The -c -dev jpeg options make a big difference. At a pinch, converting the pages into jpegs, and reading these on Kindle would be doable, but you lose the ability to resize the paper onscreen (I found the default fontsize given by pdftohtml too small to be useful). I wouldn't sell the result to customers, though.
Also, it would be desirable to have hyperlinks in the document, but my current PDF doesn't have them. With a bit of effort, I could get these, I suppose, or figure out why latex2html doesn't work too well (or try out l2h).
But Kindle doesn't seem to make it easy by not natively supporting PDF, which is my main point of this thread.
Really? - it looks like an unreadable mess to me, even worse than what latex2html does.
Of course you may think it was undreadable to start with:), but that's not the point!
I recently had reader of my book Theory of Nothing ask for a Kindle friendly version of the book. I had flirted with Amazon's ebook program, but the DRM requirements, the proprietry format, and the excessive price tag made this a non-starter. From the beginning a plain, unencumbered PDF was available to purchasers of my book, which I used to email out on request. But eventually I just made it a free download.
Anyway, I mentioned this to him, and he tried out Amazon's PDF->mobipocket conversion service, but the result was dreadful. I had a bit of a read of the Kindle website, and looked at trying to create an HTML version of my book to see if that worked any better. The problem was that HTML conversion failed about halfway through the book, on top of the usual crappy representation of figures, equations etc. So this was a nonstarter too.
Most of my literature I keep on my laptop for a rainy day is PDF (or can be easily converted to such). Without a practical PDF display option, Kindle should be given a wide berth, in my opinion.
Absolutely. The other issue in this argument is that not all steps in the "Great Filter" are equally hard. Based on the fact the life got going on Earth pretty quickly, but took more than 3 billion years to evolve complex life forms, I suspect that simple (ie bacteria-like) life forms might be rather common in the universe, but things like animals and plants are not.
Anything unencrypted is pretty much fair game. Particularly email.
Getting root access to a linux box when you have the hardware is fairly trivial, unless the deceased owner was so paranoid as to lock the BIOS, in which case moving the disk drive to another machine is fairly simple. Knoppix is a useful tool for this.
Once access to the account is arranged, it maybe possible to gain access to Gmail etc accounts by means of stored passwords in the web browser. This may require some detective work to figure out exactly what browser is being used, but its not rocket science. One should also check accounts listed in.ssh/config as well.
As for ethics - I would hope that someone does this to my machine after I'm gone. In particular looking for unfinished works. However, I suspect that I won't be sufficiently important for anyone to bother! Anything I really, really don't want read, I encrypt with GPG, and don't leave the password for that lying around.
This new posting system chewed my last comment, so forgive me for being a little short.
I used FWeb (Fortran version of CWeb) a while back for a project, but discovered that debugging was extremely hard for exactly the same reason Bjarne Stroustrup warns against excessive use of macros. Line numbers do not correlate between the debugger and the source code. Often you just end up debugging intermediate code instead of the source. Also a problem was that the target of FWeb was a printed page (or equivalently a postscript file) which is hard to navigate.
I found that Doxygen (coupled with C++) implements the best features of literate programming without these detriments.
In the case of OO, yes. Microsoft do not make a version of their product for my preferred OS Linux. Prior to OO being available, I was forced to run MSWord under Wine, which often caused more problems than it solved. Invariably I would be telling the moron that.doc is not an accepted Internet standard, and that if they wanted me to read the document they just sent me, they would have to find an Internet standard to encode it in (which at the time either meant Postscript, or something like TIFF), or more usually I'd just ask them to send it to me as a hard copy (or via fax), and I would respond the same way, as this was easier than trying to explain to some MS weenie what postscript was.
OpenOffice caused a lot of aggrevation to just go away.
No, all one would need to do is provide an algorithm for generating it. Then one could say that pi is the limiting value produced by the following algorithm:...
I suspect prior art might get you in the end though. Such formulae have been known for a long time.
FVWM has had this since when I started using it in 1996. I still use FVWM actually, in spite of it being so ancient. It feels superior to both Gnome and KDE.
The author is coy about what the 'f' stands for, but I'll let you fill in the blanks. 'v' is for virtual.
I noticed that the page Intel returned said that the site was slashdotted! How did they do this? I know one can get the referrer details to know that you're coming from slashdot, but in a website overloaded situation how could they run a CGI scipt at all?
Having struggled initially with trying to run MSWord under some kind of emulator (first Wabi, then Wine), StarOffice then OpenOffice was a godsend. Sure it has some compatibility problems with Word, but they are fewer than the compatibility problems I had with the version of Word I was licensed to use on the emulator.
When recently I needed to start using MSWindows for a particular job, my choice of office tool on Windows was OO, simply because the user interface is identical to OO on Linux. MSOffice was sufficiently different for me not to bother.
What is the historical basis for claiming that NeXT gave rise to the Web browser? Was NCSA Mosaic developed on a NeXT? Or are you referring to an earlier browser?
Interesting. In Australia, "your welcome" was rarely heard, it was always considered a bit of an Americanism. The response (if any) would be something like "no problems", "no worries", "she'll be apples" or even "no wuckers" (I'll leave you to figure that out - it involves a four letter word).
However, recently I've noticed that "your welcome" has been on the increase in Oz - perhaps its being exported downunder.
Maybe the tools I happen to use instead of VS: emacs, gcc, gdb and make.
Yes, VS has some nice features - the ability to directly to the definition of a variable of function (not that it gets this right all the time!) for instance. But it also has some shockers - its insane build system, which makes make's arcane build system look like a cake walk. Also some things are not at all obvious, like how to set the name of the executable for the debugger for instance. I wasted more than an hour on this particular stupidity.
Because I need to run my codes on supercomputers, which these days invariably run some flavour of Linux, I need to know how to drive my linux toolchain. It works quite well, and I have few complaints. By contrast, VS is just an annoying distraction.
The use of a plastic chopstick also works well to open the earth pin. I had to use this recently in Singapore, which enabled me to use European round pin adaptors in UK square pin socket.
I'd bet on LaTeX in this stable - its a widely used plain ASCII format that is more or less understandable to humans without a LaTeX compiler.
I still have LaTeX documents from 18 years ago that I can read, and could compile with minor modifications if needed. The same cannot be said of the word processor documents from the same era.
I first heard about PDF in 1995, but it wasn't until around 2000 that software existed to actually do stuff with it.
I still don't do anything in PDF that can't be done in postscript - in fact I still just produce the postscript and only convert to PDF because not many people have heard of postscript.
Hear, hear. I set up Gnome a few years ago for my wife, thinking maybe I'll upgrade to Gnome or KDE soon. Using it a few time convinced me to stay with fvwm, which I have used since 1996. I have also used a few KDE machines at work, and feel likewise.
I do use some of the neat tools from both KDE and Gnome - eg CD players, etc., which work just fine under fvwm. The naming convention abused before give a nice way of searching for them - under bash:
g
k
etc.
Re:Emacs is nice, but conceptually dated...
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
Nice tip! I never new how to enter those accented characters, TeX mode input is fabulous.
Mostly these threads focus on comments and naming conventions. One of the most important coding styles I've adhered to for the last decade is to always encapsulate new and delete within a class. This ensures every new has a corresponding delete called when the class's destructor is called. Use C++ automatic variable declarations to control object lifetimes. The only time I've had a memory leak in the last 10 years was when I had to break this coding standard (eg for library compatibility).
The second most important coding style is to use pointers only when necessary - some graph algorithms need them, and so do some "legacy" C libraries. Otherwise, use references - there in the language for that purpose.
The 3rd most important coding style is use standard library container syntax whereever it makes sense. Even if you write your own container libraries - follow standard library conventions. Makes it much easier for other coders to follow.
After this follow a bunch of useful stuff - eg ensure that meaningful default, copy constructors and assignments are available for your class, use the const keyword wherever it makes sense
On the subject of naming conventions - naming conventions can lie! Tools like doxygen will quickly tell you what a particular indentifier refers to in a particular context. If not, then grep is pretty handy at working it out. However, often one wants to use the same name for type names and instance names - a convention like first letter upper case for typenames, or appended _t can help the addled brain.
Throw open a question now - any good tips for organising namespace names, and macro names to avoid the inevitable clashes?
Slashdot Mirror
The -c -dev jpeg options make a big difference. At a pinch, converting the pages into jpegs, and reading these on Kindle would be doable, but you lose the ability to resize the paper onscreen (I found the default fontsize given by pdftohtml too small to be useful). I wouldn't sell the result to customers, though.
Also, it would be desirable to have hyperlinks in the document, but my current PDF doesn't have them. With a bit of effort, I could get these, I suppose, or figure out why latex2html doesn't work too well (or try out l2h).
But Kindle doesn't seem to make it easy by not natively supporting PDF, which is my main point of this thread.
Really? - it looks like an unreadable mess to me, even worse than what latex2html does. Of course you may think it was undreadable to start with :), but that's not the point!
I recently had reader of my book Theory of Nothing ask for a Kindle friendly version of the book. I had flirted with Amazon's ebook program, but the DRM requirements, the proprietry format, and the excessive price tag made this a non-starter. From the beginning a plain, unencumbered PDF was available to purchasers of my book, which I used to email out on request. But eventually I just made it a free download.
Anyway, I mentioned this to him, and he tried out Amazon's PDF->mobipocket conversion service, but the result was dreadful. I had a bit of a read of the Kindle website, and looked at trying to create an HTML version of my book to see if that worked any better. The problem was that HTML conversion failed about halfway through the book, on top of the usual crappy representation of figures, equations etc. So this was a nonstarter too.
Most of my literature I keep on my laptop for a rainy day is PDF (or can be easily converted to such). Without a practical PDF display option, Kindle should be given a wide berth, in my opinion.
That's funny. Particularly as FUD does not appear on the page, so it must have been added to the metadata.
Absolutely. The other issue in this argument is that not all steps in the "Great Filter" are equally hard. Based on the fact the life got going on Earth pretty quickly, but took more than 3 billion years to evolve complex life forms, I suspect that simple (ie bacteria-like) life forms might be rather common in the universe, but things like animals and plants are not.
Anything unencrypted is pretty much fair game. Particularly email. Getting root access to a linux box when you have the hardware is fairly trivial, unless the deceased owner was so paranoid as to lock the BIOS, in which case moving the disk drive to another machine is fairly simple. Knoppix is a useful tool for this. Once access to the account is arranged, it maybe possible to gain access to Gmail etc accounts by means of stored passwords in the web browser. This may require some detective work to figure out exactly what browser is being used, but its not rocket science. One should also check accounts listed in .ssh/config as well.
As for ethics - I would hope that someone does this to my machine after I'm gone. In particular looking for unfinished works. However, I suspect that I won't be sufficiently important for anyone to bother! Anything I really, really don't want read, I encrypt with GPG, and don't leave the password for that lying around.
A popular one at Physics parties was making ice cream from liquid nitrogen.
This new posting system chewed my last comment, so forgive me for being a little short. I used FWeb (Fortran version of CWeb) a while back for a project, but discovered that debugging was extremely hard for exactly the same reason Bjarne Stroustrup warns against excessive use of macros. Line numbers do not correlate between the debugger and the source code. Often you just end up debugging intermediate code instead of the source. Also a problem was that the target of FWeb was a printed page (or equivalently a postscript file) which is hard to navigate. I found that Doxygen (coupled with C++) implements the best features of literate programming without these detriments.
In the case of OO, yes. Microsoft do not make a version of their product for my preferred OS Linux. Prior to OO being available, I was forced to run MSWord under Wine, which often caused more problems than it solved. Invariably I would be telling the moron that .doc is not an accepted Internet standard, and that if they wanted me to read the document they just sent me, they would have to find an Internet standard to encode it in (which at the time either meant Postscript, or something like TIFF), or more usually I'd just ask them to send it to me as a hard copy (or via fax), and I would respond the same way, as this was easier than trying to explain to some MS weenie what postscript was.
OpenOffice caused a lot of aggrevation to just go away.
No, all one would need to do is provide an algorithm for generating it. Then one could say that pi is the limiting value produced by the following algorithm:... I suspect prior art might get you in the end though. Such formulae have been known for a long time.
FVWM has had this since when I started using it in 1996. I still use FVWM actually, in spite of it being so ancient. It feels superior to both Gnome and KDE. The author is coy about what the 'f' stands for, but I'll let you fill in the blanks. 'v' is for virtual.
I noticed that the page Intel returned said that the site was slashdotted! How did they do this? I know one can get the referrer details to know that you're coming from slashdot, but in a website overloaded situation how could they run a CGI scipt at all?
When recently I needed to start using MSWindows for a particular job, my choice of office tool on Windows was OO, simply because the user interface is identical to OO on Linux. MSOffice was sufficiently different for me not to bother.
What is the historical basis for claiming that NeXT gave rise to the Web browser? Was NCSA Mosaic developed on a NeXT? Or are you referring to an earlier browser?
Interesting. In Australia, "your welcome" was rarely heard, it was always considered a bit of an Americanism. The response (if any) would be something like "no problems", "no worries", "she'll be apples" or even "no wuckers" (I'll leave you to figure that out - it involves a four letter word). However, recently I've noticed that "your welcome" has been on the increase in Oz - perhaps its being exported downunder.
Maybe the tools I happen to use instead of VS: emacs, gcc, gdb and make. Yes, VS has some nice features - the ability to directly to the definition of a variable of function (not that it gets this right all the time!) for instance. But it also has some shockers - its insane build system, which makes make's arcane build system look like a cake walk. Also some things are not at all obvious, like how to set the name of the executable for the debugger for instance. I wasted more than an hour on this particular stupidity. Because I need to run my codes on supercomputers, which these days invariably run some flavour of Linux, I need to know how to drive my linux toolchain. It works quite well, and I have few complaints. By contrast, VS is just an annoying distraction.
What like China or Vietnam? Oh, you mean rogue countries...
The use of a plastic chopstick also works well to open the earth pin. I had to use this recently in Singapore, which enabled me to use European round pin adaptors in UK square pin socket.
I'd bet on LaTeX in this stable - its a widely used plain ASCII format that is more or less understandable to humans without a LaTeX compiler.
I still have LaTeX documents from 18 years ago that I can read, and could compile with minor modifications if needed. The same cannot be said of the word processor documents from the same era.
I first heard about PDF in 1995, but it wasn't until around 2000 that software existed to actually do stuff with it.
I still don't do anything in PDF that can't be done in postscript - in fact I still just produce the postscript and only convert to PDF because not many people have heard of postscript.
I do use some of the neat tools from both KDE and Gnome - eg CD players, etc., which work just fine under fvwm. The naming convention abused before give a nice way of searching for them - under bash: g k etc.
Nice tip! I never new how to enter those accented characters, TeX mode input is fabulous.
Mostly these threads focus on comments and naming conventions. One of the most important coding styles I've adhered to for the last decade is to always encapsulate new and delete within a class. This ensures every new has a corresponding delete called when the class's destructor is called. Use C++ automatic variable declarations to control object lifetimes.
The only time I've had a memory leak in the last 10 years was when I had to break this coding standard (eg for library compatibility).
The second most important coding style is to use pointers only when necessary - some graph algorithms need them, and so do some "legacy" C libraries. Otherwise, use references - there in the language for that purpose.
The 3rd most important coding style is use standard library container syntax whereever it makes sense. Even if you write your own container libraries - follow standard library conventions. Makes it much easier for other coders to follow.
After this follow a bunch of useful stuff - eg ensure that meaningful default, copy constructors and assignments are available for your class, use the const keyword wherever it makes sense
On the subject of naming conventions - naming conventions can lie! Tools like doxygen will quickly tell you what a particular indentifier refers to in a particular context. If not, then grep is pretty handy at working it out. However, often one wants to use the same name for type names and instance names - a convention like first letter upper case for typenames, or appended _t can help the addled brain.
Throw open a question now - any good tips for organising namespace names, and macro names to avoid the inevitable clashes?