Scratch is awesome. It's simple enough that someone like my 6 year-old nephew can have fun fiddling with it. But it's powerful enough with sophisticated concepts like events, objects, multi-threading, message passing, and more to keep it interesting as you progress. Scratch is like Logo for the 21st century.
My recommendation would be starting off with scratch, then moving on to something like Python.
Re:Hate to Jones in on the thread...
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
I spent the hours rolling my own. Though I had some fun doing it, JungleDisk is much more cost effective.
Re:Hate to Jones in on the thread...
on
What NAS To Buy?
·
· Score: 1
Have you looked into a Pay As You Go cell phone like tracfone? Or how about voice over IP to your house? You might even get by with something like gizmoproject or skype on your computer if you have such a low usage pattern.
Wachovia is training its users to input their credentials on insecure pages. The users have no way of knowing if the page is submitting their credentials to Wachovia's site or somewhere else. The front page could be easily spoofed. Therefore, I don't believe you when you say they are quite serious about their IT security. I think they are more serious about saving some CPU power on their servers by not encrypting the front page. If etrade, paypal, and other security-conscious sites can encrypt their front page, so can Wachovia.
Just last week I decided to try and grab the data from my 3.5" MS-DOS floppies from the late 80's and early 90's. I found about 60 floppies that seemed likely to have interesting data. On loading them in my older Linux laptop (that had a 3.5" floppy drive) I narrowed it to about 15 floppies that I wanted to save. I did a standard file-by-file copy of those disks. Out of the 15 disks containing several hundred files, there were only about 3 files with read errors.
For most of those years the disks were stored indoors in normal living space. For the last 3.5 years they had been in the attic, subject to 100+ F temps in the summer and sub-32 F temps in the winter.
Whitelisting an entire app is too coarse-grained. We need to be able to whitelist the actions that a specific app can take. For example... by default, microsoft word should only have read-only access to its own files and library files needed to run. It should have no net access whatsoever. It should have no access to any of my personal data files. It should have no access to my keyboard when I'm typing in another app. It should have no access to drawing on any portion of my screen outside its own window. It should have no way to spoof another app's name in the window titlebar. It should only have read/write access to the single file that I click "open" on to edit.
Since I have to choose the files I want to work with in a file open dialog anyway, we force microsoft word to use a system-wide, trusted file open dialog which is the only way to grant it access to more files.
...will have two employees: a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment. --Warren G. Bennis
I'm a SunRocket customer. Appears my service isn't working anymore. Does anybody know how to unlock the gizmo so I can use it with a VoIP provider like les.net?
I think the approximate statistic is that Japan has about half the population of the US packed in a landmass approximately the size of California. Trying to "keep up with the Jones's" is much more difficult when there is so much less infrastructure per person to be upgraded in Japan.
When I'm logged into slashdot and browsing news, there's only a very small part of the page that is customized specifically to me. Everything else is the exact same content that everyone else is seeing. Currently the web browser does separate queries to pull down the images in the page, which are mostly the same for everyone. Perhaps under VJ's scheme the text parts that are specific to me would have to come pretty much directly from slashdot's site, but it could contain references to all the common content on the site which would be fully cacheable by his dissemination model.
Instead of slashdot's content authors writing templates that are processed on their servers before giving the web page to my browser, something similar to their template would be shipped to my browser, which would then ask for all the common (cacheable) content to fill out the page. Image-heavy pages would already work well with his scheme if the browser just requested the images using the new semantic.
Nice. Your scheme is very close to mine. I'm just now getting the offsite backups going with 2 USB-enclosed drives swapping between home and a safe deposit box. One thing I do is use hardlinks with rsync on the backup server so that I can store more than 2 snapshots with only an incremental use of space. Maybe that's what you meant about the rsync option.
I have an old PC running linux with a 160 GB drive in it which is my backup server. I use rsync with hard-links to backup my laptop, photos, and music there. My mythtv video is not backed up, because it is so big and I got it for free anyway, I'm not going to cry if the drive fails and I lose it. By using rsync with hard links I can keep several historical snapshots of my data without using up very much space. I get the space savings of incremental backups with the ease-of-use of full snapshots.
I am in the process of creating an off-site backup scheme. For me that entails burning my unchanging data, such as music and photos, to DVD. The more changeable data I will save to an old 40 GB hard drive and an old 60 GB hard drive in USB enclosures. I plan to put the DVDs in a safe deposit box and swap which drive is in the safe deposit box every 3 or 4 weeks. The 40 GB drive was given to me by a friend. For the 60 GB drive, I bought a new 250 GB SATA drive for the mythtv box and reclaimed its 60 GB drive for the offsite rotation scheme. The price per GB of a new 60 GB drive is too high to consider. Why spend $50 on a 60 GB drive for backups when I can spend $80 for a 250 GB drive and upgrade my mythtv at the same time?
