Why? For one of my favorite lines in all of film: "Sorry, Venkman, I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought."
See, like a true scientist, even when a epic global disaster is about to take place in front of him and his death is imminent, he says something coherent and explanatory. He even apologizes!
This was before the launch of google.cn, so it was the American-hosted, Chinese-language google.com.
While I didn't try any "sensitive" queries, my understanding is that, if I had, the results would have been censored (by the Great Chinese Firewall) anyway.
"In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub."
I have Java code written and compiled on 32-bit hardware that is running in production on 64-bit hardware on 64-bit Java on Linux right now. Not a single issue.
When i looked at this last night, i noticed that of the 1,509 people in the game who all, I believe, started with $10,000 fantasy dollars in the game, only 29 still had that much or more.
So why are only 2% of the players profitting in a set of zero-sum games? What investment strategy are they pursuing that is so poor?
mahlen
21 short exercises by Dave (Pragmatic) Thomas
on
Short Coding Projects?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For the lazy or doubtful, here's the list of descriptions:
KataOne: Supermarket pricing. Pricing looks easy, but scratch the surface and there are some interesting issues to consider. KataTwo: Karate Chop. A binary chop algorithm is fairly boring. Until you have to implement it using five totally different techniques. KataThree: How Big, How Fast? Quick estimation is invaluable when it comes to making design and implementation decisions. Here are some questions to make you turn over the envelope. KataFour: Data Munging. Implement two simple data extraction routines, and see how much they have in common. KataFive: Bloom Filters. Implement a simple hash-based lookup mechanism and explore its characteristics. KataSix: Anagrams. Find all the anagram combinations in a dictionary. KataSeven: Reviewing. What does our code look like through critical eyes, and how can we make our eyes more critical? KataEight: Objectives. What effects do our objectives have on the way we write code? KataNine: Checkout. Back to the supermarket. This week, well implement the code for a checkout system that handles pricing schemes such as "apples cost 50 cents, three apples cost $1.30." KataTen: Hash vs. Class. Is it always correct to use (for example) classes and objects to structure complex business objects, or couple simpler structures (hash as Hashes) do the job? KataEleven: Sorting it Out. Just because we need to sort something doesnt necessarily mean we need to use a conventional sorting algorithm. KataTwelve: Best Sellers. Consider the implementation of a top-ten best sellers list for a high volume web store. KataThirteen: Counting Lines. Counting lines of code in Java source is not quite as simple as it seems. KataFourteen: Trigrams. Generating text using trigram analysis lets us experiment with different heuristics. KataFifteen: Playing with bits. A diversion to discover the pattern in some bit sequences. KataSixteen: Business Rules. How can you tame a wild (and changing) set of business rules? KataSeventeen: More Business Rules. The rules that specify the overall processing of an order can be complex too, particularly as they often involve waiting around for things to happen. KataEighteen: Dependencies. Lets write some code that calculates how dependencies propagate between things such as classes in a program. KataNineteen: Word chains. Write a program that solves word chain puzzles (cat -> cot -> dot -> dog). KataTwenty: Klondike. Experiment with various heuristics for playing the game Klondike. KataTwentyOne: Simple Lists. Play with different implementations of a simple list.
In contrast, our internal Wiki (a JSPWiki instance) grows by leaps and bounds, currently at the rate of 400 new pages a month, and typically 50+ edits a day. There was never any official pronouncement to make it so; I actually started it here just for myself.
I think it took off because it was adopted by some high-profile and prolific people, and thus "It's in the Wiki" and "put it in the Wiki" became common phrases. I think that these combined to make it the "official" place to keep vital information. Quite a few developers have personal blogs and todo lists on the Wiki. The ease of corrections and low barrier to entry have really helped people get into it, though adoption is certainly far from universal. But I've seen meetings where the principal focus seems to be editing a Wiki page until it's correct, which is a great way to arrive at consensus and publish the consensus at the same time.
My development group at Shopping.com uses an Ambient Orb to reflect the status of the hourly build/test cycle. Even though the continuous build process sends out email and has a web page to indicate what the status is, it's still nice to have a physical artifact of the system, and certainly hammers home that The Build Must Keep Working. When you look at it and it's green, you feel just a little bit OK, and when it's red, you get a little anxious, and really want to make sure it gets fixed.
I only wish that the Orb was more responsive to the data we send it; occasionally it can take 20 minutes for it to update. But overall, we like it. Do not anger the Orb!
Yes, the kid who wrote Marble Madness was Mark Cerny. He and I had been close friends when we were 8-11 years old, but I've lost contact with him since. Google reveals that he's done a lot of game design work since. He now has a game consulting company, Cerny Games (http://www.cernygames.com/).
He was incredibly smart as a kid (skipping two elementary school grades). I recall him describing the book _1984_ to me, which he read when he was eight years old, if I recall correctly. Also him trying in vain to explain fractional exponents to me.
mahlen
Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done." Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
--Arthur Naiman
I would think that the local news media would be interested in a story like this, since ISP's are essentially local. Sure, they'd get the story wrong in most ways, but when the local TV station calls the FBI to ask why they are ignoring people's credit card numbers being stolen after being told about it, that would increase the likelyhood they they sit up and do something.
Might be worth a shot.
mahlen
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
--Woodrow Wilson
Yes, I've had problems reading articles on/. as well. As far as I can tell, sometimes the article.pl barfs when viewed from the Hiptop browser. But i think that's an error on the part of the/. server, not the Danger proxy. I could be wrong on that, though.
Basically, you can make a macro that will write out any Unicode character, so pipe is available (as pointed out elsewhere, tilde is on the keyboard).
mahlen
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to
act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
--Oscar Wilde, British playwright, poet, and novelist (1854-1900)
While i guess there's no _guarantee_ that particular websites will work on the Hiptop, my experience over the last 3 months is that the vast bulk of sites work great. The only sites that haven't worked are ones that rely on JavaScript to do everything useful in the site.
My advice, if there's a small number of sites you're most concerned about, is to post a list of them on the hiptop.com board and ask people to try them for you. Or go to a T-Mobile shop and try them yourself.
To clarify, it's not like you have to be on some Danger-approved list or anything. The sites i run all work fine.
Personally, my Hiptop has been life-changing the way that my first Palm was. Does it always work and do everything exactly the way i want, everywhere? No. Is some mobile web/email with a real keyboard better than none? Hell yeah.
mahlen
"Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!"
--From the "Top 20 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon programmer"
The NSA and Gary Powers
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
James Bamford's Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency has an amazing chapter on Ike's personal involvement in the U2 missions, and, when the Congress was investigating those U2 missions after Gary Powers was shot down, Ike's insistance that his subordinates lie to the Congress under oath about Ike's involvement. This insistance is an impeachable offense, by the way.
Body of Secrets is very worth checking out if the back story of spying is of interest. And much more entertaining than his previous NSA history, The Puzzle Palace.
mahlen
All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture.
--bumper sticker
There's plenty of empty space in finished buildings in SOMA. I work at 8th St. and Townsend, and several large buildings in the area have been completed in the last year (even though the boom was over, projects that had already started more or less had to be completed, thanks to clever time-limits on the building permits). But for that much space, they wouldn't have been a nice set of contiguous buildings, and it wouldn't be secluded like the Presido space appears to be.
Although I'm not a big fan of "campus-style" workspaces, those are nice looking plans. And, hey, it would shorten my commute from the beach. I wouldn't mind working there:).
mahlen
Van Roy's Law: "An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."
For Java coding, take a look at RetroVue, which indeed lets you wind back the clock and see exactly HOW that reference became null (among other things).
It's a long shot, but you might be thinking of the "Codex Seraphinianus" by Luigi Serafini, published in the U.S. in 1983. All the text is in some alien language (even the page numbers). Here are some of the images, perhaps they look familiar.
I believe that much of the website design for Mozilla.org is/was done by Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. He has a fondness for early 20th century Soviet propaganda styles that suffuses much of his work.
Also, there is a "revolutionary" quality to much of the Mozilla work, which the red star also harkens to.
I always say, "I'll have a glass of your fine tap water." That usually gets a laugh, and some free water.
I agree, strong typing always _seems_ like a less risky way to go (catch problems at compile time, not run time). But I'm starting to do more work with Ruby, so maybe that'll convert me.
"Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels."
And don't assume that this will always be the case in the future. I predict that someday 1600x1200 screens will seem as quaint as 640x480 screens are now.
mahlen
History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
--Clarence Darrow
This sounds an awful lot like the building materials that told people (vocally, not via screen) how to assemble them into a building from Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction. Don't need skilled labor if the bricks tell you what to do. Very interesting to see this in the real world.
mahlen
I defend myself by saying that, although this seemed immoral to me, it also
seemed as though it wouldn't ever work anyway.
--Fred Pohl, "The Coming of the Quantum Cats", ca. 1985
I would hope that you have the in-house ability to test your application in the things that matter to your boss. For example, if you expect high load, you have stress tests, and so on.
So run multi-day tests on each of the different servers you are considering. Compare the results. As you can see below, there's wide ranges of opinion. I suspect that those differences in opinion are due to different applications surfacing different problems, people having different expectations, and so forth.
These comments provide at least some evidence that Tomcat can run in production. So really, find out what works for _you_ best before pushing for it's adaptation. And then you'll have data that says, "X will work best for us". That will goes miles toward convincing the boss to use X.
Who knows, it may even convince you that Tomcat isn't the right choice (if it isn't). Rather than tie your reputation to Tomcat because Tomcat is Open Source, find out what really works best. Better for you and the company.
Also, you might check the Netcraft reports; they may help convince the boss that these things are real. Not to mention the various companies' marketing groups.
mahlen
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
--Trotsky
So how did Cafe Cocomo (http://www.cafecocomo.com/) work out? When i found out that it was a dance club with a dress code, it seemed like a really mindless choice for a/. meeting, so I passed on it. But it sounds like i missed out. Did Cocomo end up having/. appropriate places, or was every S.F. nerd more stylishly dressed than I would expect?
mahlen
When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
--Richard Nixon
Slashdot Mirror
Why? For one of my favorite lines in all of film: "Sorry, Venkman, I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought."
See, like a true scientist, even when a epic global disaster is about to take place in front of him and his death is imminent, he says something coherent and explanatory. He even apologizes!
mahlen
This was before the launch of google.cn, so it was the American-hosted, Chinese-language google.com.
While I didn't try any "sensitive" queries, my understanding is that, if I had, the results would have been censored (by the Great Chinese Firewall) anyway.
mahlen
I was in China in October, and indeed, when going to google.com, the results would default to Chinese language results.
mahlen
"In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub."
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
mahlen
I have Java code written and compiled on 32-bit hardware that is running in production on 64-bit hardware on 64-bit Java on Linux right now. Not a single issue.
mahlen
When i looked at this last night, i noticed that of the 1,509 people in the game who all, I believe, started with $10,000 fantasy dollars in the game, only 29 still had that much or more.
So why are only 2% of the players profitting in a set of zero-sum games? What investment strategy are they pursuing that is so poor?
mahlen
http://pragprog.com/pragdave/Practices/Kata
For the lazy or doubtful, here's the list of descriptions:
KataOne: Supermarket pricing. Pricing looks easy, but scratch the surface and there are some interesting issues to consider.
KataTwo: Karate Chop. A binary chop algorithm is fairly boring. Until you have to implement it using five totally different techniques.
KataThree: How Big, How Fast? Quick estimation is invaluable when it comes to making design and implementation decisions. Here are some questions to make you turn over the envelope.
KataFour: Data Munging. Implement two simple data extraction routines, and see how much they have in common.
KataFive: Bloom Filters. Implement a simple hash-based lookup mechanism and explore its characteristics.
KataSix: Anagrams. Find all the anagram combinations in a dictionary.
KataSeven: Reviewing. What does our code look like through critical eyes, and how can we make our eyes more critical?
KataEight: Objectives. What effects do our objectives have on the way we write code?
KataNine: Checkout. Back to the supermarket. This week, well implement the code for a checkout system that handles pricing schemes such as "apples cost 50 cents, three apples cost $1.30."
KataTen: Hash vs. Class. Is it always correct to use (for example) classes and objects to structure complex business objects, or couple simpler structures (hash as Hashes) do the job?
KataEleven: Sorting it Out. Just because we need to sort something doesnt necessarily mean we need to use a conventional sorting algorithm.
KataTwelve: Best Sellers. Consider the implementation of a top-ten best sellers list for a high volume web store.
KataThirteen: Counting Lines. Counting lines of code in Java source is not quite as simple as it seems.
KataFourteen: Trigrams. Generating text using trigram analysis lets us experiment with different heuristics.
KataFifteen: Playing with bits. A diversion to discover the pattern in some bit sequences.
KataSixteen: Business Rules. How can you tame a wild (and changing) set of business rules?
KataSeventeen: More Business Rules. The rules that specify the overall processing of an order can be complex too, particularly as they often involve waiting around for things to happen.
KataEighteen: Dependencies. Lets write some code that calculates how dependencies propagate between things such as classes in a program.
KataNineteen: Word chains. Write a program that solves word chain puzzles (cat -> cot -> dot -> dog).
KataTwenty: Klondike. Experiment with various heuristics for playing the game Klondike.
KataTwentyOne: Simple Lists. Play with different implementations of a simple list.
mahlen
In contrast, our internal Wiki (a JSPWiki instance) grows by leaps and bounds, currently at the rate of 400 new pages a month, and typically 50+ edits a day. There was never any official pronouncement to make it so; I actually started it here just for myself.
I think it took off because it was adopted by some high-profile and prolific people, and thus "It's in the Wiki" and "put it in the Wiki" became common phrases. I think that these combined to make it the "official" place to keep vital information. Quite a few developers have personal blogs and todo lists on the Wiki. The ease of corrections and low barrier to entry have really helped people get into it, though adoption is certainly far from universal. But I've seen meetings where the principal focus seems to be editing a Wiki page until it's correct, which is a great way to arrive at consensus and publish the consensus at the same time.
mahlen
My development group at Shopping.com uses an Ambient Orb to reflect the status of the hourly build/test cycle. Even though the continuous build process sends out email and has a web page to indicate what the status is, it's still nice to have a physical artifact of the system, and certainly hammers home that The Build Must Keep Working. When you look at it and it's green, you feel just a little bit OK, and when it's red, you get a little anxious, and really want to make sure it gets fixed.
I only wish that the Orb was more responsive to the data we send it; occasionally it can take 20 minutes for it to update. But overall, we like it. Do not anger the Orb!
mahlen
Monitor resolution of 6400x1200 sound good?
mahlen
Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
Yes, the kid who wrote Marble Madness was Mark Cerny. He and I had been close friends when we were 8-11 years old, but I've lost contact with him since. Google reveals that he's done a lot of game design work since. He now has a game consulting company, Cerny Games (http://www.cernygames.com/).
He was incredibly smart as a kid (skipping two elementary school grades). I recall him describing the book _1984_ to me, which he read when he was eight years old, if I recall correctly. Also him trying in vain to explain fractional exponents to me.
mahlen
Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still
crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this
and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference
between life and death.
You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in
Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New
York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown
F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your
first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees
left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done."
Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
--Arthur Naiman
I would think that the local news media would be interested in a story like this, since ISP's are essentially local. Sure, they'd get the story wrong in most ways, but when the local TV station calls the FBI to ask why they are ignoring people's credit card numbers being stolen after being told about it, that would increase the likelyhood they they sit up and do something.
Might be worth a shot.
mahlen
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen
minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
--Woodrow Wilson
Yes, I've had problems reading articles on /. as well. As far as I can tell, sometimes the article.pl barfs when viewed from the Hiptop browser. But i think that's an error on the part of the /. server, not the Danger proxy. I could be wrong on that, though.
mahlen
Basically, you can make a macro that will write out any Unicode character, so pipe is available (as pointed out elsewhere, tilde is on the keyboard).
mahlen
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. --Oscar Wilde, British playwright, poet, and novelist (1854-1900)While i guess there's no _guarantee_ that particular websites will work on the Hiptop, my experience over the last 3 months is that the vast bulk of sites work great. The only sites that haven't worked are ones that rely on JavaScript to do everything useful in the site.
