I've worked on and with a logging framework that takes advantage of compile-time optimizations such that messages below the specified log level are stripped from the executing code and messages that meet or exceed the log level are treated as non-conditional statements. This mitigates the performance impact of having to evaluate each logging line at run time, but allows for flexibility to tweak the actually level of logging by simply restarting the service. (This is a mod_perl service.) There is the disadvantage of not being able to dynamically adjust the logging level of a currently running process, but you would rarely want to do this in a production environment, anyway.
... http://thedailywtf.com/ then decide. Look at the number of things that can happen when large corporations employ vast numbers of marginally competent programmers to work in an overly complex framework. I admin that I am biased, mostly because I am a Perl programmer; pretty much have been for over a decade. I spent six months doing Java and hated it. The company I worked for switched from Perl to Java and IT seemed to fall on its face in the process. I was working with mostly the same people that had been Perl devs, but the Java environment was awful. I nearly ran when I was given an offer to go back to Perl.
I'm sure that.Net and Java are not the same. I have never subjected myself to it. Ultimately, I think enjoying what you do is extremely important, unless you feel that you are getting so obscenely overpaid to do something that you hate that you can justify to yourself doing it.
IIRC, sysV has all these/etc/rc.?/ directories (corresponding to run levels) with a whole lot of S??foo and K??bar symlinks going back to/etc/rc.d/foo and/etc/rc.d/bar. I remember thinking, hey that's kind of a neat way to do things. That was when I was learning UNIX (Digital/Compaq Tru*64).
When I picked up Linux (RedHat 6.0), I felt like I knew what I was looking at because it was similar. After that, I stalled with the RedHat upgrade cycle at 7.3 because it worked and worked well.
Finally I had to upgrade my workstattion because chasing RPM dependencies got to be too much fun. (Yes, I know about apt, but then you have to hope that apt has what you want; if not, then the chase is on.) That's when I went looking for a new distro. Gentoo actually turned out to be my choice because it had "this thing called portage" which seemed very similar this other thing one of my former co-workers had been raving about with some BSD (free, I think; never tried any flavor of BSD) call "ports". Anyway, Gentoo sounded interesting and I gave it a try. After getting it installed and booted and configured, I started to try to figure out how it worked.
First major difference was startup scripts./etc/rc.d didn't exist. Neither did the/etc/rc.?/ directories. I was befudled. Then I figured out everything was in/etc/init.d. The concept of run-levels (I can tell why they are usefull; if you don't know, you've never done any real server work) was reduced to "boot" and "default". Everything that was needed for the essential running of the system was put into the "boot" runlevel. Everything else was in the "default" runlevel. Then, I started looking at the scripts in/etc/init.d. They aren't the regular #!/bin/sh scripts I expected. They were essentially "set some variables, define the functions start(), stop(), restart()." Among other things, they can define what they REQUIRE and PROVIDE and what they must start BEFORE and AFTER.
Now from this thread, I think this is very BSD-like. I know it isn't the sysV style I grew up with. I think it's better because it is too easy to not add a link in a runlevel directory to start/stop a daemon when you need to. That is, if you put a S99foo in/etc/rc.3, but boot to runlevel 5, did you start foo? And if you have K00foo in/etc/rc.3 and go from runlevel 5 to runlevel 3, do you start or stop foo? I don't know.
Now as to the questions of why use runlevel: if you have a *Real* server (big cabinet-style as seen in machine rooms at universities), you will find yourself at times needing to be at single-user mode for doing hardware checks/system maintenance. Other times, you need to allow more than one person on the machine, but don't want to have full services up: multi-user mode; let multiple parties perform their maintenance steps in parellel, but don't open the system up to everyone. Then, you can bring the system up to a level that allows a small set of users to log in and test prior to bringing the system up to full-service level. Sure, you can manually stop/start daemons as you move from one level to the next, but wouldn't it be neat if all you had to do was tell the machine "bring up the net work services" and it "knew" what to start? Oh, that's what a runlevel is for!
I just downloaded and installed the free player to night to try to watch those SuperBowl commercials. I knew that I had a search ahead of me to even find the free player, then when installing it, I got a screen with the choice:
[ ] Install Premium Player with blah blah
commercial FREE radio
[ ] Install Basic Player
Now, if that isn't an underhanded trick, then I don't know what is.
This has been looked at before (as stated in the article) but only on a much smaller scale. The difference with this project is that they intend to cover a larger area and to watch it for a longer period of time. However, a couple of months will not be long enough to truly judge what sort of side-effects this method may generate.