With this scheme I will end up with 3 or even 4 physical copies of my most precious data... 1 in use at my house, 1 on the backup server at my house, and 1 on either DVD or a hard drive in the safe deposit box. This should be good enough to survive all but the largest natural disaster or act of war.
I don't think RAID should be the main solution for backups, because there are so many hardware, software, human error, and natural disaster scenarios that it can't handle. Redundant physical copies with as much geographic diversity as practical seems better to me.
If everyone is so concerned about saving energy, why not consider some do-it-yourself solar projects? Here are some projects with 1-year paybacks:
http://builditsolar.com/TopTen/tenoneyearpb.htm
A typical electric heat pump to heat a home has a COP (coefficient of performance) around 3. That means it uses only 1 W of electricity to move 3 W of heat. In other words, the heat pump is 3x as efficient at heating the home as the incandescent light bulb which has a COP of 1. Baseboard electric heat has a COP of 1 too, so it's a wash there with the bulbs. Or is it? The baseboard heat is starting at floor level, so I would say that the heat produced there is more useful to the occupants than heat produced near the ceiling by the light bulbs.
So I think even in a heating-dominated environment the CF still has better overall energy savings than its own power consumption.
The problem with doing your own audits of open source projects is that typically the open source project will have lots of extra bells and whistles and generality that your application doesn't need. It may also depend on various libraries that your application otherwise doesn't need. It may be very difficult to untangle the 20% of functionality that you actually need from the rest of the open source package. In the end, it may be easier to just write a "good enough" solution with only 80% of the features of the 20% you wanted from the open source package. If you write it using your internal libraries and coding standards it is probably easier to review and maintain as well, at least at first.
Of course, within another year or so you will have reimplemented all of the 20% of functionality you originally wanted from the open source software, and even more. The open source software will have advanced as well, but now you will be stuck maintaining a large codebase that still doesn't do as much as you could have had if you used the open source codebase originally.
I follow something similar. I still like having new emails just pop up every now and then, but I leave my email check interval at 30 minutes. That seems like a good balance for me of limiting interruptions but still bounding the latency for the occassional somewhat-urgent items.
I keep my inbox close to zero. I do sometimes allow a few emails to hang around in the inbox. Typically these are high-priority emails that I want to have "in my face". Because it's only a few emails at any time and my inbox is otherwise uncluttered, I can live with this.
I have gmail filter rules that automatically label some of my emails, but they don't file them for me. That saves me the time of labeling them, but I still have to glance at the subject to decide whether to read the email or to file it. Typically for my mailing lists, once it's filed I won't look at it again. I also make use of the delete button in gmail for various spam-like or fluff emails from companies. Personal email is never deleted.
I use the following "getting things done" labels for my email:
@action
@someday_maybe
@waiting_for
Those are in addition to my reference filing labels. Because of the @ symbol, they sort at the top of all the lists in gmail for easy access. I had an @to_read label for a while but decided that I prefer to just put those emails in @someday_maybe.
I have a small project based on sphinx4 that allows command and control of Linux. It is really not ready for primetime yet, but help and feedback is appreciated. I have looked into dictation (for email) with sphinx4 but have not implemented it yet.
I use the petname firefox extension
to help guard against these
attacks. I believe it would have foiled this
attack. It puts an extra "petname" bar in the
corner of your browser. On non-SSL sites it
is white and says "untrusted." On SSL sites
that you have no relationship with, it is yellow
and says "untrusted." If you want to begin a
relationship with an SSL site, you type in a
petname for it. Now it marks your petname with
the fingerprint of the SSL cert and shows a green
bar with the petname you typed in. When you
return to the site, if the SSL cert fingerprint
matches what you previously named,
it again displays green
with the petname. If the cert does not match,
it displays yellow with "untrusted."
It's more complicated to explain than it actually
is to use. The website has a much clearer explanation
with pictures and a whitepaper explaining more
of the theory of petnames.
I still have hopes of archiving my old Atari
diskettes via the sio2pc cable. I have some
school papers (well, paragraphs really)
I wrote in 5th grade on that
machine that I'd like to see again.:)
Glad to hear that your disks still work... bit rot
is a definite concern for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Scratch is awesome. It's simple enough that someone like my 6 year-old nephew can have fun fiddling with it. But it's powerful enough with sophisticated concepts like events, objects, multi-threading, message passing, and more to keep it interesting as you progress. Scratch is like Logo for the 21st century. My recommendation would be starting off with scratch, then moving on to something like Python.
