I've used Scoop, Drupal, and built a couple of custom lite-CMS solutions. My only experience with Wikis is installing MediaWiki. To me the biggest downside was support for inserting straight HTML.
While you can insert HTML into a Wiki entry, it isn't recommended. They want you to use the Wiki tagging language. This makes sense because the Wiki tagging is used to convey useful meta-information and separate content from presentation, but at the same time, losing the ability to use all of the functionality of HTML when entering content seems like a big trade-off.
Some of the MediaWiki developers explained that while it is easy to convert Wiki tags to HTML, it's much more difficult to convert HTML to Wiki.
I don't know that any current CMS can adequately accomplish the goals of separating content and meta-information about that content from its presentation. Storing a bunch of HTML in a database field is going to reduce the possibilities for multiple-use (e.g. non-HTML E-mail delivery, RSS and other feeds, etc.) At the same time, inserting content, including legacy content, that has already been formatted using HTML is going to be desirable by at least some users.
Drupal's ability to include not just HTML, but even PHP code within posted contents was a really powerful tool, but exacerbates this problem even more.
To me, a CMS powerful enough but easy enough to use by my company would be able to:
1- Provide a WYWYSIG editor for those who just want to add new content.
2- Allow users to cut and paste highly formatted content from (gasp!) MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
3- Allow insertion of HTML-formatted content. Given that one goal of serious CMS is to avoid storing HTML as is, this would then have to be parsed and split between content and presentation, and be able to deal with a variety of HTML standards, as well as non-standard HTML.
To me it seems like XML may provide the best hope for being able to accomplish all these goals, or they may be mutually exclusive.
If there's something out there that already does these things, pray tell...
I wouldn't think my setup would be a problem, but my gaming box isn't as uber-l33t as I'd like to think it is.
2.8 Ghz, 1GB memory, Radeon 9800 Pro (that card may be horribly out of date by now.)
Did you have CD or Steam-based install?
I'm going to try Rylin's suggestions below about using the SDK to unpack the gcf files ahead of time, and see if that speeds things up. I'll post results;-)
> It's unpacking the textures etc. from the gcf > file(s) relevant to your game. > It then saves the extracted copies > in "\SteamApps\SteamUsername\half-life 2"
Do you know of any way to manually unpack these puppies ahead of time?
I ordered online through Steam last night and it took about 30 minutes to unlock. I had already pre-downloaded.
On a slightly unrelated note: what's with the mid-game/mid-level load times? Are they just slow for me, or does anyone else feel like they may as well be downloading the game textures from Steam as you play?
I assume you're talking about the sexual connotations of the "bases", and not the actual baseball gameplay mechanics.
From Wikipedia:
"Rounding the Bases"
Rounding the bases is a group of slang terms dealing with sexual activities, borrowing terms from baseball. There are often variant definitions, but most criteria are similar.
First base - Kissing, especially "French" kissing.
Second base - Fondling or groping, especially of the breasts or genitals.
Third base - Depending on the speaker, either full nudity or a non-intercourse orgasm (especially when resulting from oral sex)
Home run (or "Hitting it out of the park", etc.; sometimes "Fourth Base") - Sexual intercourse.
Grand Slam - Usually sexual intercourse with: 1) oral sex, 2) vaginal sex, 3) anal sex and finally ejaculation on the face or breasts (or "4 run bomb", etc.)
I'd never heard of the Grand Slam one, personally. Among my friends growing up, second base meant breastage (either over or under clothing), and third base was any non-penetration sex, whether or not it resulted in an orgasm.
Of course, at the time in life where I still refered to sex using baseball terminology AND felt the need to tell my friends every detail about it, the need for any bases beyond 2 was probably unnecessary...
Here's another question: what do they call French Kissing in France? Just Kissing?;-)
Ericsson doesn't plan to continue design and development around Bluetooth, but it will continue to support existing customers and include it in products, the company representative said. Bluetooth technology efforts will be incorporated into the work of Ericsson's Mobile Platforms group.
Glass Half Full Interpretation: Maybe this means that Bluetooth has become so simple to implement that they don't need a dedicated development team anymore. It seems that Bluetooth is cropping up in all sorts of CE devices. BT chips and control sets are becoming more and more standardized. For Ericsson, the hard work of developing tie-ins to their phone OS is already done. This could be a good sign, rather than a bad one, for Bluetooth in general.
I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Ericsson and SonyEricsson. Not sure if the former will impact the phones of the latter.
Re:Not solution to slashdot effect, but still grea
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 1
I should clarify that I mean this will not be the solution to the effect caused by "surprise-slashdotting" where the site owners are not notified ahead of time.