My advice, if there's a small number of sites you're most concerned about, is to post a list of them on the hiptop.com board and ask people to try them for you. Or go to a T-Mobile shop and try them yourself.
To clarify, it's not like you have to be on some Danger-approved list or anything. The sites i run all work fine.
Personally, my Hiptop has been life-changing the way that my first Palm was. Does it always work and do everything exactly the way i want, everywhere? No. Is some mobile web/email with a real keyboard better than none? Hell yeah.
mahlen
"Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!"
--From the "Top 20 things likely to be overheard from a Klingon programmer"
James Bamford's Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency has an amazing chapter on Ike's personal involvement in the U2 missions, and, when the Congress was investigating those U2 missions after Gary Powers was shot down, Ike's insistance that his subordinates lie to the Congress under oath about Ike's involvement. This insistance is an impeachable offense, by the way.
Body of Secrets is very worth checking out if the back story of spying is of interest. And much more entertaining than his previous NSA history, The Puzzle Palace.
mahlen
All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture. --bumper sticker
There's plenty of empty space in finished buildings in SOMA. I work at 8th St. and Townsend, and several large buildings in the area have been completed in the last year (even though the boom was over, projects that had already started more or less had to be completed, thanks to clever time-limits on the building permits). But for that much space, they wouldn't have been a nice set of contiguous buildings, and it wouldn't be secluded like the Presido space appears to be.
:).
Although I'm not a big fan of "campus-style" workspaces, those are nice looking plans. And, hey, it would shorten my commute from the beach. I wouldn't mind working there
mahlen
Van Roy's Law:
"An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."
mahlen
mahlen
I believe that much of the website design for Mozilla.org is/was done by Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. He has a fondness for early 20th century Soviet propaganda styles that suffuses much of his work.
Also, there is a "revolutionary" quality to much of the Mozilla work, which the red star also harkens to.
mahlen
I always say, "I'll have a glass of your fine tap water." That usually gets a laugh, and some free water.
I agree, strong typing always _seems_ like a less risky way to go (catch problems at compile time, not run time). But I'm starting to do more work with Ruby, so maybe that'll convert me.
mahlen
Sleep is for Amateurs - Barrington Hall grafitti.
"Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels."
And don't assume that this will always be the case in the future. I predict that someday 1600x1200 screens will seem as quaint as 640x480 screens are now.
mahlen
History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
--Clarence Darrow
This sounds an awful lot like the building materials that told people (vocally, not via screen) how to assemble them into a building from Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction. Don't need skilled labor if the bricks tell you what to do. Very interesting to see this in the real world.
mahlen
I defend myself by saying that, although this seemed immoral to me, it also seemed as though it wouldn't ever work anyway. --Fred Pohl, "The Coming of the Quantum Cats", ca. 1985
I would hope that you have the in-house ability to test your application in the things that matter to your boss. For example, if you expect high load, you have stress tests, and so on.
So run multi-day tests on each of the different servers you are considering. Compare the results. As you can see below, there's wide ranges of opinion. I suspect that those differences in opinion are due to different applications surfacing different problems, people having different expectations, and so forth.
These comments provide at least some evidence that Tomcat can run in production. So really, find out what works for _you_ best before pushing for it's adaptation. And then you'll have data that says, "X will work best for us". That will goes miles toward convincing the boss to use X.
Who knows, it may even convince you that Tomcat isn't the right choice (if it isn't). Rather than tie your reputation to Tomcat because Tomcat is Open Source, find out what really works best. Better for you and the company.
Also, you might check the Netcraft reports; they may help convince the boss that these things are real. Not to mention the various companies' marketing groups.
mahlen
Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
--Trotsky
So how did Cafe Cocomo (http://www.cafecocomo.com/) work out? When i found out that it was a dance club with a dress code, it seemed like a really mindless choice for a /. meeting, so I passed on it. But it sounds like i missed out. Did Cocomo end up having /. appropriate places, or was every S.F. nerd more stylishly dressed than I would expect?
mahlen
When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
--Richard Nixon