The more the logic is separated from the code, the better.
I am an artist/designer with a bit of programming skill. I used to use Gallery as the backend for my site. Gallery 1.x spits out horrible, ugly table-based HTML. And this HTML is intimately entwined with its PHP code. I browbeat it into making reasonably clean HTML that I could style. It took a hell of a long time, because I had to dissect and understand a lot of its PHP code. I pretty much got a working knowledge of PHP doing this.
Then updates happened. I'd had to so extensively modify Gallery that merging my design with the updates was a bigger task than doing them from scratch was. And the 2.x strain of it, while it has a templating system, has a terrible case of second-system effect - it's huge.
I switched to Singapore. It was close to being my original choice, but it lacked a couple of features it's since added. I was able to exactly duplicate my design in a couple of days, because its templates are firmly separated from its logic. It would have taken even less time, but I took the opportunity to clean up my code a little.
Singapore just updated. I haven't updated my installation yet, but it's a task that actually seems possible.
Of course, you also have to be willing to spend five years of your life polishing the thing.
Re:Jealousy is a terrible thing. In the meantime..
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
·
· Score: 1
The 'really creative computer users' bit jumped out at me. I consider myself pretty creative - I make my living as a freelance artist - and the most customizing I've ever done to the hardware was spray-painting a zebra pattern on my Amiga 2000 back in the early nineties!
I think this article's supposed to be a joke. Or even making fun of diehard PC folks. Or a troll to increase ad impressions - maybe all of the above.
Well, if you're already enough into a particular mouse to have a preference for it, there's nothing stopping you from yanking it from your Windows box and plugging it into your shiny new Mac!
I mean, I prefer a tablet to a mouse (reduces carpal tunnel advancement a LOT, and it keeps people the hell off my computer). When I got a new machine, my tablet stayed in use, even though the machine it was connected to didn't.
And if you're getting the company to buy you a new computer, you can't get them to spend $40 for Your Favorite Mouse, and keep the Mighty Mouse around for a spare mouse?
Yes - but in a different way. Safari renders HTML using a system component called WebKit. A growing number of tools use WebKit to provide rich text display - for instance, Adium, Fire, and Colloquy (two IM clients and an IRC one) use it for their very pretty message displays. Mail uses it for showing HTML email. Most apps use a WebKit-based help viewer.
So, like an IE hole hitting you no matter if you use IE or not, a WebKit hole can be opened from a lot of places. On the other hand, patches generally get rolled out pretty quickly, and there's nothing quite as system-exposing as ActiveX to worry about!!
*shrug* It's a place where I can fool around and look like this or this or this.
On the other hand, I don't go there much except for spates of avatar-hacking, because my laptop doesn't run it too well, and the conversation UI is like a bad IRC client. I'd rather go to SL and make something myself than go to WoW and endlessly grind to make a few numbers increase on a server, though.
Compare and contrast: the state of the television animation industry before and after "overseas" became a common word; the state of the IT industry before and after "outsourcing" became a common word.
There's a lot more cartoons on the tube, but not many more jobs in the States involved in making them.
LJ lets you fill in the 'mood' field by selecting from a dropdown, or from typing in arbitrary text. Looking at my recent LJ entries, I see things like "pretty good, all things considered" and "out of Coke" along with the 'normal' ones like "tired". And a lot of entries with no mood data.
This thing is probably only surveying the Official Moods, but maybe they're looking for commonalities in freeform moods, as well. It's all displayed as a text string anyway.
Ah, are you one of those people who encodes all track data in the file structure, rather than the id3 tags? I can see why you'd hate iTunes. iTunes really really really wants you to not give a damn about the file structure and filename, and doesn't have any support for parsing 'Ozric Tentacles/Live Underslunky/03-Erpland.mp3'* into something usable.
I swear and curse whenever I get music from people like you, because I have to tag it manually. There are tools out there to try and do this automatically, but I've never had enough untagged files to be worth figuring out how to configure them. And the wide variety of naming formats people use makes these tools kind of fragile, though if you've ripped all your tracks and followed a consistent naming format, it should be easier.
I used to use Audion, then I switched to iTunes because so many Mac tools interacted with it interestingly; both of these will put album name, artist, etc, in the id3 tags of the tracks when they rip, so aside from losing my custom Audion skins, the switch was painless.
So now under bands I have "Beatles" and "The Beatles" [...]
I could go through and standardize the naming of all of the mp3s I've been collecting since 1997....Um...ya....no.</i>
It's pretty easy!
1. go to the search box in the main iTunes interface 2. type 'beatles' 3. select all (edit->select all) 4. file->get info 5. type 'The Beatles' into the 'artist' field (or whatever version of the name you prefer) 6. hit 'ok', sit back and wait while iTunes updates all those tags.
Am I the only person who thought "So why are games about gunslingers inherently focused on the character in a way all other RPGs aren't?" before clicking through to the article?
But then again I'm currently playing <i>Curse of Monkey Island</i> for the first time. I don't keep up with the cutting edge of gaming any more.
Yknow, an RPG set in the Old West could be kinda fun. (Or the Future West. Wait, wasn't that the much-loved <i>Wasteland?</i>)
Uh-huh. Yeah. You know, Tinyfugue had support for "portals" that would bounce you from one MU* to another, and I never saw those used.
Different worlds, different characters. Maybe sometimes they're the same character dressed for the realm, maybe you're boring and play the same character everywhere you go with as little change for the world as possible... or maybe there're a few underlying themes, which you mix and match with a dose of whatever inspiration comes to mind? Reinvent yourself for a new world, and maybe learn something about who you are.
For my library of something around 2000 books (ruined by Katrina) I used a little something called 'the alphabet'. It's kind of an old technology, you might not have heard of it...
More precisely: alphabetize fiction by author, then sort by loose groupings of sequels/chronological order (as you please). Some non-fiction may be sorted as fiction to make a statement. Sort reference books by subject; I arranged them mostly by weight, keeping the heavy volumes near the bottom to help shelf stability.
Leave space on shelves to create room for expansion. Place tchotchkes and knick-knacks in these gaps if you please.
Note that this can result in lots of 'wasted space' if you shelve hardbacks with paperbacks, as I do. I looked at it as 'breathing room' instead, and enjoyed the fact that I never had trouble removing books from the shelves as I might have if they were shelved for maximal space efficiency. I also enjoyed the lack of paranoia about them tipping over from being seriously overloaded.
Be willing for The Library to be a major design element of your home. If you're not - start selling those suckers off. Or wait for your local disaster, as I did.
It's <i>your</i> library, a record of what made <i>your</i> mind. Arrange it in a way that suits your needs. If this is not strict Dewey Decimal/Library of Congress, spend a little time just looking vacantly into space through your shelves now and then to reinforce your mental map of the things.
PS. Bookcases suck. They cost a lot for the amount of shelf space they give you and really limit how you can place the shelves.
"Say Rockstar came out with a game in which you're a Nazi, trying to take over Europe."
They never would. Not for social reasons, but for financial ones: Germany has laws that forbid Nazi imagery, including in games. And Germans buy a hell of a lot of games. Putting Nazis in games means you're cutting off a fairly significant market.
This is why Activision's "Battlezone" is an alternate-history Cold War game: it was going to be an alternate-history WWII game, until they realized that they couldn't sell a game where you can play the Nazis in Germany.
* fewer backup schedules to deal with * less impact on the environment to make one machine than two * less power consumed * no hassle with moving data around for testing - that website in development stays in one place * only one to take on the plane with you - wanna get some work done? do it on the Mac. wanna play "The 500 Guns of Grunty McShootsalot"? do it on Windows, running on the Mac. * no godawful Windows-world attempts at case design, or boring beige box cases, uglying up your life
Which one are they going to come back to ten years later - the one that sold based on its hot graphics that look laughably dated now, or the sleeper hit that might not have been pretty, but is tons of fun to play?
I mean, I have about two hundred and fifty people reading my blog, according to the stats Livejournal gives me. Less who comment regularly.
Some of them are there for my art. I'm a professional artist, I post finished stuff and a lot of my rough sketches.
Some of them are there for the essays I occasionally write about the weird subjects I get into. Or for the amusingly odd throwaway thoughts I have now and then.
Some of them are there for the ongoing story of my gender transition. I talk frankly about it sometimes. Hell, before I started transition, I devoured similar stories myself, in blog and other forms.
If all you have to say in a blog is "here's a link from Slashdot, here's a link from Gizmodo, here's a link from BoingBoing", not many people are going to read it. If all you have is the minutae of your daily life only people close to you will be even halfway interested.
If you have something to say, you can find an audience. I've never tried to promote my blog. I just write it. The audience found me.