I spent the hours rolling my own. Though I had some fun doing it, JungleDisk is much more cost effective.
Amazon S3 with JungleDisk?
Have you looked into a Pay As You Go cell phone like tracfone? Or how about voice over IP to your house? You might even get by with something like gizmoproject or skype on your computer if you have such a low usage pattern.
Wachovia is training its users to input their credentials on insecure pages. The users have no way of knowing if the page is submitting their credentials to Wachovia's site or somewhere else. The front page could be easily spoofed. Therefore, I don't believe you when you say they are quite serious about their IT security. I think they are more serious about saving some CPU power on their servers by not encrypting the front page. If etrade, paypal, and other security-conscious sites can encrypt their front page, so can Wachovia.
Just last week I decided to try and grab the data from my 3.5" MS-DOS floppies from the late 80's and early 90's. I found about 60 floppies that seemed likely to have interesting data. On loading them in my older Linux laptop (that had a 3.5" floppy drive) I narrowed it to about 15 floppies that I wanted to save. I did a standard file-by-file copy of those disks. Out of the 15 disks containing several hundred files, there were only about 3 files with read errors. For most of those years the disks were stored indoors in normal living space. For the last 3.5 years they had been in the attic, subject to 100+ F temps in the summer and sub-32 F temps in the winter.
Solar thermal energy is much more cost effective than photovoltaics (solar to electricity). Here's a nice paper on solar closets and sunspaces for heating your home: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/solar/solar.html Also check out this guy's archive of posts, mostly to alt.solar.thermal: http://www.ece.villanova.edu/~nick/usenet/
Whitelisting an entire app is too coarse-grained. We need to be able to whitelist the actions that a specific app can take. For example... by default, microsoft word should only have read-only access to its own files and library files needed to run. It should have no net access whatsoever. It should have no access to any of my personal data files. It should have no access to my keyboard when I'm typing in another app. It should have no access to drawing on any portion of my screen outside its own window. It should have no way to spoof another app's name in the window titlebar. It should only have read/write access to the single file that I click "open" on to edit.
Since I have to choose the files I want to work with in a file open dialog anyway, we force microsoft word to use a system-wide, trusted file open dialog which is the only way to grant it access to more files.
See http://plash.beasts.org/ and http://www.eros-os.org/essays/capintro.html
...will have two employees: a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment. --Warren G. Bennis
I'm a SunRocket customer. Appears my service isn't working anymore. Does anybody know how to unlock the gizmo so I can use it with a VoIP provider like les.net?
I think the approximate statistic is that Japan has about half the population of the US packed in a landmass approximately the size of California. Trying to "keep up with the Jones's" is much more difficult when there is so much less infrastructure per person to be upgraded in Japan.
When I'm logged into slashdot and browsing news, there's only a very small part of the page that is customized specifically to me. Everything else is the exact same content that everyone else is seeing. Currently the web browser does separate queries to pull down the images in the page, which are mostly the same for everyone. Perhaps under VJ's scheme the text parts that are specific to me would have to come pretty much directly from slashdot's site, but it could contain references to all the common content on the site which would be fully cacheable by his dissemination model.
Instead of slashdot's content authors writing templates that are processed on their servers before giving the web page to my browser, something similar to their template would be shipped to my browser, which would then ask for all the common (cacheable) content to fill out the page. Image-heavy pages would already work well with his scheme if the browser just requested the images using the new semantic.
Nice. Your scheme is very close to mine. I'm just now getting the offsite backups going with 2 USB-enclosed drives swapping between home and a safe deposit box. One thing I do is use hardlinks with rsync on the backup server so that I can store more than 2 snapshots with only an incremental use of space. Maybe that's what you meant about the rsync option.
I have an old PC running linux with a 160 GB drive in it which is my backup server. I use rsync with hard-links to backup my laptop, photos, and music there. My mythtv video is not backed up, because it is so big and I got it for free anyway, I'm not going to cry if the drive fails and I lose it. By using rsync with hard links I can keep several historical snapshots of my data without using up very much space. I get the space savings of incremental backups with the ease-of-use of full snapshots.
I am in the process of creating an off-site backup scheme. For me that entails burning my unchanging data, such as music and photos, to DVD. The more changeable data I will save to an old 40 GB hard drive and an old 60 GB hard drive in USB enclosures. I plan to put the DVDs in a safe deposit box and swap which drive is in the safe deposit box every 3 or 4 weeks. The 40 GB drive was given to me by a friend. For the 60 GB drive, I bought a new 250 GB SATA drive for the mythtv box and reclaimed its 60 GB drive for the offsite rotation scheme. The price per GB of a new 60 GB drive is too high to consider. Why spend $50 on a 60 GB drive for backups when I can spend $80 for a 250 GB drive and upgrade my mythtv at the same time?
With this scheme I will end up with 3 or even 4 physical copies of my most precious data... 1 in use at my house, 1 on the backup server at my house, and 1 on either DVD or a hard drive in the safe deposit box. This should be good enough to survive all but the largest natural disaster or act of war.
I don't think RAID should be the main solution for backups, because there are so many hardware, software, human error, and natural disaster scenarios that it can't handle. Redundant physical copies with as much geographic diversity as practical seems better to me.
If everyone is so concerned about saving energy, why not consider some do-it-yourself solar projects? Here are some projects with 1-year paybacks: http://builditsolar.com/TopTen/tenoneyearpb.htm
A typical electric heat pump to heat a home has a COP (coefficient of performance) around 3. That means it uses only 1 W of electricity to move 3 W of heat. In other words, the heat pump is 3x as efficient at heating the home as the incandescent light bulb which has a COP of 1. Baseboard electric heat has a COP of 1 too, so it's a wash there with the bulbs. Or is it? The baseboard heat is starting at floor level, so I would say that the heat produced there is more useful to the occupants than heat produced near the ceiling by the light bulbs.
So I think even in a heating-dominated environment the CF still has better overall energy savings than its own power consumption.
The problem with doing your own audits of open source projects is that typically the open source project will have lots of extra bells and whistles and generality that your application doesn't need. It may also depend on various libraries that your application otherwise doesn't need. It may be very difficult to untangle the 20% of functionality that you actually need from the rest of the open source package. In the end, it may be easier to just write a "good enough" solution with only 80% of the features of the 20% you wanted from the open source package. If you write it using your internal libraries and coding standards it is probably easier to review and maintain as well, at least at first.
Of course, within another year or so you will have reimplemented all of the 20% of functionality you originally wanted from the open source software, and even more. The open source software will have advanced as well, but now you will be stuck maintaining a large codebase that still doesn't do as much as you could have had if you used the open source codebase originally.
It can be a tough decision.
I follow something similar. I still like having new emails just pop up every now and then, but I leave my email check interval at 30 minutes. That seems like a good balance for me of limiting interruptions but still bounding the latency for the occassional somewhat-urgent items.
I keep my inbox close to zero. I do sometimes allow a few emails to hang around in the inbox. Typically these are high-priority emails that I want to have "in my face". Because it's only a few emails at any time and my inbox is otherwise uncluttered, I can live with this.
I have gmail filter rules that automatically label some of my emails, but they don't file them for me. That saves me the time of labeling them, but I still have to glance at the subject to decide whether to read the email or to file it. Typically for my mailing lists, once it's filed I won't look at it again. I also make use of the delete button in gmail for various spam-like or fluff emails from companies. Personal email is never deleted.
I use the following "getting things done" labels for my email:
Those are in addition to my reference filing labels. Because of the @ symbol, they sort at the top of all the lists in gmail for easy access. I had an @to_read label for a while but decided that I prefer to just put those emails in @someday_maybe.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/speechlion
This is one I wouldn't mind visiting and has some similarities to what you describe: http://www.stockton.edu/~hossayp/greenhome/
The tours are listed here... I haven't bothered to search for the 2006 listing yet: http://www.ases.org/tour/2005_tour/listings.htm
And of course, there's always: http://www.ourcoolhouse.com/
Windows wants a backdoor into the UK gov't, so let's just call it even.
Check it out... a decentralized trust scheme that overlays on SSL: http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/ There's a mailing list devoted to these topics too: http://www.eros-os.org/mailman/listinfo/cap-talk
I use the petname firefox extension to help guard against these attacks. I believe it would have foiled this attack. It puts an extra "petname" bar in the corner of your browser. On non-SSL sites it is white and says "untrusted." On SSL sites that you have no relationship with, it is yellow and says "untrusted." If you want to begin a relationship with an SSL site, you type in a petname for it. Now it marks your petname with the fingerprint of the SSL cert and shows a green bar with the petname you typed in. When you return to the site, if the SSL cert fingerprint matches what you previously named, it again displays green with the petname. If the cert does not match, it displays yellow with "untrusted."
It's more complicated to explain than it actually is to use. The website has a much clearer explanation with pictures and a whitepaper explaining more of the theory of petnames.
Government proposes to expand taxation... film at 11:00
I still have hopes of archiving my old Atari diskettes via the sio2pc cable. I have some school papers (well, paragraphs really) I wrote in 5th grade on that machine that I'd like to see again. :)
Glad to hear that your disks still work... bit rot
is a definite concern for me.