Nobody wants to hear your opinion about parenting based on your experiences as a child. If you're a parent, you're qualified to offer an opinion (not impose one). If you're not, don't tell this guy how to parent his children. Regardless of whether you are or you aren't, the fact is that this guy has already made a decision to limit his kids' computer time, and you aren't going to convince him otherwise. He's looking for a technical solution - one that may also help other people who need to automate computer timing controls, perhaps for someone not their kids.
Now, back on topic: cron's a good start, but AppleScript can help you. Schedule the command osascript -e "display dialog \"You have five minutes left on the computer\"" & sleep 300 && osascript -e "tell app \"Finder\" to log out" - it's probably a little cleaner of an interface that way. Ampersands sic: the single ampersand causes the first command to run in the background, so the timer starts ticking as soon as the dialog appears. The double ampersand waits for the five minutes to finish. (This isn't the idea behind the different syntaxes, but it's close enough for our purposes.)
Yeah, really. This guy acts as if Slashdot is his own website or something. I mean, if he wants to editorialize, why doesn't he start his own site? I'm sure the founders of Slashdot are regretting they ever gave CmdrTaco editor status....
Have you read this? The Omelette Rant? That's part of the reason.
The other part of the reason is that many people will come in here and suggest things about crashing computers that probably have no relevance to the asker but will be relevant for hundreds of readers of the site. Ask Slashdot is like Dear Abby or something: Abby's not going to answer a question about a specific instance with a specific answer, but she will say something general like marriage counseling because that's usually a good starting point for a lot of people.
Similarly, we don't care if he has a Gateway THX1000 with 512 and a half MB of RAM, and the extra half-megabyte is throwing it off. If the asker wants a real answer, he'd do best to take it to a repair shop. What we get here is comments about GoBack - something I didn't know because I don't have a recent Gateway and I've never had to repair one, but if I see a Gateway it's something I'll check now. Comments about getting UPSes. Comments about NTFS corruption, which may be useful for people who don't know about chkdsk or the Recovery Console. And so forth. An answer to the asker only helps the asker - if it's correct. A comment about buying a UPS saves untold hours of work each for possibly hundreds of people.
Before I get started, let me say that I use mailx more than I use Outlook.
There's one feature of Outlook, though, that I used to use: the Journal. If you're in Microsoft Office, it automatically tracks the time every document opens and closes in a little timeline. If you're not in Office and you remember to use the feature, you can add arbitrary items to the Journal much like you would add address book entries. It's a great way of watching how much time you spend on documents.
god's party is the majority of his favorite country.
That may have been true when Bush won, but Likud seems not to be doing so well now. Speaking of which, what does the election of Bush have to do with Israel?
(You do realize that "God's Favorite Country" cannot apply to the US, right? Israel has a very good claim as His Chosen, and Rome has something about apostolic succession that I don't quite remember since I'm Protestant. Besides, if the US were God's favorite country, why did 9/11 happen? El Al has a pretty good track record as far as avoiding hijackings, by the way....)
Oxygen isn't dangerous per se, but it becomes deadly when it reacts with hydrogen to form dihydrogen monoxide.
This statement is actually correct (though not in the way it was intended): the enthalpy of formation of water is frickin' big. If you have large amounts of hydrogen burning, you don't want to be near it.
Nah, I was doing the same thing.:-) Be careful, though: the "kill -9/bin/lp" won't work because you refer to processes by pid, not by executable name. Try something along the lines of whatever kill `ps|grep|awk` combo he was using elsewhere, or better yet, "killall -9 lp".
I'm I the only engineer here who finds working for their company is 80% political and 20% engineering? I've learned so much about lying and trickery I'm considering running for office.
Why do you think that's exclusive to engineering? Every job is like that. Politics (as in lying and trickery, not as in political philosophy) is the natural result of human relationships. You need to know how to wield it to do anything.
It's from Office Space. He's not quoting the concept, he's quoting the movie. You really can't blame him; he's like the thousands of other people here who think that because a movie is funny, all its lines are funny, too.
By that logic, you must be a citizen of a country with no army, because any country with an army is willing to kill people, and killing people is worse than convicting a Chinese journalist, and you definitely can't support such countries, can you?
It's appropriate to put pressure on Yahoo! as a community. It's stupid to organize a one-man boycott of a giant organization because one guy somewhere did something that you're morally opposed to. I bet you at least one of its executives have committed adultery; does that mean that priests who have Y!Mail accounts support adultery?
Sure, if you can catch my server when it's on (approx 10 AM - 11 PM Central): geoffrey.homeip.net:8080./ajaxchat is the front-end. It's a chat program that also implements LaTeX formulas via artofproblemsolving.com (try sending the message $c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab \cos \theta$ to yourself).
Source:/ajaxchat_put.phps for inserting to the database one message,/ajaxchat_get.phps for retrieving all messages from a user. Uses a MySQL database CREATE TABLE test.chat (user TEXT, message TEXT). And, of course, ajaxchat(.html) as the front-end.
By the way, it doesn't quite work in Internet Explorer. I'm still working on that. Works fine in Mozilla and in Firefox.
Sorry, no hyperlink so the teeming Slashdot hordes don't pwn my desktop computer. If enough people find this useful I may clean it up and move it to a better server.
As far as documentation: the "check for messages" checkbox polls the server about once per second; I haven't figured out a clean way for the script to just wait for the table to have something. Once you click send, it will wait for the message to be sent before clearing the box. Any message with a $ character is sent through LaTeX.
No, it's like JavaScript. That's like saying that humans "are" mammals in a discussion about evolution. I don't care what its technical classification is; I care about what sort of step it is in advancing the Web (or species, as the case may be).
Chartered in 1997 and still only a candidate for accreditation.
That's kinda because you have to graduate a class to be accredited. OP is graduating this year, in the first class. They will be accredited come June, or I'll eat my hat.
undergraduates actually get to do real research.
Olin has only undergraduates, and I find it hard to believe they have no research at all.
DHTML is nothing more than javascript and html. And how the heck are you supposed to use javascript without using the DOM, aka Document Object Model? Talk about buzzword compliant...
Argh, no. You're one of those people who looks at Hungarian notation and thinks it means tacking the variable's declaration type (like "short integer") on it, not its content type (like "area in square meters"), right?
DHTML is composed of JS and HTML, but DHTML is rewriting objects on an HTML page using JS. It is not HTML; it is not JS. It's the model of dynamic webpage content - accessing objects and messing with them, client-side. There are plenty of HTML pages that use JS. Few of them are actually DHTML. (Using JS to spawn popups is most definitely not DHTML.)
DOM is not JS. In fact, it's theoretically unrelated. DOM is a programmable way of getting into XML documents using an object-oriented language. It just so happens that the most common XML-like language is HTML, and the most common object-oriented language used with HTML is JS. JavaScript is a Turing-complete language; there are plenty of ways to use it outside of a web page, let alone the DOM.
And while I'm at it, to respond to the guy somewhere here who said that AJAX was JS: AJAX is something you can do in JS. It is not JS, since it's not a language. It's a methodology.
Re:JavaScript code is the core code - What???
on
Mastering Ajax Websites
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well it is;). It assumes that XMLHttpRequest is implemented in one form or another, it throws an exception when Internet Explorer users have ActiveX disabled, and it doesn't handle Internet Explorer 5.0 (IIRC), which implements the same object, but with a slightly different name
As a rule, you don't post error-checking code in programming discussions. It's assumed that everything's wrapped in a try block.
What I used in my application was copied-and-pasted from Apple's XMLHTTPRequest tutorial, part of function loadXMLdoc(), with appropriate redirects to an error/troubleshooting page if creating the object ultimately failed.
I'm in the first class of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
This is completely off-topic, but...how is it? Where else did you apply? How are the teachers? Is the goal mainly industry (as my dad claims) or also on academia? What field does it focus on (well, engineering of course, but e.g. how much CS is it)? I'm an HS senior applying to Olin as well as a few others, and as information on Olin is rather scarce, I'd like to hear your opinion of it.
A good rule of thumb for knowing when it's appropriate to use Ajax is where you intend on posting something to the server, and then redisplaying the page you just came from.
Completely. AJAX should only be used when you would've POSTed something to the server and made a slight change - both of those are non-bookmarkable and non-addressable. (Good) web designers seem used to when to GET and when to POST, so only use AJAX in the latter case. The general rule for that, by the way, is that POST should change stuff on the server, and GET should only retrieve data. Thus, you can only bookmark a view of data, not a change of it - you've already changed it once you're ready to bookmark.
AJAX can actually help with the entire problem of tabs and forms - if the form only changes data but doesn't update the view, you can use a regular link to see a different view of it.
The other solution is to do what Google Maps does - since they're using AJAX to retrieve views, they have a button called "Link to this view" or something that gives you a context-free URI to that particular view.
Re:JavaScript code is the core code - What???
on
Mastering Ajax Websites
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Particular Way" for browser one... "Particular Way" for browser two... Sounds like in an inherently poor design.
Yeah, because var req; if (window.XMLHTTPRequest) req=new XMLHTTPRequest(); else req=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); is such poor design. (req supports the same capabilities now, regardless of method - that's why he said "create".)