Meanwhile, most people I've known have one HD with one partition, and one user. And Windows has trained them that major problems are best solved by reinstalling the whole system anyway. Hell, if something trashed my user directory, I sure wouldn't want to trust that it hadn't dropped other little surprises somewhere.
And... backups? What're those? *innocent blink*
Most folks don't have someone to enforce separation of user data and system data; the way the machines are sold kinda discourages it. If they live in a house with a sysadmin type they might, assuming there hasn't been religious wars about OSs that result in the sysadmin type being forbidden to touch their machines on pain of death. (I've seen that.)
Whatever the Unixism is for 'delete all files in the current user's home directory'. I don't keep command line stuff swapped into my head most of the time.
this exploit can only affect items that the user has rights to
Like ~/Documents/ where you're encouraged to store pretty much everything you make with your machine. Or ~/Pictures/ where iPhoto keeps everything it loads up. Or ~/Music/ where iTunes puts all your music. Or wherever the hell iMovie keeps what you build with it - probably either ~/Movies/ or ~/Documents/ Or wherever the hell GarageBand keeps its work.
Sure, the machine still boots. But if a script does rm -rf ~*.* you're kinda fucked. Why is it that Slashdotters always say 'oh, this exploit just affects userland, no big deal'?
Slashdot Mirror
his two-dimensional text editor
As always, the central question of 'what's this story about?' is not a link. Sigh.
Obviously, you'll want to name that electrical being "Grendel".
The more the logic is separated from the code, the better.
I am an artist/designer with a bit of programming skill. I used to use Gallery as the backend for my site. Gallery 1.x spits out horrible, ugly table-based HTML. And this HTML is intimately entwined with its PHP code. I browbeat it into making reasonably clean HTML that I could style. It took a hell of a long time, because I had to dissect and understand a lot of its PHP code. I pretty much got a working knowledge of PHP doing this.
Then updates happened. I'd had to so extensively modify Gallery that merging my design with the updates was a bigger task than doing them from scratch was. And the 2.x strain of it, while it has a templating system, has a terrible case of second-system effect - it's huge.
I switched to Singapore. It was close to being my original choice, but it lacked a couple of features it's since added. I was able to exactly duplicate my design in a couple of days, because its templates are firmly separated from its logic. It would have taken even less time, but I took the opportunity to clean up my code a little.
Singapore just updated. I haven't updated my installation yet, but it's a task that actually seems possible.
Of course, you also have to be willing to spend five years of your life polishing the thing.
The 'really creative computer users' bit jumped out at me. I consider myself pretty creative - I make my living as a freelance artist - and the most customizing I've ever done to the hardware was spray-painting a zebra pattern on my Amiga 2000 back in the early nineties!
I think this article's supposed to be a joke. Or even making fun of diehard PC folks. Or a troll to increase ad impressions - maybe all of the above.
Well, if you're already enough into a particular mouse to have a preference for it, there's nothing stopping you from yanking it from your Windows box and plugging it into your shiny new Mac!
I mean, I prefer a tablet to a mouse (reduces carpal tunnel advancement a LOT, and it keeps people the hell off my computer). When I got a new machine, my tablet stayed in use, even though the machine it was connected to didn't.
And if you're getting the company to buy you a new computer, you can't get them to spend $40 for Your Favorite Mouse, and keep the Mighty Mouse around for a spare mouse?
Yes - but in a different way. Safari renders HTML using a system component called WebKit. A growing number of tools use WebKit to provide rich text display - for instance, Adium, Fire, and Colloquy (two IM clients and an IRC one) use it for their very pretty message displays. Mail uses it for showing HTML email. Most apps use a WebKit-based help viewer.
So, like an IE hole hitting you no matter if you use IE or not, a WebKit hole can be opened from a lot of places. On the other hand, patches generally get rolled out pretty quickly, and there's nothing quite as system-exposing as ActiveX to worry about!!
*shrug* It's a place where I can fool around and look like this or this or this.
On the other hand, I don't go there much except for spates of avatar-hacking, because my laptop doesn't run it too well, and the conversation UI is like a bad IRC client. I'd rather go to SL and make something myself than go to WoW and endlessly grind to make a few numbers increase on a server, though.
Compare and contrast: the state of the television animation industry before and after "overseas" became a common word; the state of the IT industry before and after "outsourcing" became a common word.
