole hard drive. Slackware doesn't have that problem.
Apple employees used to get a once-in-a-lifetime free macintosh under their loan-to-own program.
I got my Power Macintosh 8500/150 while I was a senior engineer in the OS Integration team of the traditional OS department.
Some amount of the quality of Mac OS Systems version 7.5.2 and 7.5.3 came from my efforts to debug them and tune their performance in my role as debugmeister.
Check out other work I've done on the Mac.
Despite what you may think of it, my 8500 is six years old and still works great. I've never had any trouble with it. I leave it on day in and day out as my main desktop machine & internet gateway.
So yes, I am in fact stupid enough to buy a fucking Mac.
OS X doesn't work so well on such an old machine (although Linux works great). For my OS X work I bought an iBook a few months ago.
There needs to be a greater emphasis placed on reliability. Mozilla has lots of features already.
The parent post was not by any means a troll.
She can't stand Mozilla. She understands very well why she should avoid IE. But she only uses Mozilla when she absolutely has to, for example to check for interoperability after completing a web page that she wrote while using mostly using IE.
Why? Because she experiences so many bugs with it. The bugs make Mozilla unusable to her. She's not a software developer. She's a regular user of the sort that applications like this are targeting.
She understands very well that her machine can get hacked if she uses IE. But crashes and usability problems happen to her several times a day when she uses Mozilla. The risk of getting hacked seems somewhat theoretical and remote. The crashes and loss of data (for example, forum postings being composed in web forms) are frequent and completely intolerable.
Today I sent her a link to that BBC article that said you shouldn't use IE because of the security holes that are used by spyware and adware. I had observed her using IE a lot lately and wanted her to really understand why she should avoid it. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate how she would react.
She was completely distraught. I looked over at her sitting at her computer this evening and she had tears running down her face, quietly crying. The reason was that she didn't know how she was going to be able to browse the web anymore, because I had just told her in quite a loud way (using the BBC article) why she shouldn't use IE, but she also finds Mozilla completely useless.
I had put her in a bind. She didn't see a way out.
The way I consoled her and resolved the bind was to tell her to go ahead and use IE. She doesn't have much data on her drive that would be a problem if someone stole it, and if she gets hacked I'll reformat the drive and reinstall Win2k.
Meanwhile I told her I would download the new mozilla and test it for her. I was pleasantly surprised to find 1.2 released tonight - I hadn't wanted to give her a beta. So I got it downloaded before the rush.
My fear, though, is that her bugs are not fixed. There are just a few bugs that give her repeated trouble. Tonight she had a repeated crash, one time when she had sixteen windows open while researching medical journal literature, and she had hard time finding her pages again.
Talkback kept popping up and made her really upset because it made it so she couldn't just relaunch Mozilla. I knew that the talkback logs would help the developers get the bugs fixed, but if my wife was to use Mozilla at all I had to show her how to disable talkback.
I'd like to make the polite suggestion that the Mozilla developers focus somewhat less on flashy features and somewhat more strongly on stability and basic usability.
I've got lots of bugs in both reliability and usability on the Linux mozilla I use on my Mac, but I have a greater tolerance for it because I'm a developer, and I'm committed to making open source work. My wife, on the other hand, uses Mozilla because I plead with her to do so. It would be nice if Mozilla didn't make her life miserable.
I convinced her recently to make a serious try at switching from windows to Linux. That's a big step - I've been trying to do that for several years. She hasn't tried it yet because I'm going to have to spend some time configuring a system with the right setup to be able to accomplish all the tasks she wants while also being very usable and reliable. I'm going to really spend some time trying to make her transition as comfortable as possible.
While she was upset tonight she told me that the reason she said she would try Linux was to make me shut up about IE vs. Mozilla, and it hadn't worked - I kept pushing her to use open source tools, and they are unusable for her.
Bonita did file one actual bug report with bugzilla. That's the last she'll ever do, because she found the whole process extremely confusing. I think the big problem is that if you try to file a bug, and don't have a bugzilla account, after your account is created, you're presented with the expert interface and not the simplified one.