The reason behind this is that XMLHTTPRequest was originally a Microsoft idea using ActiveX. When Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. realized it was a good idea, they needed a way to create that object even though they didn't support ActiveX (justifiably). And Microsoft just kept its original design.
Half the opinions about Ajax is that it's not worth all the effort. Too complex.
Too complex? As compared to what? Having each and every server-side action also generate a page for the user? With AJAX, you can have one or two pages for display, and the rest of the scripts just for sending or retrieving data.
AJAX isn't an end in itself; it's just a tool. It's like JavaScript. Back when the web was old, if you wanted to do data validation for a form (for example), you had to send the page to the server and wait for a new page as a response. When JavaScript became popular and well-enough supported, the webpage itself could check data before sending it to the server - although the checks couldn't be that complicated. AJAX is similar; instead of limiting yourself to either using a new page or client-side data, AJAX lets you use JS to access server-side data.
As a concrete example, play with Google Maps for a couple of minutes, then try using a map from MapQuest. It will quickly start to annoy you that you can't drag the map and that you have to click to a new page to move the map around. GMaps isn't pure AJAX, admittdly, since it deals with picture data - it can just write the image tags to the page and move them around as you drag. But the side text and the map searches are AJAX - when you click search, you don't open a new page with the search results. You can keep using the map; the client will turn your search into an XML request, Google will process it, and send the results back as XML - asynchronously.
For another example, I wrote this week a dead-simple chat program (because I needed a specific feature). It was simpler to write a web app instead of a real app, because the latter would require networking, windowing, and whatnot - the web interface made GUI easy and manual networking irrelevant. Without AJAX, I would need to have the page reload every second to check if there are new messages - very distracting. I had the system asynchronously check for messages in the background, and when one arrived, update just that part without refreshing the page.
AJAX is a tool to be used when necessary. Don't freak out over it, but realize it's there whenever you need to use a more application-like interface instead of a page-like interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody wants to hear your opinion about parenting based on your experiences as a child. If you're a parent, you're qualified to offer an opinion (not impose one). If you're not, don't tell this guy how to parent his children. Regardless of whether you are or you aren't, the fact is that this guy has already made a decision to limit his kids' computer time, and you aren't going to convince him otherwise. He's looking for a technical solution - one that may also help other people who need to automate computer timing controls, perhaps for someone not their kids.
Now, back on topic: cron's a good start, but AppleScript can help you. Schedule the command osascript -e "display dialog \"You have five minutes left on the computer\"" & sleep 300 && osascript -e "tell app \"Finder\" to log out" - it's probably a little cleaner of an interface that way. Ampersands sic: the single ampersand causes the first command to run in the background, so the timer starts ticking as soon as the dialog appears. The double ampersand waits for the five minutes to finish. (This isn't the idea behind the different syntaxes, but it's close enough for our purposes.)
Ooh. The FAQ. Very interesting. But it seems to be missing something.... "What is sarcasm? How do I recognize sarcasm on Slashdot?"
Yeah, really. This guy acts as if Slashdot is his own website or something. I mean, if he wants to editorialize, why doesn't he start his own site? I'm sure the founders of Slashdot are regretting they ever gave CmdrTaco editor status....
Have you read this? The Omelette Rant? That's part of the reason.
The other part of the reason is that many people will come in here and suggest things about crashing computers that probably have no relevance to the asker but will be relevant for hundreds of readers of the site. Ask Slashdot is like Dear Abby or something: Abby's not going to answer a question about a specific instance with a specific answer, but she will say something general like marriage counseling because that's usually a good starting point for a lot of people.
Similarly, we don't care if he has a Gateway THX1000 with 512 and a half MB of RAM, and the extra half-megabyte is throwing it off. If the asker wants a real answer, he'd do best to take it to a repair shop. What we get here is comments about GoBack - something I didn't know because I don't have a recent Gateway and I've never had to repair one, but if I see a Gateway it's something I'll check now. Comments about getting UPSes. Comments about NTFS corruption, which may be useful for people who don't know about chkdsk or the Recovery Console. And so forth. An answer to the asker only helps the asker - if it's correct. A comment about buying a UPS saves untold hours of work each for possibly hundreds of people.
Ask Slashdot is not Experts-Exchange.
Did they not use Google?
Does anyone with near-continuous Internet access really remember metric-customary conversions anymore?
While I'm mentioning Google Calculator, here's another stupid but informative example. (The currency rates are very recent, though not realtime.)
Before I get started, let me say that I use mailx more than I use Outlook.