There's a lot more cartoons on the tube, but not many more jobs in the States involved in making them.
Try using the Flash editor to make anything serious. It's pretty sucky.
(former Flash animator/director.)
LJ lets you fill in the 'mood' field by selecting from a dropdown, or from typing in arbitrary text. Looking at my recent LJ entries, I see things like "pretty good, all things considered" and "out of Coke" along with the 'normal' ones like "tired". And a lot of entries with no mood data.
This thing is probably only surveying the Official Moods, but maybe they're looking for commonalities in freeform moods, as well. It's all displayed as a text string anyway.
The dropdown contains:
accomplished, aggravated, amused, angry, annoyed, anxious, apathetic, artistic, awake, bitchy, blah, blank, bored, bouncy, busy, calm, cheerful, chipper, cold, complacent, confused, contemplative, content, cranky, crappy, crazy, creative, crushed, curious, cynical, depressed, determined, devious, dirty, disappointed, discontent, distressed, ditzy, dorky, drained, drunk, ecstatic, embarrassed, energetic, enraged, enthralled, envious, exanimate, excited, exhausted, flirty, frustrated, full, geeky, giddy, giggly, gloomy, good, grateful, groggy, grumpy, guilty, happy, high, hopeful, horny, hot, hungry, hyper, impressed, indescribable, indifferent, infuriated, intimidated, irate, irritated, jealous, jubilant, lazy, lethargic, listless, lonely, loved, melancholy, mellow, mischievous, moody, morose, naughty, nauseated, nerdy, nervous, nostalgic, numb, okay, optimistic, peaceful, pensive, pessimistic, pissed off, pleased, predatory, productive, quixotic, recumbent, refreshed, rejected, rejuvenated, relaxed, relieved, restless, rushed, sad, satisfied, scared, shocked, sick, silly, sleepy, sore, stressed, surprised, sympathetic, thankful, thirsty, thoughtful, tired, touched, uncomfortable, weird, working, worried
Ah, are you one of those people who encodes all track data in the file structure, rather than the id3 tags? I can see why you'd hate iTunes. iTunes really really really wants you to not give a damn about the file structure and filename, and doesn't have any support for parsing 'Ozric Tentacles/Live Underslunky/03-Erpland.mp3'* into something usable.
I swear and curse whenever I get music from people like you, because I have to tag it manually. There are tools out there to try and do this automatically, but I've never had enough untagged files to be worth figuring out how to configure them. And the wide variety of naming formats people use makes these tools kind of fragile, though if you've ripped all your tracks and followed a consistent naming format, it should be easier.
I used to use Audion, then I switched to iTunes because so many Mac tools interacted with it interestingly; both of these will put album name, artist, etc, in the id3 tags of the tracks when they rip, so aside from losing my custom Audion skins, the switch was painless.
*to use what happens to be playing at the moment
So now under bands I have "Beatles" and "The Beatles" [...]
I could go through and standardize the naming of all of the mp3s I've been collecting since 1997....Um...ya....no.</i>
It's pretty easy!
1. go to the search box in the main iTunes interface
2. type 'beatles'
3. select all (edit->select all)
4. file->get info
5. type 'The Beatles' into the 'artist' field (or whatever version of the name you prefer)
6. hit 'ok', sit back and wait while iTunes updates all those tags.
Am I the only person who thought "So why are games about gunslingers inherently focused on the character in a way all other RPGs aren't?" before clicking through to the article?
But then again I'm currently playing <i>Curse of Monkey Island</i> for the first time. I don't keep up with the cutting edge of gaming any more.
Yknow, an RPG set in the Old West could be kinda fun. (Or the Future West. Wait, wasn't that the much-loved <i>Wasteland?</i>)
Uh-huh. Yeah. You know, Tinyfugue had support for "portals" that would bounce you from one MU* to another, and I never saw those used.
Different worlds, different characters. Maybe sometimes they're the same character dressed for the realm, maybe you're boring and play the same character everywhere you go with as little change for the world as possible... or maybe there're a few underlying themes, which you mix and match with a dose of whatever inspiration comes to mind? Reinvent yourself for a new world, and maybe learn something about who you are.
For my library of something around 2000 books (ruined by Katrina) I used a little something called 'the alphabet'. It's kind of an old technology, you might not have heard of it...
More precisely: alphabetize fiction by author, then sort by loose groupings of sequels/chronological order (as you please). Some non-fiction may be sorted as fiction to make a statement. Sort reference books by subject; I arranged them mostly by weight, keeping the heavy volumes near the bottom to help shelf stability.