If a savvy site owner is notified by slashdot editors before being listed, they might be able to take some preventive action.
I don't think that currently happens very often, though.
Not solution to slashdot effect, but still great!
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, it won't be the solution to Slashdotting, as you can't cache a whole site.
Please note that you cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/ This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item that you want to have cached seperately.
You can cache an HTML page (index.html) but all the images will pull from the local machine. You could cache each image separately, but the change would have to be made in the site's HTML.
On the other hand, I don't imagine it would be hard to write some kind of proxy script that grabs the page and changes the HTML to point to freecache SRCs for each image/movie... you could then point to a freecache of that page...
And of course, this all breaks the second somebody has a site that is heavily CGI based.
Still, it's a start. I'll be sure to use it if I ever submit any site of my own to Slashdot;-) Many thanks to the guys at the Internet Archive for setting this up. You rock!
I'm going to have to check out FileZilla... I've used CuteFTP, LeechFTP, and some others... I've never found one I'm completely happy with. PDF Creator and SpyBot SS look like good programs to have too... thx for the links!
Cygwin usually goes on a machine after a while, but it's an "install as needed" item. I've decided to use RealAlternative instead of installing RealPlayer for the rare occasions I need to view a RAM stream.
With all of the requirements you are listing here, it looks like you may just need to grow your own solution, with help from one or two third party tools.
One aid to you in this process is the prevalence of WYSYWIG Html Editors that can be added as an "Input" to a Web page.
Take a look at eWebEditPro from Ektron (ektron.com) for an example. (I don't work for the company, but I do use this app for content management on my company's Web site.) Apps like these give people basic editing capability within a Web app, and you can set this one up to create well-formed XHTML docs straight from a Word cut and paste.
You can use this to interface w/ a Database driven web app that stores content and delivers it in the various formats (XML, etc.) based on your needs.
It looks like a great service, except for one thing:
Just like yahoo (aka Yahoo Maps) and many other online services, google uses MapQuest to provide directions.
I wish more sites would instead start using the company formerly known as MapBlast/Vicinity. Their Line Drive maps are much easier to use, and their directions are much better, at least based on extensive personal experience.
Granted, they got bought by the Beast, but the technology still works...
I wonder what Mapblast is doing wrong that the consistently inferior service gets consistently greater exposure and linkage?
Maybe one of these days I can figure out a way to turn a link like this into a link like this
Maybe a combination of a hosts file entry and a quickie PHP script on my personal Web server to parse and redirect... Or would that be considered a violation of the DMCA? *grin*
I agree. My host had Razor installed for free, so I activated it. It just prepends "[SPAM]" to subject lines of suspect messages. So far a lot of false positives.
I've had great luck with Dreamhost. They offer both SSL POP3 and SSL IMAP. I can't rave enough about their hosting. I did a lot of research into hosting companies, and they consistently came up as one of the top companies in the business.
Fair disclosure:If you use that link and end up buying from them, I get a small "referral" credit on my own hosting bill. However, I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't think they were absolutely the best.
Well, as of now it looks like all that money went to naught, as the Red Team vehicle is disabled 7 miles out.
Re:Return Path numbers are low
on
Spam Bits
·
· Score: 1
Maybe we should just start sending our customers telegrams....
Return Path numbers are low
on
Spam Bits
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The AP/ReturnPath story is interesting, in that the actual number of messages that never see their intended recipients is probably even higher than 19%.
The study was based on a snapshot of messages sent by 100 Return Path customers. Return Path set up test mailboxes with 18 major Internet service providers and monitored about one-fourth of the 120,000 marketing campaigns from those customers.
This wouldn't even begin to account for the number of messages filtered by larger companies, universities, and other entities that maintain their own spam-filtering and spam-blocking systems. It also wouldn't account for the growing number of individual end-users who are installing and using commercial or free spam-blocking software on their local machines. Anti-spam software isn't just for geeks anymore. According to download.com, the top 25 results for a search on "anti-spam" have been downloaded 2,493,051 times, in aggregate.
Well isn't that a good thing?
If you are an end user, and missing a message doesn't matter that much to you, then no. If you are a company using E-mail to communicate with your customers, but you aren't sending anything critical, then no.
If you miss the electronic notification from your bank, credit-card, or student loan company that your last payment is late, or the notification from your airline that your flight was cancelled, then it does matter.
And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.
Things are probably going to get worse before they get better, but E-mail for business has so much potential that I can't but hope that we will solve this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a fanless mini pc from CappuccinoPC. I don't see the exact model I purchased on their site, but it was close to this one:
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp300-fanless
1.65"H x 5.75"W x 9.84"D
Slightly bigger than the mini-mac, and not as stylish.
They have a variety of other systems, some with fans, some without. Some of them come in a brushed silver color.
They have cases, barebones, and fully functional offerings. I bought a complete PC and it was under $600.
A few Sci-fi books I've enjoyed that deal with Eternal life scenarios:
John C. Wright's "The Golden Age"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0812579844
David Brin's "Kiln People"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0765342618
Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345457684
The general consensus: Eternal life doesn't automatically make you happy. But it beats the alternative.
I'm sure there are others that could be added to this list.
I evaluated dotproject not too long ago. The initative to implement it at my company got sidetracked, so I can't comment on actual usage.
It's on sourceforge and at http://www.dotproject.net/
I've used Scoop, Drupal, and built a couple of custom lite-CMS solutions. My only experience with Wikis is installing MediaWiki. To me the biggest downside was support for inserting straight HTML.
While you can insert HTML into a Wiki entry, it isn't recommended. They want you to use the Wiki tagging language. This makes sense because the Wiki tagging is used to convey useful meta-information and separate content from presentation, but at the same time, losing the ability to use all of the functionality of HTML when entering content seems like a big trade-off.
Some of the MediaWiki developers explained that while it is easy to convert Wiki tags to HTML, it's much more difficult to convert HTML to Wiki.
I don't know that any current CMS can adequately accomplish the goals of separating content and meta-information about that content from its presentation. Storing a bunch of HTML in a database field is going to reduce the possibilities for multiple-use (e.g. non-HTML E-mail delivery, RSS and other feeds, etc.) At the same time, inserting content, including legacy content, that has already been formatted using HTML is going to be desirable by at least some users.
Drupal's ability to include not just HTML, but even PHP code within posted contents was a really powerful tool, but exacerbates this problem even more.
To me, a CMS powerful enough but easy enough to use by my company would be able to:
1- Provide a WYWYSIG editor for those who just want to add new content.
2- Allow users to cut and paste highly formatted content from (gasp!) MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
3- Allow insertion of HTML-formatted content. Given that one goal of serious CMS is to avoid storing HTML as is, this would then have to be parsed and split between content and presentation, and be able to deal with a variety of HTML standards, as well as non-standard HTML.
To me it seems like XML may provide the best hope for being able to accomplish all these goals, or they may be mutually exclusive.
If there's something out there that already does these things, pray tell...
I wouldn't think my setup would be a problem, but my gaming box isn't as uber-l33t as I'd like to think it is.
2.8 Ghz, 1GB memory, Radeon 9800 Pro (that card may be horribly out of date by now.)
Did you have CD or Steam-based install?
I'm going to try Rylin's suggestions below about using the SDK to unpack the gcf files ahead of time, and see if that speeds things up. I'll post results
> It's unpacking the textures etc. from the gcf
> file(s) relevant to your game.
> It then saves the extracted copies
> in "\SteamApps\SteamUsername\half-life 2"
Do you know of any way to manually unpack these puppies ahead of time?
I ordered online through Steam last night and it took about 30 minutes to unlock. I had already pre-downloaded.
On a slightly unrelated note: what's with the mid-game/mid-level load times? Are they just slow for me, or does anyone else feel like they may as well be downloading the game textures from Steam as you play?
I assume you're talking about the sexual connotations of the "bases", and not the actual baseball gameplay mechanics.
From Wikipedia:
I'd never heard of the Grand Slam one, personally. Among my friends growing up, second base meant breastage (either over or under clothing), and third base was any non-penetration sex, whether or not it resulted in an orgasm.
Of course, at the time in life where I still refered to sex using baseball terminology AND felt the need to tell my friends every detail about it, the need for any bases beyond 2 was probably unnecessary...
Here's another question: what do they call French Kissing in France? Just Kissing? ;-)
From the News.com.com article:
Glass Half Full Interpretation: Maybe this means that Bluetooth has become so simple to implement that they don't need a dedicated development team anymore. It seems that Bluetooth is cropping up in all sorts of CE devices. BT chips and control sets are becoming more and more standardized. For Ericsson, the hard work of developing tie-ins to their phone OS is already done. This could be a good sign, rather than a bad one, for Bluetooth in general.
I'm a little fuzzy on the relationship between Ericsson and SonyEricsson. Not sure if the former will impact the phones of the latter.
Is it not spelled programmer? Or is there a joke/allusion that I'm missing?