There's one feature of Outlook, though, that I used to use: the Journal. If you're in Microsoft Office, it automatically tracks the time every document opens and closes in a little timeline. If you're not in Office and you remember to use the feature, you can add arbitrary items to the Journal much like you would add address book entries. It's a great way of watching how much time you spend on documents.
god's party is the majority of his favorite country.
That may have been true when Bush won, but Likud seems not to be doing so well now. Speaking of which, what does the election of Bush have to do with Israel?
(You do realize that "God's Favorite Country" cannot apply to the US, right? Israel has a very good claim as His Chosen, and Rome has something about apostolic succession that I don't quite remember since I'm Protestant. Besides, if the US were God's favorite country, why did 9/11 happen? El Al has a pretty good track record as far as avoiding hijackings, by the way....)
Oxygen isn't dangerous per se, but it becomes deadly when it reacts with hydrogen to form dihydrogen monoxide.
This statement is actually correct (though not in the way it was intended): the enthalpy of formation of water is frickin' big. If you have large amounts of hydrogen burning, you don't want to be near it.
I believe I saw an article on the same topic get posted. Perhaps they rejected it as a dupe?
Nah, I was doing the same thing. :-) Be careful, though: the "kill -9 /bin/lp" won't work because you refer to processes by pid, not by executable name. Try something along the lines of whatever kill `ps|grep|awk` combo he was using elsewhere, or better yet, "killall -9 lp".
In America an engineer has to be 80% politician!
I'm I the only engineer here who finds working for their company is 80% political and 20% engineering? I've learned so much about lying and trickery I'm considering running for office.
Why do you think that's exclusive to engineering? Every job is like that. Politics (as in lying and trickery, not as in political philosophy) is the natural result of human relationships. You need to know how to wield it to do anything.
Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.
It's from Office Space. He's not quoting the concept, he's quoting the movie. You really can't blame him; he's like the thousands of other people here who think that because a movie is funny, all its lines are funny, too.
Now go find us a shrubbery.
Things Yahoo did too:
get some chinese internet journalist convicted...
I don't support such companies...
By that logic, you must be a citizen of a country with no army, because any country with an army is willing to kill people, and killing people is worse than convicting a Chinese journalist, and you definitely can't support such countries, can you?
It's appropriate to put pressure on Yahoo! as a community. It's stupid to organize a one-man boycott of a giant organization because one guy somewhere did something that you're morally opposed to. I bet you at least one of its executives have committed adultery; does that mean that priests who have Y!Mail accounts support adultery?
Yahoo! = Yahoo * Yaho * Yah * Ya * Y, right?
Sure, if you can catch my server when it's on (approx 10 AM - 11 PM Central): geoffrey.homeip.net:8080. /ajaxchat is the front-end. It's a chat program that also implements LaTeX formulas via artofproblemsolving.com (try sending the message $c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2ab \cos \theta$ to yourself).
/ajaxchat_put.phps for inserting to the database one message, /ajaxchat_get.phps for retrieving all messages from a user. Uses a MySQL database CREATE TABLE test.chat (user TEXT, message TEXT). And, of course, ajaxchat(.html) as the front-end.
Source:
By the way, it doesn't quite work in Internet Explorer. I'm still working on that. Works fine in Mozilla and in Firefox.
Sorry, no hyperlink so the teeming Slashdot hordes don't pwn my desktop computer. If enough people find this useful I may clean it up and move it to a better server.
As far as documentation: the "check for messages" checkbox polls the server about once per second; I haven't figured out a clean way for the script to just wait for the table to have something. Once you click send, it will wait for the message to be sent before clearing the box. Any message with a $ character is sent through LaTeX.
No, it's like JavaScript. That's like saying that humans "are" mammals in a discussion about evolution. I don't care what its technical classification is; I care about what sort of step it is in advancing the Web (or species, as the case may be).
Chartered in 1997 and still only a candidate for accreditation.
That's kinda because you have to graduate a class to be accredited. OP is graduating this year, in the first class. They will be accredited come June, or I'll eat my hat.
undergraduates actually get to do real research.
Olin has only undergraduates, and I find it hard to believe they have no research at all.
DHTML is nothing more than javascript and html. And how the heck are you supposed to use javascript without using the DOM, aka Document Object Model? Talk about buzzword compliant...
Argh, no. You're one of those people who looks at Hungarian notation and thinks it means tacking the variable's declaration type (like "short integer") on it, not its content type (like "area in square meters"), right?
DHTML is composed of JS and HTML, but DHTML is rewriting objects on an HTML page using JS. It is not HTML; it is not JS. It's the model of dynamic webpage content - accessing objects and messing with them, client-side. There are plenty of HTML pages that use JS. Few of them are actually DHTML. (Using JS to spawn popups is most definitely not DHTML.)
DOM is not JS. In fact, it's theoretically unrelated. DOM is a programmable way of getting into XML documents using an object-oriented language. It just so happens that the most common XML-like language is HTML, and the most common object-oriented language used with HTML is JS. JavaScript is a Turing-complete language; there are plenty of ways to use it outside of a web page, let alone the DOM.
And while I'm at it, to respond to the guy somewhere here who said that AJAX was JS: AJAX is something you can do in JS. It is not JS, since it's not a language. It's a methodology.
Well it is ;). It assumes that XMLHttpRequest is implemented in one form or another, it throws an exception when Internet Explorer users have ActiveX disabled, and it doesn't handle Internet Explorer 5.0 (IIRC), which implements the same object, but with a slightly different name
As a rule, you don't post error-checking code in programming discussions. It's assumed that everything's wrapped in a try block.
What I used in my application was copied-and-pasted from Apple's XMLHTTPRequest tutorial, part of function loadXMLdoc(), with appropriate redirects to an error/troubleshooting page if creating the object ultimately failed.
I'm in the first class of Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
This is completely off-topic, but...how is it? Where else did you apply? How are the teachers? Is the goal mainly industry (as my dad claims) or also on academia? What field does it focus on (well, engineering of course, but e.g. how much CS is it)? I'm an HS senior applying to Olin as well as a few others, and as information on Olin is rather scarce, I'd like to hear your opinion of it.
Though my ID isn't under 750204.
Yes it is. 666 < 750204. You think Slashcode puts you as zero? Lower than CmdrTaco himself?
A good rule of thumb for knowing when it's appropriate to use Ajax is where you intend on posting something to the server, and then redisplaying the page you just came from.
Completely. AJAX should only be used when you would've POSTed something to the server and made a slight change - both of those are non-bookmarkable and non-addressable. (Good) web designers seem used to when to GET and when to POST, so only use AJAX in the latter case. The general rule for that, by the way, is that POST should change stuff on the server, and GET should only retrieve data. Thus, you can only bookmark a view of data, not a change of it - you've already changed it once you're ready to bookmark.
AJAX can actually help with the entire problem of tabs and forms - if the form only changes data but doesn't update the view, you can use a regular link to see a different view of it.
The other solution is to do what Google Maps does - since they're using AJAX to retrieve views, they have a button called "Link to this view" or something that gives you a context-free URI to that particular view.
"Particular Way" for browser one ... "Particular Way" for browser two ...
Sounds like in an inherently poor design.
Yeah, because var req; if (window.XMLHTTPRequest) req=new XMLHTTPRequest(); else req=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); is such poor design. (req supports the same capabilities now, regardless of method - that's why he said "create".)
The reason behind this is that XMLHTTPRequest was originally a Microsoft idea using ActiveX. When Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. realized it was a good idea, they needed a way to create that object even though they didn't support ActiveX (justifiably). And Microsoft just kept its original design.
Half the opinions about Ajax is that it's not worth all the effort. Too complex.
Too complex? As compared to what? Having each and every server-side action also generate a page for the user? With AJAX, you can have one or two pages for display, and the rest of the scripts just for sending or retrieving data.
AJAX isn't an end in itself; it's just a tool. It's like JavaScript. Back when the web was old, if you wanted to do data validation for a form (for example), you had to send the page to the server and wait for a new page as a response. When JavaScript became popular and well-enough supported, the webpage itself could check data before sending it to the server - although the checks couldn't be that complicated. AJAX is similar; instead of limiting yourself to either using a new page or client-side data, AJAX lets you use JS to access server-side data.
As a concrete example, play with Google Maps for a couple of minutes, then try using a map from MapQuest. It will quickly start to annoy you that you can't drag the map and that you have to click to a new page to move the map around. GMaps isn't pure AJAX, admittdly, since it deals with picture data - it can just write the image tags to the page and move them around as you drag. But the side text and the map searches are AJAX - when you click search, you don't open a new page with the search results. You can keep using the map; the client will turn your search into an XML request, Google will process it, and send the results back as XML - asynchronously.
For another example, I wrote this week a dead-simple chat program (because I needed a specific feature). It was simpler to write a web app instead of a real app, because the latter would require networking, windowing, and whatnot - the web interface made GUI easy and manual networking irrelevant. Without AJAX, I would need to have the page reload every second to check if there are new messages - very distracting. I had the system asynchronously check for messages in the background, and when one arrived, update just that part without refreshing the page.
AJAX is a tool to be used when necessary. Don't freak out over it, but realize it's there whenever you need to use a more application-like interface instead of a page-like interface.