How might one find a copy of Lotus Agenda? I'm making a study of productivity software in order to write and open source one and I'd love to track down this one.
However, I have gotten away from using either of these, as they take too much screen real estate. Mozilla Firefox has a compact search box built in with Google, and which you can download any other search engine module for (Dictionary.com, Amazon, All Music Guide, even Slashdot)
Finally, you can get this search functionality in ANY browser by putting a neat little javascript popup box bookmark on your personal toolbar bookmark area. I learned this trick from WordReference.com, which provides quicklinks for their Spanish translation dictionary, like so:
WordReference.com
search link:
javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){void (Qr=prompt('Translate to Spanish:',''))};if(Qr)location.href='http://wordre ference.com/es/Translation.asp?tranword='+escape(Q r)
Just copy and paste that text all on one line into a bookmark and whala, you have a little popup box search that, with a little sophistication, can be tweaked to work for whatever site you want.
I did this for Amazon.com by going to their site, View HTML Source, search for "form", copy the link in that form tag, paste it over the WordReference.com link in my bookmark, search for "input" in the source, find the name of the input for the search term, and add this to the end of the boomark's URL "?searchterm=".
Hope that makes sense! Unfortunately I can't demonstrate it directly because slashdot forbids javascript links (with good reason).
This is primarily the reason so many college radio stations play true "alternative", oldies, classical, or generally unheard of bands. The royalties are cheaper.
I don't think you could be more incorrect. They play that music because it is generally better music. At my former college radio station we had a group review process during which we considered every single CD sent to us (including those with roylaties) for potential airplay based on merit of the music. A few major label discs made it through--a very few. We didn't "cool-pile" the rest because we didn't want to take air time away from truly interesting music and give it to truly banal music.
virtually all music other than your local garage bands are covered by ASCAP
You've got it somewhat backwards. Virtually all music is not covered by ASCAP. That is because mainstream music that is produced by the major label members of ASCAP represents a sliver of the total amount of music produced in America, and a shred of a sliver of the total amount of music produced worldwide.
Of course there is no way to quantify this number, but among those in the music department of my college radio station, we figure mainstream music makes up less than 1% of all music, and probably much less. This is judging from the hundreds of CDs we receive each month, a single handful of which might be ASCAP covered. Most of the popular music you will see topping the CMJ charts isn't ASCAP either.
Here in Fresno, CA (a city the size of Portland), there are exactly 0 electronica/techno stations, 0 jazz stations, 0 classical stations (save for the scant moments when NPR isn't Bush bashing or begging for funding), 0 stations for progressive rock (old or new), 0 metal stations, 0 other random experimental/avant-garde stations, 0 international/world/"ethnic" stations (except for music from the exotic paradise of Mexico), 0 blues statiopns, and 0 true urban/rap stations (just some canned MTV processed hip-hop).
I beg to differ. From KFSR Fresno's homepage, we see they play indie rock, hip hop, rpm, country, world, and a whole lotta jazz. When are people going to realize the diversified radio they were looking for was there all along in the college radio band of their local FM dial?
Those referents may theoretically exist, but that does not mean they are known outside of a certain culture. One language may refer to concepts that are foreign and unknown to another culture. Furthermore the language may reflect a more pervasive cultural differences in the way they think, like the chasm described in The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently.
THAI ELEPHANT ORCHESTRA s/t (Mulatta Records) cd 15.98
First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!
The Thai Elephant Orchestra was dreamed up, and this disc produced, by David Soldier (New York musician and academic) and Richard Lair (American expatriate elephant expert, who advises the Thai Elephant Conservation Center where this project goes on). The two came up with the idea that elephants, being social animals, might enjoy playing music together, and proceeded to investigate... Happily, not only did the elephants enjoy playing, they were good at it, demonstrating that they were able to decide what sounded good (to them) and what didn't.
The booklet features photos and detailed, fascinating liner notes by both men. Here is what Soldier says the criteria was for the construction of the instruments, which were made by New York instrument builder Ken Butler (of "Gravikords, Whirligigs..." fame):
"1. The instruments must be suitable to the elephant's anatomy, which means large instruments operated by the trunk.
"2. The instruments must withstand jungle heat, humidity -- and the elephants.
"3. The instruments should require minimum upkeep.
"4. The instruments should have a Thai sound, because the regular daily audience is Thai, the mahouts would enjoy the music more, and the elephants have heard Thai music all their lives."
Some more great tid-bits from the notes: "The elephants took easily to the harmonica, which sparked the first elephant music fad: one morning I arrived to hear the sound of harmonicas from all over -- from the hills and from the river. The elephants were walking in from the forest playing harmonicas, which they hold easily in the tip of their trunks."