There is the question of whether the phytoplankton will fall to the ocean bottom and actually remove the CO2 from the system, but this is really less of an issue, I think, because there are many "outs" that the carbon can take to actually fall to the ocean floor. At every step in the food chain things die and float to the bottom or are consumed and excreted and float to the bottom. the general theory is that X% of the biomass will always fall to the ocean floor. If you increase the biomass by a factor of Y, you should see a y-fold increase in flocculation of carbon.
Other questions to consider are what will the effect of an iron enrichment be to other life forms in the same waters? Will the FeSO4 level be toxic to zooplankton or to certain species of fish? Without careful consideration, this process could have devastating effects.
Fortunately, they are practicing good science in that they are testing their theories on (relatively) small scales before beginning a full regimen of iron enrichment to combat a growing problem. This will not solve our problems by any means. It is merely to stem the tide so that better environmental practices can be realized.
After switching to Linux six years ago and spending a lot of time trying to navigate Gnome's menus to find what I was looking, a friend told me about WindowMaker. I edit the menus to weed out the cruft, include things that take a lot of keystrokes to launch, and open terminals to do my other work. If I need something that I didn't put in a menu, I have a command prompt to launch it. No muss, no fuss. This, of course requiresarealOS.
For those of you using Mozilla/Firebird, turn off the pop-up blocker and you'll see what jodi.org is about. One of the more interesting ones I was pointed to about four years ago is snarg.net. It's changed since then, but there is still a trippy flash navigation/music interface. It really takes some exploration to figure it out. And if you can't find what I'm talking about, find the # and click on it. The site used to open up a bunch of browser windows and look like it was maliciously destroying your computer (animations which showed windows dialogs about deleting the filesystem and such). Quite a trip!
As for what this post is all about, judging from jodi.org, it's asking for sites that use browser features to "perform" performance art on your desktop to make browsing an entertaining experience.
Unfortunately, this troll does NOT work as well from a liberal point of view. Conservatives are more apt than liberals to use these sweeping and exagerated arguments with little or no basis. Conservatives espouse their religious beliefs and rights to their audience more readily and ferociously than do liberals. Probably the greatest reason this troll does not convert to a conservative myth is that liberals are far more conserned with controlling the spread and use of firearms within our own (US) borders while conservatives fervently defend their right to own and bear arms.
To my first point, I refer you only to the radio airwaves. Rush Limbaugh is just one of many conservative voices that will enlighten and inform listeners as to the ways in which the liberal leadership of this country has fouled up the whole works by ripping the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the government. I cannot think of a single liberal media mogul that uses these tactics. Liberal media voices tend to be more satirical and sarcastic, prefering to trivialize the other side as oppose to demonize them. Al Franken is a prime example of this modality.
As for the "God-fearing" tone of this troll, a liberal will tell you that "religion and politics don't mix." Out of the past five presidents, we have only one example (that I can recall) of the president's religion having a very strong voice in guiding public policy. That president is the current Bush. His religious views on abstinence, life, and general moral righteousness has had more impact on our laws than Clinton's lack of morality in committing adultery. He has enacted "abstinence only" sexual education programs, banned a type of abortion procedure, and waged war on the "evil doers" of the world whom happen to be largely muslim.
Finally, the issue surrounding the supposed purpose of this balloon: to observe and track the movement, use, and ownership of firearms. The right to own and bear arms is spelled out in the Bill of Rights and is considered by most conservatives to be a God-given right. Liberal legislation has placed limits on the purchase of firearms both in terms of who may own firearms and the types of firearms that can be privately owned. Staunch conservatives like to quote Charleton Heston's "cold dead hand" comments on gun control, whereas liberals feel the need to protect the citizenry from the dangers of guns by removing the threat.
Therefore, the main tenants of this troll are very conservative-based and anti-liberal. They cannot have "liberal" substituted with "conservative" and still be valid. The entire argument would need a re-write to include emotional arguments and tangible evidence to show that it is really a conservative plot to do X, where X is not track the use of firearms. At this point, the troll would fall apart due to a lack of real evidence that the moon is really a man-made satelite put in place to track liberal ideals.
None of this is to say that Liberals do not have their own conspiracy theories. This just is not one of them.
Test your landing equipment better. Or at least once.
According to a previous/. story, the airbags were a major risk for this project.
If anything goes wrong the engineers suspect it will be [the air bags]. They failed their first tests and had to be designed and built without a full testing regime.
Now scientists are claiming that this "recently discovered" crater is near the center of the landing elipse. Either someone did not do their homework or they made a BIG mistake.
Scientists also say that they have ruled out hardware problems. Does that include landing equipment? Parachute failure: Beagle2 would have been travelling to fast for the airbags to deploy in time/protect it from impact. Airbag failure: failure to deploy would leave the craft unprotected on impact; failure to detach could cripple the craft. Pathfinder had an issue where an airbag partially obstructed the deployment of the ramp for the Sojouner.
This may have been the cheapest mission of this sort, but it also may be as big a catastrophe as the Polar Lander. If we (people in general) are going to continue spending vast sums of money to send probes and rovers to the planets, comets, and far reaches of the solar system, I for one would like it if we actually got some tangible return on our investment. Galileo, and Voyager, and Pathfinder are/were examples of missions were of incredible worth. That is space exploration as it should be. Take the time. Test your systems individually and together. Ensure that all calculations are correct. Check and re-check everything. As Yoda would say "Do or do not. There is no try." So should it be with any bit of space exploration
I see people saying "Pentax" or "Nikon" a lot. I perfer Canon. Any of these will honestly work well as long as it is solid, has minimal electronics, and manual everything. If the camera is older than about 20 years (not sure exact age cut/off) make sure that the light meter battery has been updated to take modern batteries and not old Mercury-based batteries.
Once you get a camera body, it's time to talk lenses. You "have to have" a fixed-focus lens. That is the basis for any set-up. Make sure it is at least mid-range quality. You're just starting and I doubt you will keep using that lens for a lifetime.
If you still have money to work with, consider a short zoom/macro lens. There is a whole world waiting to be explored and photographed at very close distances. You can't get those shots without a macro lense.
From my own experience, I have a Canon FtB body which has no electronics save a light meter. Shutter speeds go between 1 sec. to 1/1000 sec. if I remeber correctly (don't have the camera with me) plus a "bulb" setting. It has a shutter release lock, a self timer, and a mirror lock. This last is especially useful at slow shutter speed so that the only moving part is the actual shutter.
Do some research to determine what you "have to have" in a camera body then go to ebay to find the one you want. You can probably find lenses the same way. Also look for local consignment stores/pawn shops/used camera shops.
Verticle mouse looks like it has the advantage of being smaller and a closer kin to a regular mouse, but (at least from your link) doesn't look like it offers a left-handed option. This would put it out of the running for me and at least three of my coworkers.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked on and with a logging framework that takes advantage of compile-time optimizations such that messages below the specified log level are stripped from the executing code and messages that meet or exceed the log level are treated as non-conditional statements. This mitigates the performance impact of having to evaluate each logging line at run time, but allows for flexibility to tweak the actually level of logging by simply restarting the service. (This is a mod_perl service.) There is the disadvantage of not being able to dynamically adjust the logging level of a currently running process, but you would rarely want to do this in a production environment, anyway.
... http://thedailywtf.com/ then decide. Look at the number of things that can happen when large corporations employ vast numbers of marginally competent programmers to work in an overly complex framework. I admin that I am biased, mostly because I am a Perl programmer; pretty much have been for over a decade. I spent six months doing Java and hated it. The company I worked for switched from Perl to Java and IT seemed to fall on its face in the process. I was working with mostly the same people that had been Perl devs, but the Java environment was awful. I nearly ran when I was given an offer to go back to Perl.
.Net and Java are not the same. I have never subjected myself to it. Ultimately, I think enjoying what you do is extremely important, unless you feel that you are getting so obscenely overpaid to do something that you hate that you can justify to yourself doing it.
I'm sure that
Congratulations and good luck.
IIRC, sysV has all these /etc/rc.?/ directories (corresponding to run levels) with a whole lot of S??foo and K??bar symlinks going back to /etc/rc.d/foo and /etc/rc.d/bar. I remember thinking, hey that's kind of a neat way to do things. That was when I was learning UNIX (Digital/Compaq Tru*64).
/etc/rc.d didn't exist. Neither did the /etc/rc.?/ directories. I was befudled. Then I figured out everything was in /etc/init.d. The concept of run-levels (I can tell why they are usefull; if you don't know, you've never done any real server work) was reduced to "boot" and "default". Everything that was needed for the essential running of the system was put into the "boot" runlevel. Everything else was in the "default" runlevel. Then, I started looking at the scripts in /etc/init.d. They aren't the regular #!/bin/sh scripts I expected. They were essentially "set some variables, define the functions start(), stop(), restart()." Among other things, they can define what they REQUIRE and PROVIDE and what they must start BEFORE and AFTER.
/etc/rc.3, but boot to runlevel 5, did you start foo? And if you have K00foo in /etc/rc.3 and go from runlevel 5 to runlevel 3, do you start or stop foo? I don't know.
When I picked up Linux (RedHat 6.0), I felt like I knew what I was looking at because it was similar. After that, I stalled with the RedHat upgrade cycle at 7.3 because it worked and worked well.
Finally I had to upgrade my workstattion because chasing RPM dependencies got to be too much fun. (Yes, I know about apt, but then you have to hope that apt has what you want; if not, then the chase is on.) That's when I went looking for a new distro. Gentoo actually turned out to be my choice because it had "this thing called portage" which seemed very similar this other thing one of my former co-workers had been raving about with some BSD (free, I think; never tried any flavor of BSD) call "ports". Anyway, Gentoo sounded interesting and I gave it a try. After getting it installed and booted and configured, I started to try to figure out how it worked.
First major difference was startup scripts.
Now from this thread, I think this is very BSD-like. I know it isn't the sysV style I grew up with. I think it's better because it is too easy to not add a link in a runlevel directory to start/stop a daemon when you need to. That is, if you put a S99foo in
Now as to the questions of why use runlevel: if you have a *Real* server (big cabinet-style as seen in machine rooms at universities), you will find yourself at times needing to be at single-user mode for doing hardware checks/system maintenance. Other times, you need to allow more than one person on the machine, but don't want to have full services up: multi-user mode; let multiple parties perform their maintenance steps in parellel, but don't open the system up to everyone. Then, you can bring the system up to a level that allows a small set of users to log in and test prior to bringing the system up to full-service level. Sure, you can manually stop/start daemons as you move from one level to the next, but wouldn't it be neat if all you had to do was tell the machine "bring up the net work services" and it "knew" what to start? Oh, that's what a runlevel is for!
I just downloaded and installed the free player to night to try to watch those SuperBowl commercials. I knew that I had a search ahead of me to even find the free player, then when installing it, I got a screen with the choice:
[ ] Install Premium Player with blah blah
commercial FREE radio
[ ] Install Basic Player
Now, if that isn't an underhanded trick, then I don't know what is.
This has been looked at before (as stated in the article) but only on a much smaller scale. The difference with this project is that they intend to cover a larger area and to watch it for a longer period of time. However, a couple of months will not be long enough to truly judge what sort of side-effects this method may generate.
There is the question of whether the phytoplankton will fall to the ocean bottom and actually remove the CO2 from the system, but this is really less of an issue, I think, because there are many "outs" that the carbon can take to actually fall to the ocean floor. At every step in the food chain things die and float to the bottom or are consumed and excreted and float to the bottom. the general theory is that X% of the biomass will always fall to the ocean floor. If you increase the biomass by a factor of Y, you should see a y-fold increase in flocculation of carbon.
Other questions to consider are what will the effect of an iron enrichment be to other life forms in the same waters? Will the FeSO4 level be toxic to zooplankton or to certain species of fish? Without careful consideration, this process could have devastating effects.
Fortunately, they are practicing good science in that they are testing their theories on (relatively) small scales before beginning a full regimen of iron enrichment to combat a growing problem. This will not solve our problems by any means. It is merely to stem the tide so that better environmental practices can be realized.
After switching to Linux six years ago and spending a lot of time trying to navigate Gnome's menus to find what I was looking, a friend told me about WindowMaker. I edit the menus to weed out the cruft, include things that take a lot of keystrokes to launch, and open terminals to do my other work. If I need something that I didn't put in a menu, I have a command prompt to launch it. No muss, no fuss. This, of course requires a real OS.
For those of you using Mozilla/Firebird, turn off the pop-up blocker and you'll see what jodi.org is about. One of the more interesting ones I was pointed to about four years ago is snarg.net. It's changed since then, but there is still a trippy flash navigation/music interface. It really takes some exploration to figure it out. And if you can't find what I'm talking about, find the # and click on it. The site used to open up a bunch of browser windows and look like it was maliciously destroying your computer (animations which showed windows dialogs about deleting the filesystem and such). Quite a trip!
As for what this post is all about, judging from jodi.org, it's asking for sites that use browser features to "perform" performance art on your desktop to make browsing an entertaining experience.
Unfortunately, this troll does NOT work as well from a liberal point of view. Conservatives are more apt than liberals to use these sweeping and exagerated arguments with little or no basis. Conservatives espouse their religious beliefs and rights to their audience more readily and ferociously than do liberals. Probably the greatest reason this troll does not convert to a conservative myth is that liberals are far more conserned with controlling the spread and use of firearms within our own (US) borders while conservatives fervently defend their right to own and bear arms.
To my first point, I refer you only to the radio airwaves. Rush Limbaugh is just one of many conservative voices that will enlighten and inform listeners as to the ways in which the liberal leadership of this country has fouled up the whole works by ripping the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the government. I cannot think of a single liberal media mogul that uses these tactics. Liberal media voices tend to be more satirical and sarcastic, prefering to trivialize the other side as oppose to demonize them. Al Franken is a prime example of this modality.
As for the "God-fearing" tone of this troll, a liberal will tell you that "religion and politics don't mix." Out of the past five presidents, we have only one example (that I can recall) of the president's religion having a very strong voice in guiding public policy. That president is the current Bush. His religious views on abstinence, life, and general moral righteousness has had more impact on our laws than Clinton's lack of morality in committing adultery. He has enacted "abstinence only" sexual education programs, banned a type of abortion procedure, and waged war on the "evil doers" of the world whom happen to be largely muslim.
Finally, the issue surrounding the supposed purpose of this balloon: to observe and track the movement, use, and ownership of firearms. The right to own and bear arms is spelled out in the Bill of Rights and is considered by most conservatives to be a God-given right. Liberal legislation has placed limits on the purchase of firearms both in terms of who may own firearms and the types of firearms that can be privately owned. Staunch conservatives like to quote Charleton Heston's "cold dead hand" comments on gun control, whereas liberals feel the need to protect the citizenry from the dangers of guns by removing the threat.
Therefore, the main tenants of this troll are very conservative-based and anti-liberal. They cannot have "liberal" substituted with "conservative" and still be valid. The entire argument would need a re-write to include emotional arguments and tangible evidence to show that it is really a conservative plot to do X, where X is not track the use of firearms. At this point, the troll would fall apart due to a lack of real evidence that the moon is really a man-made satelite put in place to track liberal ideals.
None of this is to say that Liberals do not have their own conspiracy theories. This just is not one of them.
Test your landing equipment better. Or at least once.
According to a previous /. story, the airbags were a major risk for this project.
Now scientists are claiming that this "recently discovered" crater is near the center of the landing elipse. Either someone did not do their homework or they made a BIG mistake.
Scientists also say that they have ruled out hardware problems. Does that include landing equipment? Parachute failure: Beagle2 would have been travelling to fast for the airbags to deploy in time/protect it from impact. Airbag failure: failure to deploy would leave the craft unprotected on impact; failure to detach could cripple the craft. Pathfinder had an issue where an airbag partially obstructed the deployment of the ramp for the Sojouner.
This may have been the cheapest mission of this sort, but it also may be as big a catastrophe as the Polar Lander. If we (people in general) are going to continue spending vast sums of money to send probes and rovers to the planets, comets, and far reaches of the solar system, I for one would like it if we actually got some tangible return on our investment. Galileo, and Voyager, and Pathfinder are/were examples of missions were of incredible worth. That is space exploration as it should be. Take the time. Test your systems individually and together. Ensure that all calculations are correct. Check and re-check everything. As Yoda would say "Do or do not. There is no try." So should it be with any bit of space exploration
I see people saying "Pentax" or "Nikon" a lot. I perfer Canon. Any of these will honestly work well as long as it is solid, has minimal electronics, and manual everything. If the camera is older than about 20 years (not sure exact age cut/off) make sure that the light meter battery has been updated to take modern batteries and not old Mercury-based batteries.
Once you get a camera body, it's time to talk lenses. You "have to have" a fixed-focus lens. That is the basis for any set-up. Make sure it is at least mid-range quality. You're just starting and I doubt you will keep using that lens for a lifetime.
If you still have money to work with, consider a short zoom/macro lens. There is a whole world waiting to be explored and photographed at very close distances. You can't get those shots without a macro lense.
From my own experience, I have a Canon FtB body which has no electronics save a light meter. Shutter speeds go between 1 sec. to 1/1000 sec. if I remeber correctly (don't have the camera with me) plus a "bulb" setting. It has a shutter release lock, a self timer, and a mirror lock. This last is especially useful at slow shutter speed so that the only moving part is the actual shutter.
Do some research to determine what you "have to have" in a camera body then go to ebay to find the one you want. You can probably find lenses the same way. Also look for local consignment stores/pawn shops/used camera shops.
Happy photographing.
It's times like this that make me wish I were still in Alaska....
Just tried, but I'm getting messages like: configure.ac:18: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PATH_SDL configure.ac:79: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_OPTIONS_WXCONFIG configure.ac:80: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PATH_WXCONFIG WTF?
Verticle mouse looks like it has the advantage of being smaller and a closer kin to a regular mouse, but (at least from your link) doesn't look like it offers a left-handed option. This would put it out of the running for me and at least three of my coworkers.