I think it would be helpful if there was a dead-simple bug report form that just had a couple lists for the platform and version, and one free-form text input field where the reporter could describe their problem. Then the person who fields the bug reports could translate this into a proper bugzilla report. Don't present people who aren't developers with the bugzilla query page - like Bonita, that will be the last report you ever get from a regular user.
It would also be very helpful if the very first page of the talkback wizard presented the option of disabling it and making it just go away. Having to click through several pages before being allowed to quit talkback is really frightening for someone who just lost all their windows and just wants to launch it again so they can find the pages that just disappeared from their screen.
Read more of what I have to say about the importance of quality in Free Software.
Last I heard, Red Hat only ran on x86. Or actually I remember they had an S/390 distro too.
On other x86 distributions, you at least have the hope of using alien to switch the package format. But I use Debian on a PowerPC Macintosh.
I'm pretty sure Macromedia wrote software for the Macintosh before they even had any products for Windows. Flash right now is supported on the Macintosh, so the software is supported on PowerPC architecture.
How about getting us a Flash for Debian PowerPC Linux?
The "Red Hat" only mentality is why I think there isn't much hope of companies succeeding in shipping proprietary products for Linux. People on other distros or architectures get particularly irritated that they can't do whatever the product provides and write an open source replacement, where they wouldn't have bothered if the commercial app supported all the platforms.
If a bunch of volunteers working for no pay can support, what is it? 8000 packages on eleven architectures, why can't a commercial vendor support all the major Linux distros and architectures?
I bought "Inside Windows 2000" a year and a half ago, and it's a good introduction for someone completely unfamiliar with the system, but is sorely lacking for critical details. It also is very politically-correct, in terms of advocating the Microsoft way.
The icing on the cake was the shrink-wrap EULA on the enclosed CD. After having spent a lot of time working with Linux, I found it positively insulting.
Why?
Big computer books are often filled with fluff, such as large illustrations, fancy typography or sidebars that don't add much meat.
What is really worse is that it takes a lot more work for a writer to explain a complex point concisely. I imagine it also takes more works for the editors to cut down on material that doesn't really add value to the book. My experience is that the big computer books are often poorly written.
Also, I don't have enough time to read all the technical books. It simply takes less time to read a compact, well-written book than a big, verbose tome. There's also the problem of fitting a bunch of big computer books on my limited bookshelf space.
I have observed that there seem to be an awful lot of big books for windows & web programming, and Java programming. The situation seems quite a bit better for C++ programming, with such slim books as Scott Meyers' "Effective C++".
There are long books which are worthwhile, but the ones that are both big and good are covering a topic that is very broad and detailed, for example Foley, Van Dam, Feiner and Hughes' "Computer Graphics".
My wife wanted to learn to use cascading stylesheets for her web design. The bookstore had two books, a small one by O'Reilly and a much larger one that seemed to cover the same material but had lots of fancy typography and illustrations and verbose text. In the end she chose the O'Reilly book, and after using it to design a website for some friends of ours she said she was very glad to have gotten the O'Reilly book.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that before you purchase a new technical book, check to see if there is a review of it at the Association of C and C++ Users book reviews section.
On the one hand, I think I would do a lot of good to the community if I copylefted my article. A lot of people might read it who otherwise would never come across it. On the other hand, allowing the only copy to be on my website generates a lot of valuable traffic that helps to advertise my consulting business. But on still another hand, maybe having the copylefted version in the wild would do even more to publicize my business.
John Levon suggested that that particular article is probably best where it is. I'm thinking now that he's probably right.
But I have other articles that I am thinking of copylefting. I have started writing a column on cross-platform software development. My thought now is that I will copyleft my articles, say, six months after they are published. The one article I have posted so far is older than that, so if I decide to do this I will copyleft it right away.
That way there will be traffic to my cross-platform site from people looking for new articles, but ultimately they will have the most positive effect if they are picked up by linux distros, for example.
I'm still undecided about it, I probably won't make a decision right away. Yes, I want to help people. But I'm sorry to say that it's been challenging to be a self-employed software consultant since the dot-com crash. My articles take a lot of work to write, and I don't get paid for writing them, in fact I take a lot of time off to write that I could spend doing billable work for my clients. They are an effective advertising medium. The decision of whether to copyleft them is going to have to be based in large part on what I think would be best for my business.
