The Robotic News Desk Editor Google News points out as a minor "Top Story":
Jackson Wears Fake Nose , Hates Being Black , According To Article Launch Yahoo - and 89 related »Hopefully this doesn't become a trend-- I use google news daily because generally this crap only appears in the Entertainment section, not the "Top News" section.
User Friendly open I didn't get a chance to do diddlysquat on this, might get some time tonight.
auspex's open I wouldn't think of it as a pitiful "file manager"--this is a good idea and better if you made a "user friendly" version that did not require getopt style arguments for "ordinary people" who are adverse to getopt-style command lines:
view x [with tool] edit x [with tool] compress x [with tool] encrypt x [with tool] decrypt x [with tool] translate x to language
We already typically use MIME types to decide what program to "view" something with, why not also create mappings for edit, compress, and translate? I have heard of many users of computers who might have used some program every day for the last 3 years on their computer and didn't know what it was called. ("Do you use Word to edit your manuscripts?" "What's Word?" {{Clippy bangs on the CRT and mouths "I'm Word! Look at me! Help meeeee!!"}}) Too often icons on desktops represent file-types as application tools (e.g. there's a Winamp icon for a sound file, but no distinct WAV, MP3, or OGG icon) instead of file types. This idea has given me a small kick in the pants and I actually started prototyping in Bash-- but will switch back to Python because of better array support. More verbs than just those will be available and the issue of "x" where "x" is some filespec (hard to remember/type by users) will be looked at.
Sendmail Saw another news note about another buffer overrun hole recently published about Sendmail. I decided years ago to stop using Sendmail because of things like this, so I've been using either QMAIL, EXIM, or POSTFIX, depending on whatever was easiest to install. I do typically nuke Sendmail if I find it on a machine if I become responsible for that machine.
Leonardo's Laptop This book should perhaps become required reqding for GNOME and KDE developers. I'm very worried about the insistence of "cloning" Microsoft user interfaces to increase acceptance of Linux. Evolution may well be a very faithful clone of Outlook, but is Outlook the best user interface for a personal information manager? One thing the book points out in "The Quest for Universal Usability" is that:
A fundamental interface improvement would be support for evolutionary learning and a level-structured approch to design (Baecker et al. 2000). Why can't you begin with an interface that contains only basic features (say 5 percent of the full system) and become expert at this level within a few minutes? Game designers have created clever introductions that gracefully present new features as users acquire skill at the first level of complexity. [...] A good level-structured design in the interface must be acompanied by levels in the tutorials, online help, and the error messages. (pg 47)
I would add that getting the computer to puzzle out your intent AND be smart about it is one of the key issues of making computers easier to use. Microsoft's Clippy was widely hated because it interrupted the user with guesses at the user's intent-- "I see you're about to write a suicide note, would you like to see a list of the most successful ways to off yourself?" What's worse, is all the work involved in making this interruption animated (eating that little bit of processor time that could be better used by everyone's instance of the Distributed Net OGR cruncher!) Open Office make this intent-help less intrusive with the little transient light-bulb icon at the lower-right corner.
Advogato Needs Book Lists If we have ranking for diary entries, I think it would be a simple matter of programming to also rate lists of books in various categories using the same system. More interestingly, it should perhaps give you the same kind of evolutionary learning scale or level structured and could even take the existing "categories" of Observer, Apprentice, et al. for pigeon-holing books. Observer-level books get you things like "In the beginning was the command line" by Neal Stephenson, Apprentice "Learning Perl", Journeyer "Programming Perl, Mastering Algorithms in Perl, Perl Cookbook" and Master "Perl in a Nutshell". Maybe its too much work but the idea is appealing to kind of see "What's on everyone else's bookshelf?" vs. "What's on everyone else's desk?"
our thought processes as programmers are deeply influenced by the language we programmed in.is not a new claim as it was theorized early last century that (natural) language affects how we think and related languages affect how we think similarly. I don't think that anyone could dispute that a programming language could not be considered a "human" language, considering the amount of Perl poetry that exists. :)
Gentoo and KDE Got bitten by the KDE 3.1 bug in Gentoo where everything just collapsed and fucked up after I logged out. Solution is to edit /etc/env.d/49kdelibs-3.1 and add KDEDIRS=/usr/kde/3.1 to that list of variables. You'll probably have to reboot. Without this, look for basically zilch in your KDE menus and no ability to even launch an xterm from inside KDE. TWM makes me shudder.
