Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.)
Thats about the philosophy that Emacs adopted. The current version in development, 23.3, would have been 1.23.3 under the original numbering scheme. But then they realized they were probably never going to bump the major version again and so they might as well drop it. Makes a lot of sense to me, honestly.
TFA even mentions one of these avoiding a deer: "You could see the cars avoiding things like a deer that dashed in front of one or another making it carefully around a small hillside road, as a large truck came toward it."
There was also a story here a year ago about Stanford's efforts in this area with a computer-controlled car doing a 180 spin into a tight parking space. "That means Junior could have an entire language of extreme driving maneuvers it could unleash when called upon... itâ(TM)s also a sign that the cars of the future will be able to respond to any adverse condition with remarkable driving talent."
Put them together and we're well on our way to computerized control that's safer than the average driver.
It's one of my favorites for creating complex highlights and shadows. Inkscape's solution to that seems to be blurs, but those are rasterization effects and bloat the size of any PDFs I export. I prefer all-vector solutions when using a vector graphics package. Admittedly, there's a bundled plugin to blend paths, but it's always been very crash-prone for me. Worse, I can't easily just tweak the result just by modifying the key paths like I can in Illustrator.
Aside from changing indentation, I've used it for things like turning single column tables into multiple column tables, removing common prefixes from a list, removing commas from aligned numbers, moving table columns in LaTeX source, and moving pieces of ascii diagrams around (for block comments designed to be renderable in ditaa.) Those are just some uses that I can think of off the top of my head.
I find it one of those things that doesn't seem very useful until you have an editor that can actually do it. Then you suddenly start finding uses for it.
Sony Imageworks has started to open source a series of components recently. Admittedly, some of them like Pystring are fairly minor, but others like OSL are serious pieces of code.
It's not as though they're competing for a prize here. It's just a friendly competition. You're free to ignore their result and focus on the rest if you like.
Personally, I find this kind of thing interesting as far as seeing what's possible, even if it's not exactly practical.
Honestly, Emacs does have a lot of stuff, but it's pretty much all load-on-demand these days. Jokes aside, a basic startup can be pretty darn quick:
% time emacs -nw -Q --kill
real 0m0.089s user 0m0.067s sys 0m0.012s
If I force it to load CC mode with a ~4kloc C++ file to edit, that rises to about 0.185s real. More importantly I only pay the extra delay the first time. Things are pretty much instant after that. If that's not enough, I can amortize the cost over a persistent session running for weeks at a time with multiple clients attached from different terminals.
I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business.
Maybe you haven't seen it yet, but I've received a number of e-mails from Amazon announcing "new books" from these guys with titles referring to topics that I'm interested in. Yes, I can opt-out of such e-mails from Amazon but automatic notification of new books in my field is a useful service to me, and it's led directly to Amazon getting sales out of me because they provide it.
So yes, it does lead to spam of a form, and I think Amazon needs to handle this very carefully.
Ugh, yes. I don't even use either of those services.
I couldn't find a control specifically for them, but I did discover that turning on Help & Preferences > Layout > Use Classic Index seemed to kill them without too much impact.
It's not really refraction. There actually is a refraction effect which is why we can see the sun at sunrise before it would be strictly visible over the horizon, and still see it at sunset after it's gone below the horizon. It's really more of a reflection -- think of light being scattered around by glitter except on a much smaller scale.
Rayleigh scattering preferentially scatters shorter (bluer) wavelengths more strongly. When the sun is directly overhead, as in midday, light nearer to the reddish end of the spectrum will reach you directly while only the bluer wavelengths will have been scattered. The blue that you see is light from the sun that has been scattered towards you by the air molecules in the atmosphere. The opposite happens at sunrise and sunset to make it appear red; the light reaching you has a much longer optical path to go through so nearly all of the the blue wavelengths have been scattered away leaving only the reddish light to reach you.
There's also a minor effect due to Mie's scattering off the dust and other particulates in the atmosphere. Mie's scattering deals with scattering by slightly larger particles than Rayleigh scattering.
I used to play a ton of instagib CTF on the Unreal Tournament series. No powerups, health boxes, armor, ammo, or weapons to collect. All you got was the super shockrifle: a beam weapon that killed instantly and had effectively infinite ammo but did no splash damage.
Skill in that game involved speed and accuracy with firing, learning the dodge combos to move evasively, and knowing the maps.
I always liked it because it felt more like a pure contest of skill to me than the FPS games that involved collecting weapons. Things like standing around guarding the rocket launcher from the guy with the pistol always seemed like a cheese tactic. The fully loaded player guarding the rockets might actually be the better player, or it could have been a lucky fluke that they capitalized on. The difference in power always seemed to me to obscure the connection between skill and performance.
By contrast, with instagib a player had to repeatedly prove that they really were the superior.
From watching other "singing Tesla coil" videos, my understanding is that the music is actually played by the Tesla coil. Think of how what appears to be a single lightning bolt typically has ~20 strokes back and forth between the ground and the sky. In similar fashion, they've set up the coil so that it's actually discharging hundreds of times per second but to us (and to the video recording equipment) appears to be on continuously. Each discharge makes a little snapping sound and in aggregate you get something like a square wave playing music.
That's true, so far as returning in a single step goes. But those commands also interact with the mark ring so pressing C-u C-SPC repeatedly still gets me back after a couple of hops.
This isn't one that I use every day, but I find it enormously handy when I do need it: (defun for-each (begin end place start stop step)
"Copy the active region and replace a placeholder string with a number."
(interactive "r\nsPlaceholder: \nn Start: \nn Stop: \nn Step: ")
(let ((template (buffer-substring begin end))
(count (1+ (/ (- stop start) step))))
(delete-region begin end)
(dotimes (time count)
(let ((value (number-to-string (+ start (* time step))))
(expansion template))
(while (string-match place expansion)
(setq expansion (replace-match value nil t expansion)))
(insert expansion)))))
Select a region, do M-x for-each and then give it a placeholder in the region, starting and stopping numbers and an increment. For example, selecting a region with:
"% bottles of beer on the wall. % bottles of beer on the wall, % bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, "
and giving it % as the placeholder, 99 as the start value, 1 as the end value, and -1 as the increment will instantly expand it to most of the body of the old song:
"99 bottles of beer on the wall. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall. 98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall. 97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall...."
You can use multiple placeholders and apply it N times in succession to do N-dimensional expansions as well. I suspect that it has often saved me from what very likely could have been some nasty cut-and-paste errors.
My favorite new-to-me trick by the way, is \, for Elisp code in regexp replacements, as described by Steve Yegge. I've only known about it for a few weeks now and I've already found a ton of handy uses: selectively deleting numbers from a list, converting hh:mm:ss to seconds, etc.
Back in the day when I did Java, I'd do the same thing, keeping both Eclipse and XEmacs running. One thing I found, at least on their Windows version, was that dragging a dropping a file from the file tree to XEmacs worked just fine. Make my edits, save, alt-tab back to Eclipse and let it reload when it detects the external modifications.
I'd be surprised if something similar didn't work with Eclipse/Emacs combinations on other platforms.
Oh, and for the word count, I usually just do M-| wc RET, though I'll admit to having embedded other utilities such as uniq as Elisp scripts.
Another issue that no one seems to have mentioned yet is the credibility aspect. If the publications associated with a piece of software start getting enough citations to where it becomes well known and other researchers build on that software then citing it helps to give your own work a measure of credibility.
You show that your results are obtained by building on top of battle-tested, proven software that's already been vetted by others. It deflects concerns about mistakes in your basic implementation and helps referees to be able to focus on what's really new in your results.
Exactly. That's really it for me. I used to do a lot in Java, but these days C++ and Python are my languages of choice. I feel like they complement each other well, and I've had good success at using Python to generate C++ in some interesting cases (e.g., cross-"assembling" a program written for another architecture into C++ to emulate it). Java seems to fall in the middle of the development speed vs. execution speed continuum and seems to combine the worst features of each.
If I'm going to bother with a language that requires an explicit compilation step and is more verbose, I might as well just use C++ and at least get the raw execution speed, lower memory requirements of C++, and easy distribution of the executables. If I'm willing to accept a language that runs more slowly and is harder to distribute to end users, why not just use something that's more concise, gives me a REPL and lets me iterate the development more quickly.
About the only feature from Java that I occasionally miss in C++ is reflection. But I find avoiding that usually keeps my architectures cleaner anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"God's number" is 20.
Torchlight was made with Ogre3d.
There's more to the government than the executive branch. The courts are certainly part of the government.
Where could Drupal patent the use of 'hooks' to let developers interact with the core of the application? (If they invented this, I am not really sure.)
No they did not. Hooks are ancient.
Thats about the philosophy that Emacs adopted. The current version in development, 23.3, would have been 1.23.3 under the original numbering scheme. But then they realized they were probably never going to bump the major version again and so they might as well drop it. Makes a lot of sense to me, honestly.
TFA even mentions one of these avoiding a deer: "You could see the cars avoiding things like a deer that dashed in front of one or another making it carefully around a small hillside road, as a large truck came toward it."
There was also a story here a year ago about Stanford's efforts in this area with a computer-controlled car doing a 180 spin into a tight parking space. "That means Junior could have an entire language of extreme driving maneuvers it could unleash when called upon ... itâ(TM)s also a sign that the cars of the future will be able to respond to any adverse condition with remarkable driving talent."
Put them together and we're well on our way to computerized control that's safer than the average driver.
To add to your list.
* Blend tool
It's one of my favorites for creating complex highlights and shadows. Inkscape's solution to that seems to be blurs, but those are rasterization effects and bloat the size of any PDFs I export. I prefer all-vector solutions when using a vector graphics package. Admittedly, there's a bundled plugin to blend paths, but it's always been very crash-prone for me. Worse, I can't easily just tweak the result just by modifying the key paths like I can in Illustrator.
* Layer window
No, the XML tree outline is not the same thing.
Aside from changing indentation, I've used it for things like turning single column tables into multiple column tables, removing common prefixes from a list, removing commas from aligned numbers, moving table columns in LaTeX source, and moving pieces of ascii diagrams around (for block comments designed to be renderable in ditaa.) Those are just some uses that I can think of off the top of my head.
I find it one of those things that doesn't seem very useful until you have an editor that can actually do it. Then you suddenly start finding uses for it.
Others, off the top of my head:
Sony Imageworks has started to open source a series of components recently. Admittedly, some of them like Pystring are fairly minor, but others like OSL are serious pieces of code.
Disney's Ptex library is also open source.
Then there's the old Cinepaint project from R&H.
You mean something like Fusion?
An even more appropriate old saying in this case: "One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."
It's not as though they're competing for a prize here. It's just a friendly competition. You're free to ignore their result and focus on the rest if you like.
Personally, I find this kind of thing interesting as far as seeing what's possible, even if it's not exactly practical.
See Clarke's First Law.
Honestly, Emacs does have a lot of stuff, but it's pretty much all load-on-demand these days. Jokes aside, a basic startup can be pretty darn quick:
% time emacs -nw -Q --kill
real 0m0.089s
user 0m0.067s
sys 0m0.012s
If I force it to load CC mode with a ~4kloc C++ file to edit, that rises to about 0.185s real. More importantly I only pay the extra delay the first time. Things are pretty much instant after that. If that's not enough, I can amortize the cost over a persistent session running for weeks at a time with multiple clients attached from different terminals.
I agree that it's a nuisance but I'm not certain it's spam. I am not receiving unsolicited e-mails or cold-calls to my phone about this. Unlike my personal inbox or my personal telephone, Amazon is a place of business.
Maybe you haven't seen it yet, but I've received a number of e-mails from Amazon announcing "new books" from these guys with titles referring to topics that I'm interested in. Yes, I can opt-out of such e-mails from Amazon but automatic notification of new books in my field is a useful service to me, and it's led directly to Amazon getting sales out of me because they provide it.
So yes, it does lead to spam of a form, and I think Amazon needs to handle this very carefully.
Ugh, yes. I don't even use either of those services.
I couldn't find a control specifically for them, but I did discover that turning on Help & Preferences > Layout > Use Classic Index seemed to kill them without too much impact.
It's not really refraction. There actually is a refraction effect which is why we can see the sun at sunrise before it would be strictly visible over the horizon, and still see it at sunset after it's gone below the horizon. It's really more of a reflection -- think of light being scattered around by glitter except on a much smaller scale.
Rayleigh scattering preferentially scatters shorter (bluer) wavelengths more strongly. When the sun is directly overhead, as in midday, light nearer to the reddish end of the spectrum will reach you directly while only the bluer wavelengths will have been scattered. The blue that you see is light from the sun that has been scattered towards you by the air molecules in the atmosphere. The opposite happens at sunrise and sunset to make it appear red; the light reaching you has a much longer optical path to go through so nearly all of the the blue wavelengths have been scattered away leaving only the reddish light to reach you.
There's also a minor effect due to Mie's scattering off the dust and other particulates in the atmosphere. Mie's scattering deals with scattering by slightly larger particles than Rayleigh scattering.
I used to play a ton of instagib CTF on the Unreal Tournament series. No powerups, health boxes, armor, ammo, or weapons to collect. All you got was the super shockrifle: a beam weapon that killed instantly and had effectively infinite ammo but did no splash damage.
Skill in that game involved speed and accuracy with firing, learning the dodge combos to move evasively, and knowing the maps.
I always liked it because it felt more like a pure contest of skill to me than the FPS games that involved collecting weapons. Things like standing around guarding the rocket launcher from the guy with the pistol always seemed like a cheese tactic. The fully loaded player guarding the rockets might actually be the better player, or it could have been a lucky fluke that they capitalized on. The difference in power always seemed to me to obscure the connection between skill and performance.
By contrast, with instagib a player had to repeatedly prove that they really were the superior.
From watching other "singing Tesla coil" videos, my understanding is that the music is actually played by the Tesla coil. Think of how what appears to be a single lightning bolt typically has ~20 strokes back and forth between the ground and the sky. In similar fashion, they've set up the coil so that it's actually discharging hundreds of times per second but to us (and to the video recording equipment) appears to be on continuously. Each discharge makes a little snapping sound and in aggregate you get something like a square wave playing music.
That's true, so far as returning in a single step goes. But those commands also interact with the mark ring so pressing C-u C-SPC repeatedly still gets me back after a couple of hops.
M-< and M-> set the mark before they jump. You can get back to it with C-u C-SPC.
This isn't one that I use every day, but I find it enormously handy when I do need it:
(defun for-each (begin end place start stop step)
"Copy the active region and replace a placeholder string with a number."
(interactive "r\nsPlaceholder: \nn Start: \nn Stop: \nn Step: ")
(let ((template (buffer-substring begin end))
(count (1+ (/ (- stop start) step))))
(delete-region begin end)
(dotimes (time count)
(let ((value (number-to-string (+ start (* time step))))
(expansion template))
(while (string-match place expansion)
(setq expansion (replace-match value nil t expansion)))
(insert expansion)))))
Select a region, do M-x for-each and then give it a placeholder in the region, starting and stopping numbers and an increment. For example, selecting a region with:
"% bottles of beer on the wall.
% bottles of beer on the wall, % bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, "
and giving it % as the placeholder, 99 as the start value, 1 as the end value, and -1 as the increment will instantly expand it to most of the body of the old song:
"99 bottles of beer on the wall. ..."
99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.
98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall.
97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall.
You can use multiple placeholders and apply it N times in succession to do N-dimensional expansions as well. I suspect that it has often saved me from what very likely could have been some nasty cut-and-paste errors.
My favorite new-to-me trick by the way, is \, for Elisp code in regexp replacements, as described by Steve Yegge. I've only known about it for a few weeks now and I've already found a ton of handy uses: selectively deleting numbers from a list, converting hh:mm:ss to seconds, etc.
Back in the day when I did Java, I'd do the same thing, keeping both Eclipse and XEmacs running. One thing I found, at least on their Windows version, was that dragging a dropping a file from the file tree to XEmacs worked just fine. Make my edits, save, alt-tab back to Eclipse and let it reload when it detects the external modifications.
I'd be surprised if something similar didn't work with Eclipse/Emacs combinations on other platforms.
Oh, and for the word count, I usually just do M-| wc RET, though I'll admit to having embedded other utilities such as uniq as Elisp scripts.
Another issue that no one seems to have mentioned yet is the credibility aspect. If the publications associated with a piece of software start getting enough citations to where it becomes well known and other researchers build on that software then citing it helps to give your own work a measure of credibility.
You show that your results are obtained by building on top of battle-tested, proven software that's already been vetted by others. It deflects concerns about mistakes in your basic implementation and helps referees to be able to focus on what's really new in your results.
Exactly. That's really it for me. I used to do a lot in Java, but these days C++ and Python are my languages of choice. I feel like they complement each other well, and I've had good success at using Python to generate C++ in some interesting cases (e.g., cross-"assembling" a program written for another architecture into C++ to emulate it). Java seems to fall in the middle of the development speed vs. execution speed continuum and seems to combine the worst features of each.
If I'm going to bother with a language that requires an explicit compilation step and is more verbose, I might as well just use C++ and at least get the raw execution speed, lower memory requirements of C++, and easy distribution of the executables. If I'm willing to accept a language that runs more slowly and is harder to distribute to end users, why not just use something that's more concise, gives me a REPL and lets me iterate the development more quickly.
About the only feature from Java that I occasionally miss in C++ is reflection. But I find avoiding that usually keeps my architectures cleaner anyway.