Unfortunately, the dot-com crash ensued just as I was getting started, and things have been a little too hectic since then for me to do much about it.
A number of people suggested I use bugzilla, and I thought a lot about it, but didn't want to use it, at least not in its current form, because it lacks a feature that I feel is critical for a bug database that is to be used to track operating system development: storage of preset machine configurations.
Perhaps the people with the new kernel bugzilla can put this in.
What I envisisioned was a way for the user to specify the hardware configuration of their machines by drawing on a database of all known hardware. (Just making that database would be a big job in itself). The user could give a name to each configuration.
Then when reporting a bug, the user would be presented with a popup menu or scrolling list of their configuration presets. There would be a way to make variations for a particular bug report, to indicate that a board had been added or removed from the stored preset.
Then the user would upload their kernel .config file.
This would allow the kernel developers to search for combinations of hardware that is or isn't installed along with kernel config options that are selected or not set.
This would help a lot to identify situations where FooBar Corp's ethernet board doesn't work when you've got a WhizzyVideo card installed.
I would also encourage people to report the configurations for successful kernel tests. That would help to build confidence as well as to identify untested areas so more attention could be paid to them.
Unfortunately, I'm just a guy working alone and although some have offerred to help, I have been working too hard just to survive to even coordinate the development of such a database.
However, I have found some time to write some articles on various aspects of Linux and web software quality and post them at the site. Writing is what I like to do to relax when I'm not programming - I write articles like these whenever I can, despite despite what the anklebiters have to say about them.
The OSDL was kind enough to mirror my two kernel testing articles and even translate them into Japanese. You can mirror or translate them if you like, as they are under the GNU Free Documentation License. I would be particularly pleased if any of my articles were translated into more languages.
The two kernel testing articles are:
-
Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
(
Japanese translation)
- Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
(
Japanese translation)
I should point out that I asked a couple of the larger commercial Linux vendors to contribute to the Linux Quality Database, which would have enabled me to feed myself while developing it, but I got turned down. I find that hard to understand, as it would have benefited them tremendously. I don't want to say who it was that turned me down, as I don't think negative publicity would be productive.But I found the OSDL's interest in my articles quite encouraging.
A lot of people are griping about not being able to file bugs anonymously with bugzilla. I had always intended to allow anonymous bug reports, although I would encourage users to log in so we could follow up with them.
Also some people are saying in other comments that bug reports that aren't emailed to the linux-kernel mailing lists won't be as good as the traditional ones. But I'd like to point out that linux-kernel is one of the highest traffic mailing lists around, and the discussions are extremely technical and often heated. Patches also fall on the floor all the time, as I found when someone posted a patch that fixed the problem I reported when I first subscribed.
I felt then and still feel that linux-kernel is too intimidating for the average linux user, so most will choose not to partipate in kernel QA. A bug database with a nice web interface where the reporter doesn't have to participate in the mailing list traffic can only encourage more people to post bugs. And a bug database would make it possible to log successes without overwhelming the list.
It would also be possible to publish an XML interface to the database, so people could log reports programmatically. That would help for identifying configuration information, for example you could run a program that would do what lspci does and upload it to your account at the bugbase.
I think everyone here is being pretty unfair to Hurd and RMS's efforts. Hurd can easily do all kinds of stuff you'll never get Linux to be able to do, like allow unpriviliged users to mount filesystems in their home directories without causing problems for security, allowing ordinary users to hack the kernel without breaking security and so on.
All of this has been a major advancement in computer science, and they simply haven't needed things like large partitions that of course would be needed for widespread acceptance. I simply don't see it as a big deal that they've taken so long to add the features needed for an end-user, because they had to take a long time to write the architectural underpinnings that are miles beyond Linux.
I haven't tried, but I would be surprised if VTune ran on an AMD processor.
For the very fastest code, you can take advantage of special instruction, write stuff in assembly with the clever use of registers, etc. But the performance gains won't be portable.
Optimizing cache use could be considered a non-portable optimization, but it can be done directly in C or C++, and any processor most people are likely to use will use a cache. There will just be some variations in its size, the size of a cache line and stuff like that.