Leave space on shelves to create room for expansion. Place tchotchkes and knick-knacks in these gaps if you please.
Note that this can result in lots of 'wasted space' if you shelve hardbacks with paperbacks, as I do. I looked at it as 'breathing room' instead, and enjoyed the fact that I never had trouble removing books from the shelves as I might have if they were shelved for maximal space efficiency. I also enjoyed the lack of paranoia about them tipping over from being seriously overloaded.
Be willing for The Library to be a major design element of your home. If you're not - start selling those suckers off. Or wait for your local disaster, as I did.
It's <i>your</i> library, a record of what made <i>your</i> mind. Arrange it in a way that suits your needs. If this is not strict Dewey Decimal/Library of Congress, spend a little time just looking vacantly into space through your shelves now and then to reinforce your mental map of the things.
PS. Bookcases suck. They cost a lot for the amount of shelf space they give you and really limit how you can place the shelves.
Photoshop -> Paint ...Maybe not.
"Say Rockstar came out with a game in which you're a Nazi, trying to take over Europe."
They never would. Not for social reasons, but for financial ones: Germany has laws that forbid Nazi imagery, including in games. And Germans buy a hell of a lot of games. Putting Nazis in games means you're cutting off a fairly significant market.
This is why Activision's "Battlezone" is an alternate-history Cold War game: it was going to be an alternate-history WWII game, until they realized that they couldn't sell a game where you can play the Nazis in Germany.
Only one computer means:
* fewer backup schedules to deal with
* less impact on the environment to make one machine than two
* less power consumed
* no hassle with moving data around for testing - that website in development stays in one place
* only one to take on the plane with you - wanna get some work done? do it on the Mac. wanna play "The 500 Guns of Grunty McShootsalot"? do it on Windows, running on the Mac.
* no godawful Windows-world attempts at case design, or boring beige box cases, uglying up your life
Please, My Dear Aunt Sally.
Being polite to your elders helps you remember that things in Parenthesis precede the basic Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction!
Which one are they going to come back to ten years later - the one that sold based on its hot graphics that look laughably dated now, or the sleeper hit that might not have been pretty, but is tons of fun to play?
People who they resonate with.
I mean, I have about two hundred and fifty people reading my blog, according to the stats Livejournal gives me. Less who comment regularly.
Some of them are there for my art. I'm a professional artist, I post finished stuff and a lot of my rough sketches.
Some of them are there for the essays I occasionally write about the weird subjects I get into. Or for the amusingly odd throwaway thoughts I have now and then.
Some of them are there for the ongoing story of my gender transition. I talk frankly about it sometimes. Hell, before I started transition, I devoured similar stories myself, in blog and other forms.
If all you have to say in a blog is "here's a link from Slashdot, here's a link from Gizmodo, here's a link from BoingBoing", not many people are going to read it. If all you have is the minutae of your daily life only people close to you will be even halfway interested.
If you have something to say, you can find an audience. I've never tried to promote my blog. I just write it. The audience found me.
Meanwhile, most people I've known have one HD with one partition, and one user. And Windows has trained them that major problems are best solved by reinstalling the whole system anyway. Hell, if something trashed my user directory, I sure wouldn't want to trust that it hadn't dropped other little surprises somewhere.
And... backups? What're those? *innocent blink*
Most folks don't have someone to enforce separation of user data and system data; the way the machines are sold kinda discourages it. If they live in a house with a sysadmin type they might, assuming there hasn't been religious wars about OSs that result in the sysadmin type being forbidden to touch their machines on pain of death. (I've seen that.)
Whatever the Unixism is for 'delete all files in the current user's home directory'. I don't keep command line stuff swapped into my head most of the time.
this exploit can only affect items that the user has rights to
Like ~/Documents/ where you're encouraged to store pretty much everything you make with your machine.
Or ~/Pictures/ where iPhoto keeps everything it loads up.
Or ~/Music/ where iTunes puts all your music.
Or wherever the hell iMovie keeps what you build with it - probably either ~/Movies/ or ~/Documents/
Or wherever the hell GarageBand keeps its work.
Sure, the machine still boots. But if a script does rm -rf ~*.* you're kinda fucked. Why is it that Slashdotters always say 'oh, this exploit just affects userland, no big deal'?