"The elephants didn't seem interested in the bells or theremin. At first they were spooked by the synthesizer keyboard, but later two animals were entranced by it. They disliked playing Ken's reed instruments with a large mouthpiece, or rather, trunkpiece. A mahout told me they were afraid that a snake might jump into their nostrils!"
As sort of bonus tracks, in addition to the forty-plus minutes of elephant improv, there's also some non-instrumental elephant field recordings, several tracks of humans and elephants playing together, and even a few traditional Thai songs played by humans, abou
Modern compilers are smart enough to perform many of these optimizations, and sometimes obsfucating your code can even interfere with their ability to recognize optimizable situations.
Those are for pops that launch as a result of links that you click. Popups that launch automatically when you visit a site will be blocked, even if they are a "ligitimate" part of the website's design (and not an ad). An example of this is my banking site uses such an automatic popup to broadcast notices. There are other sites that use this for purposes other than ads of course--you just don't know it because you never see them.
jodi.org works fine in Mozilla, you just have popup windows completely banned. This is why I don't recommend banning all pop-up windows indiscriminantly -- many non-advertising sites still use them as a part of their basic design.
Oh come, come now. *Every* potential commercial interest has to be insidious? If you want to be a jerk, you could expect every title mentioned in this thread is secretly self-promotion.
Close To the Machine! by ellen ullman, programmer
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is an awesome, quick read about life as a senior programming consultant in san francisco, from a very old school programmer. It's full of nerdly glee, and written in an engaging narrative style. FYI, I also have an amazon listmania called Dork Tales, but Close To The Machine is my favorite.
I'll let the text speak for itself:
Knowing an IBM mainframe -- knowing it as
you would a person, with all its good
qualities and deficiencies, knowledge gained
in years of slow anxious probing -- is no
use at all when you sit down for the first
time in front of a UNIX machine. It is
sobering to be a senior programmer and not
know how to log on.
There is only one way to deal with this
humiliation: bow your head, let go of the
idea that you know anything, and ask
politely of this new machine, "How do you
wish to be operated?" If you accept your
ignorance, if you really admit to yourself
that everything you know is now useless, the
new machine will be good to you and tell
you: here is how to operate me.
Once it tells you, your single days are
over. You are involved again. Now you can
be arrogant again. Now you *must* be
arrogant: you must believe you can come to
know this new place as well as the old --
no, better. You must dedicate yourself to
that deep slow probing, that patience and
frustration, the anxious intimacy of a new
technical relationship. You must give
yourself over wholly to this: you must
believe this is your last lover.
I have known programmers who managed to stay
with one or two operating systems their
entire careers--solid married folks, if you
will. But, sorry to say, our world has very
little use for them. Learn it, do it, learn
another: that's the best way. Don't get
comfortable, don't get too attached, don't
get married. Fidelity in technology is not
even desirable. Loyalty to one system is
career-death.
Is it any wonder that programmers make such
good social libertarians?
Slashdot Mirror
How might one find a copy of Lotus Agenda? I'm making a study of productivity software in order to write and open source one and I'd love to track down this one.
Just copy and paste that text all on one line into a bookmark and whala, you have a little popup box search that, with a little sophistication, can be tweaked to work for whatever site you want.
I did this for Amazon.com by going to their site, View HTML Source, search for "form", copy the link in that form tag, paste it over the WordReference.com link in my bookmark, search for "input" in the source, find the name of the input for the search term, and add this to the end of the boomark's URL "?searchterm=". Hope that makes sense! Unfortunately I can't demonstrate it directly because slashdot forbids javascript links (with good reason).
Of course there is no way to quantify this number, but among those in the music department of my college radio station, we figure mainstream music makes up less than 1% of all music, and probably much less. This is judging from the hundreds of CDs we receive each month, a single handful of which might be ASCAP covered. Most of the popular music you will see topping the CMJ charts isn't ASCAP either.
Those referents may theoretically exist, but that does not mean they are known outside of a certain culture. One language may refer to concepts that are foreign and unknown to another culture. Furthermore the language may reflect a more pervasive cultural differences in the way they think, like the chasm described in The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently.
review from aquariusrecords.org:
Modern compilers are smart enough to perform many of these optimizations, and sometimes obsfucating your code can even interfere with their ability to recognize optimizable situations.
Those are for pops that launch as a result of links that you click. Popups that launch automatically when you visit a site will be blocked, even if they are a "ligitimate" part of the website's design (and not an ad). An example of this is my banking site uses such an automatic popup to broadcast notices. There are other sites that use this for purposes other than ads of course--you just don't know it because you never see them.
jodi.org works fine in Mozilla, you just have popup windows completely banned. This is why I don't recommend banning all pop-up windows indiscriminantly -- many non-advertising sites still use them as a part of their basic design.
Oh come, come now. *Every* potential commercial interest has to be insidious? If you want to be a jerk, you could expect every title mentioned in this thread is secretly self-promotion.
I'll let the text speak for itself: