Slashdot Mirror

there's already a lot done,

see reddit.com/r/dcpu16/ for the first reactions...

and the first questions on stackoverflow are already coming in - stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/dcpu-16

SMART crash test on youtube - although not the fortwo, and nearly six years old.

Still impressive...

here you can find a nice collection of news articles about the solar decathlon europe.

one of the german teams, the team from rosenheim university has a nice writeup of how they dealt with each of the ten problems - team IKAROS Bavaria solar house...

i'd like to have access to the GPS data from WebApps.
that way you don't have to rely on GeoIP data and relly could customize content and make WebApps location-aware.

maybe a whitelist of sites which have access to the data, or a popup asking for confirmation that the site can use the GPS coordinates...

Actually you don't have to click anything.
just download http://mamp.info/ and drag the MAMP folder to your Applications.

Voilá, PHP 5 and MySQL 5 on your Mac.

code from scratch - and reuse your own code - that way you know exactly what it can do and where you have to start from scratch

there's something very wrong with your elections.

as long as something like this is possible : Elected officials voting for representatives that are not even in attendance! (Texas) ...

very handy...

http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/201361

i always liked the idea...

from the article: "Until the Army's Web site was hacked in late June by a 19-year old Wisconsin man, the site had been using a Microsoft Windows NT-based Web server..." :)

i remember reading the thread on fark and laughing so hard, that i had tears running down my face...

scroll halfway down - it's comedy in realtime

if you see Safari, then the "trick" still works.

Safari is only one in a list of Applications that i check - it just means that you have none of the others...

if you look at the source code (it's all in javascript - and not very complicated), you can see the Apps i'm checking for.

i *wish* this wouldn't work anymore -i discovered hat long time ago...

Safari lets you include local files, for example...

i told apple (and got a lame reply that it would be fixed eventually) month ago, yet it still works.

see http://destabili.zation.eu/ for a quick harmless example that can check what applications you got installed.

and then there is a way to crash Safari which exists for more than a year - again i had an email conversation where they wanted more info and crashreports - yet nothing was ever done about it.

http://lixlpixel.org/safaricrash/ and follow the instructions - but make sure you don't have any important tabs open...

offtopic, but I heard about this just yesterday and found it interesting that this is obviously such a common error that Apple made a shortcut just to fix this kind of typo:

In all cocoa applications (Safari, TextEdit, Mail etc.), two adjacent characters can be swapped by positioning the cursor between them and pressing Control-T.

great, no more "teh" and "memroy" for me (if I manage to remember another shortcut)

i was pleasantly surprised that even if you don't specify anything regarding the use of your code, some people still reference the original source....

http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&lr=&q=phpar adise&btnG=Search

well - MAMP (mamp.info) does give you everything in one package, with the newest versions (Apache 2 & PHP 5)...

and it really invites to screw around with the setup.

before MAMP i often hesistated to install experimental stuff, now i can just drag the one(!) folder to the trash and start with a fresh install.

things i did with MAMP which were hard to realize otherwise (sitting with the powerBook on the couch) include

• having the builtin Apache serving only static content, without loading PHP or any fancy modules at all and having a .htaccess rewrite rule to point certain URLs to the MAMP full-blown-with-everything-and-the-kitchensink Apache Server running on port 81. then you "generate" the static HTML with that server and save it to .html files - which then get "served" from the builtin Apache on port 80
• because the HD on this interim server is so noisy and it has enough memory, i created a RAM disk (donelleschi.com/ramdiskcreator) with the mount-point @ /Applications/MAMP , dragged the whole content of the MAMP folder on the RAM disk and then started the server from and in memory. works pefekt - the HD only spins up when the cron-script backup of the RAM disk kicks in.

and much more...

it really helps if you enjoy messing around with a server setup and want to learn how everything works without srewing up your Mac OS install

that's how i felt, after i discovered coverflow...

and it really changed the way i browse my music.

seeing long-forgotten covers and rediscovering music - great little app.

and beautyful

i added this to my userstylesheet (available in every decent browser) for slashdot.org

fixes (at least the frontpage) for me...

/* move the "read more" and "n comments" boxes to the left */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0.2em;
}

/* put the "read more" link where it belongs */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li.more
{
border-right: 0;
float: left;
padding: 0 1.5em 0 0.2em;
background: url(//images.slashdot.org/read-more.gif) no-repeat 95% 50%;
}

/* normalize the link */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li.more a
{
background-image: none;
padding: 0;
}

/* get rid of the spaaaaaaces and make it a nic(er) font */
body
{
line-height: 1.25em;
font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;
}

$query = 'SELECT * FROM `whatever` ORDER BY `anything` DESC';

$result = mysql_query($query, $db);

$out = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<items>';

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
    $out .= '
    <item>';

    foreach($row as $tag=>$value)
    {
        $out .= '
        <'.$tag.'><![CDATA['.$value.']]></'.$tag.'>';
    }

    $out .= '
    </item>';

}

$out .= '
</items>';

echo $out;

// simple but works

just posting to undo a moderation - wanted to hit interesting and hit offtopic - sorry for that - it should be good now

if ad blocking is the only reason you want extensions - well, it's already built in.

and it works quite well - at least the few sites i checked were ad-free after turning on the ad-blocking in the preferences

check out the screenshot

Do I need to optimize?

You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why:

• Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. With more free space available, the file system doesn't need to fill up every "nook and cranny." Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.
• Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.
• Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."
• Aggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor fragmentation has less effect on perceived system performance.

For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.

Note:Mac OS X systems use hundreds of thousands of small files, many of which are rarely accessed. Optimizing them can be a major effort for very little practical gain. There is also a chance that one of the files placed in the "hot band" for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.

taken from About disk optimization with Mac OS

but you have to admit that the kittens are adorable...

i wrote (the first time ever) a journal entry about some nice MIDI sounds back in march...

basically it's a complete record with 1h 13m music but thanks to MIDI it comes on a floppy disk.

check it out for yourself - the sound is great and not at all the "wtf - turn this down" you are accustomized from MIDI.

i hate ANY music on websites - but that doesn't mean you can't make anything nice with midi...

check out http://www.fest-platten.de/eng/disk.htm - it's a whole album on a floppy disk - thanks to midi.

it's not always about speed.

i built a webapp (a remote Safari screenshot generator), that just takes some time to finish.

there's no way to speed it up, so what to do with the visitor in that time?

instead of showing him the spinning wait-cursor while the server does its job, you can just use "Ajax" (god what an awful name) to start the job, keep the visitor informed and once the job is done, present him the result.

much nicer in my opinion...