Orange Juilius Equivalent Never had one from the mall, but this is pretty good.
Chuck in a blender, blend until frothy and smooth. Makes two drinks. The "Top Secret" recipe says to use 2 egg whites, but with a 2/60,000 chance of salmonella, I'll think that I'll stick to powdered milk.
Nullsoft Superpimp Installation System v2.0b1 is verrrrry nice. My favorite "windows installer" software for sure.
Realtime with Bill Maher So far, I think it's a better show than his previous show, Politically Incorrect, which was run off the air immediately after 9/11 when he voiced an "unpopular opinion." Perhaps because it's on HBO and not network television is what makes the difference.
Where there is Traffic, There is Innovation Noticed on the BBC London site they have something called "jamcams" and "sequences"... jamcams are oviously the American equivalent of traffic cameras, but the sequences was something new to me. The sequence is a useful ordering of existing jamcams along a commonly traveled path. I think most traffic sites I've seen in the US only give you a map to pointyclicky.
Life Up and down. Chaotic. Big ups. So-so downs. I guess I'm averaging up on the "ok" side.
Regular Expressions Now have a short python fragment that figures out and scores "proper names" of a particular format found in a string. it's helping me get used to Python (which is pleasing to program in, you write something that seems plausible and then you are pleasantly suprised that it works.) The more interesting part of the project is going to involve the management of lots of different regular expressions as they are used.
Television What's that?
Nethack Run away! Run away!
I'll just go back to my books and sleep for a bit-- I'm none too happy about having an hour and a half of my life wasted in traffic yesterday-- however, I did get through reading about 80 pages of Bitter Java while waiting in traffic, but it's not very much fun reading and driving at the same time.
Regular Expressions Together with XSLT, is going to create something very special for me and hopefully for everyone else as well-- something somewhat related to Alvin Toffler's Third Wave. I need to win the lottery so I can do this more "interesting" work without losing my house. Let's say for the moment, that we are not making our computers do enough of the work in the information economy and they absolutely don't have to get it 100% right all the time with semantic understanding as long as you can weight what the computer does with some kind of confidence rating. A lot of what heuristic anti-spam software does is creating technology that could be better used elsewhere. What's the best heuristic anti-spam software out there if it is not SpamAssassin? I don't think that SpamAssassin is the best antispam tool available because of how it trys to kill the spam-- I think Tagged Message Delivery Agent has the best solution-- but I do think that there is some very interesting alternative applications for the same technology.
Meetup: ww.meetup.com What a cool site. Out of curiosity I followed a link that mentioned the "Slashdot Meetup." I haven't searched for any other meetups other than Python and Advogato and there were some meetups for Python. Advogato seems like a community that could have use for meetups. The best thing about meetups is perhaps, the thought that we don't have to have a Linux World, or PyCon, or CodeCon to bring great people together.
SyncML Downloaded all the PDFs. I'm a glutton for reading-punishment. I've got a stack of books checked out from the library and dozens of PDF's saved for future reference.
Libraries Don't neglect your library-- just because you can clickypointy Amazon doesn't mean that you couldn't just get it for free from the library. One of the books that I checked out that's on my "list" to read is Bitter Java and I'm already halfway through Technomanifestos.
Mathmatics I've been reading whenever I can from http://planetmath.org/, which has become one of my reference bookmarks.
Python This could probably use some casting or perhaps use of the Number classes, but I'm not sure that I like how IMDB calculates their ranks anymore after playing with the formula.
def weighted_rank(v,R,m,C): """From http://us.imdb.com/top_250_films : The formula for calculating the top 250 films gives a true Bayesian estimate: weighted rank (WR) = (v / (v+m)) * R + (m / (v+m)) * C where: R = average for the movie (mean) = (Rating) v = number of votes for the movie = (votes) m = minimum votes required to be listed in the top 250 (currently 1250) C = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.9) """ return (v / ( v + m ) ) * R + ( m / ( v + m ) ) * C;
I played with this shortly after reading a little bit about the Advogato diary ranking system, hence also the interest in the PlanetMath site to understand Eigenvectors. At the moment I don't understand them well enough to compare to the IMDB estimate of rank.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!