Some that I use:
a@b.com - 8,840
a@a.com - 9,130
none@none.com - 6,780
I should clarify that I mean this will not be the solution to the effect caused by "surprise-slashdotting" where the site owners are not notified ahead of time.
If a savvy site owner is notified by slashdot editors before being listed, they might be able to take some preventive action.
I don't think that currently happens very often, though.
Well, it won't be the solution to Slashdotting, as you can't cache a whole site.
You can cache an HTML page (index.html) but all the images will pull from the local machine. You could cache each image separately, but the change would have to be made in the site's HTML.
On the other hand, I don't imagine it would be hard to write some kind of proxy script that grabs the page and changes the HTML to point to freecache SRCs for each image/movie... you could then point to a freecache of that page...
And of course, this all breaks the second somebody has a site that is heavily CGI based.
Still, it's a start. I'll be sure to use it if I ever submit any site of my own to Slashdot ;-) Many thanks to the guys at the Internet Archive for setting this up. You rock!
Amen to the comments on EditPlus! Great damn program for the money.
I have more than 10 in my "start from scratch" install, so here goes:
I'm going to have to check out FileZilla... I've used CuteFTP, LeechFTP, and some others... I've never found one I'm completely happy with. PDF Creator and SpyBot SS look like good programs to have too... thx for the links!
Cygwin usually goes on a machine after a while, but it's an "install as needed" item. I've decided to use RealAlternative instead of installing RealPlayer for the rare occasions I need to view a RAM stream.
Shouldn't it be "Take me drunk, I'm home?"
With all of the requirements you are listing here, it looks like you may just need to grow your own solution, with help from one or two third party tools.
One aid to you in this process is the prevalence of WYSYWIG Html Editors that can be added as an "Input" to a Web page.
Take a look at eWebEditPro from Ektron (ektron.com) for an example. (I don't work for the company, but I do use this app for content management on my company's Web site.) Apps like these give people basic editing capability within a Web app, and you can set this one up to create well-formed XHTML docs straight from a Word cut and paste.
You can use this to interface w/ a Database driven web app that stores content and delivers it in the various formats (XML, etc.) based on your needs.
Maybe her?
Did you try Jet Audio Basic?
See download.com
It looks like a great service, except for one thing:
Just like yahoo (aka Yahoo Maps) and many other online services, google uses MapQuest to provide directions.
I wish more sites would instead start using the company formerly known as MapBlast/Vicinity. Their Line Drive maps are much easier to use, and their directions are much better, at least based on extensive personal experience.
Granted, they got bought by the Beast, but the technology still works...
I wonder what Mapblast is doing wrong that the consistently inferior service gets consistently greater exposure and linkage?
Maybe one of these days I can figure out a way to turn a link like this into a link like this
Maybe a combination of a hosts file entry and a quickie PHP script on my personal Web server to parse and redirect... Or would that be considered a violation of the DMCA? *grin*
Referral link seems broken. Sorry about that!. working link
I agree. My host had Razor installed for free, so I activated it. It just prepends "[SPAM]" to subject lines of suspect messages. So far a lot of false positives.
I've had great luck with Dreamhost. They offer both SSL POP3 and SSL IMAP. I can't rave enough about their hosting. I did a lot of research into hosting companies, and they consistently came up as one of the top companies in the business.
Link to learn more
Fair disclosure: If you use that link and end up buying from them, I get a small "referral" credit on my own hosting bill. However, I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't think they were absolutely the best.
Well, as of now it looks like all that money went to naught, as the Red Team vehicle is disabled 7 miles out.
Maybe we should just start sending our customers telegrams....
The AP/ReturnPath story is interesting, in that the actual number of messages that never see their intended recipients is probably even higher than 19%.
This wouldn't even begin to account for the number of messages filtered by larger companies, universities, and other entities that maintain their own spam-filtering and spam-blocking systems. It also wouldn't account for the growing number of individual end-users who are installing and using commercial or free spam-blocking software on their local machines. Anti-spam software isn't just for geeks anymore. According to download.com, the top 25 results for a search on "anti-spam" have been downloaded 2,493,051 times, in aggregate.
Well isn't that a good thing?
If you are an end user, and missing a message doesn't matter that much to you, then no. If you are a company using E-mail to communicate with your customers, but you aren't sending anything critical, then no.
If you miss the electronic notification from your bank, credit-card, or student loan company that your last payment is late, or the notification from your airline that your flight was cancelled, then it does matter.
And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.
Things are probably going to get worse before they get better, but E-mail for business has so much potential that I can't but hope that we will solve this problem.