markmcb - Slashdot User

Submission + - Building Linux applications with JavaScript (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by crankymonkey on Monday January 19, 2009 @06:22PM

crankymonkey writes: The GNOME desktop environment could soon gain support for building and extending applications with JavaScript thanks to an experimental new project called Seed. Ars Technica has written a detailed tutorial about Seed with several code examples. The article demonstrates how to make a GTK+ application for Linux with JavaScript and explains how Seed could influence the future of GNOME development. In some ways, it's an evolution of the strategy that was pioneered long ago by GNU with embedded Scheme. Ars Technica concludes: "The availability of a desktop-wide embeddable scripting language for application extension and plugin writing will enable users to add lots of rich new functionality to the environment. As this technology matures and it becomes more tightly integrated with other language frameworks such as Vala, it could change the way that GNOME programmers approach application development. JavaScript could be used as high-level glue for user interface manipulation and rapid prototyping while Vala or C are used for performance-sensitive tasks."

Submission + - Visualizing Complex Data Sets (omninerd.com)

Submitted by

markmcb

on Monday January 19, 2009 @06:18PM

markmcb writes: "My company recently began using SAP as its ERP system and as we move into our second year with the software, there is still a great deal of focus on cleaning up the "master data" that ultimately drives everything the system does. The issue we face is that the master data set is gigantic and not easy to wrap one's mind around. As powerful as SAP is, I find it does little to aid with useful visualization of data. I recently employed a custom solution using Ruby and Graphviz to help build graphs of master data flow from manual extracts, but I'm wondering what other people are doing to get similar results. Have you found good out-of-the-box solutions in things like data warehouses, or is this just one of those situations where customization has to fill a gap?"

Comment Getting it was as bad as using it (Score 0) 785

by markmcb on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @12:31AM (#26427869) Attached to: In-Depth With the Windows 7 Public Beta

Was it just me, or did anyone else find the process of getting Window 7 Beta to be a pain? I was amazed at just how difficult it was to obtain their software using a non-Windows OS.

Submission + - AT&T 3G Upgrades Degrade 2G Signal Strength (ofb.biz)

Submitted by

Timothy R. Butler

on Saturday January 03, 2009 @01:08AM

Timothy R. Butler writes: "Much to the chagrin of owners of various 2G cell phones on AT&T Mobility's network, including the highly visible, and originally highly expensive first generation iPhone, we have discovered that AT&T has been quietly adjusting its network in ways that degrade 2G network performance as it has sought to build out its next generation 3G network. Many of the phones affected are still well within their two year contract period."

Submission + - Balancing Performance and Convention (omninerd.com)

Submitted by

markmcb

on Friday January 02, 2009 @04:03PM

markmcb writes: "My development team was recently pondering over a finding a practical solution to the problem that's haunted anyone who's ever used a framework: convention vs. customization. We specifically use Rails, but like most frameworks, it's great for 95% of our situations, but it's creating big bottlenecks for the other 5%. Our biggest worry isn't necessarily that we don't know how to customize, but rather that we won't have the resources to maintain whatever customize code going forward, i.e., it's quite simple to update Rails as it matures versus the alternative. What have been your experiences with this problem? Have you found any best practices to avoid digging custom holes that you can't climb out of?"

Submission + - Google Wants You to be its Unpaid Muse

Submitted by

theodp

on Thursday January 01, 2009 @07:30PM

theodp writes: "So where do you turn to for great ideas when tough times force you to abort your engineers' brainchildren? If you're Google, reports Nicholas Carlson, you simply outsource brainstorming to your users. Google's launched a new Google Product Ideas blog as well as a Product Ideas for Google Mobile site where users can submit feature and product ideas and vote on others. So what's in it for you if you come up with Google's next billion-dollar-idea? 'If you post an idea or suggestion and we put it into action, we may give you a shout out on our Product Ideas blog,' explains Google, 'but we won't be compensating users for their ideas.' Lucky thing don't-be-evil Googlers don't have to live up to the IEEE Code of Ethics, or they might have to credit properly the contributions of others."

Comment Sites Moved to Rails? (Score 4, Interesting) 385

by markmcb on Saturday December 08, 2007 @01:43PM (#21625095) Attached to: Ruby on Rails 2.0 is Done

OmniNerd.com, a site I do hobby development for, is running on Rails 2.0. We switched over from PHP this fall and site maintenance has been a dream since. Our site has even survived a few Slashdottings and Diggs since the switch, which used to murder it before. (Granted, the PHP code wasn't the best.) I've heard the "doesn't scale" debate a million times, but I'm curious if there is anyone out there who has recently moved a project from one language/framework to Ruby/Rails and whether you're glad you did or if it's been a nightmare. We're a medium-to-low traffic site with big surges every few weeks and it's worked well for us.

Submission + - Patterns in Lottery Numbers (omninerd.com)

Submitted by

markmcb

on Thursday November 01, 2007 @01:32PM

markmcb writes: "Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, i.e., random numbers are selected and people guess what they will be for a cash prize. But how random are the numbers? Matt Vea has conducted a pattern analysis of the MegaMillions lottery, which recently offered a sum of $370M (USD) to the winner. Matt shows that the lottery isn't as random as it may seem and that there are 'better' choices than others to be made when selecting numbers. From the article, 'A single dollar in MegaMillions purchases a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of landing the jackpot ... a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers.'"

Submission + - A Snarky Halloween History: Monsters Edition (omninerd.com)

Submitted by

uriah923

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @11:18AM

uriah923 writes: "Nick Dilmore has published the second edition in his Snarky Halloween History series, featured on Slashdot last year. This time around, he concentrates on movie monsters: vampires, werewolves and zombies. From the article, "[D]id you know the movie monsters we've all to come to know and love (in a platonic way, of course) have colorful histories stretching back to the earliest civilizations? What, you didn't think some Hollywood hack actually had enough imagination to invent vampires, werewolves, and zombies, did you? Silly, silly non-monster-trivia knowing person.""

Submission + - One Way Escrowing Taxes/Insurance Can Be Good (omninerd.com)

Submitted by

uriah923

on Monday September 10, 2007 @08:34AM

uriah923 writes: "With the recent hoop-dee-doo in the housing industry, banks are taking more steps to remove the risk from home loans. One of these is to offer a loan interest rate discount in return for the borrower guaranteeing they will escrow taxes and insurance. In this article, Brandon Hansen performed an economical analysis of whether or not accepting this offer is advisable from the borrower's perspective. If you're thinking of buying a house or are in the process somewhere, consider this an essential part of your stay-informed-so-I-don't-get-taken-to-the-cleaners activities."

Submission + - Busting the MythBusters' Yawn Experiment

Submitted by

markmcb

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @09:16PM

markmcb writes: "Most everyone knows and loves the MythBusters, two guys who attempt to set the story straight on so many things people just take for granted. Well, everyone except Brandon Hansen, who has offered them a taste of their own medicine as he busts the MythBusters' improper use of statistics in their experiment to show yawning is contagious. While the article maintains it is still possible yawns are contagious, the author makes it clear that he's not giving the MythBusters any credit for proving such a claim, 'not with a correlation coefficient of .045835.'"

Submission + - Theoretical Physics to be Turned on its Ear?

Submitted by

Bad Labrador

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @08:33PM

Bad Labrador writes: "Slashdot readers may remember an article and a powerpoint presentation delivered by Alexander Franklin Mayer last year entitled "The Many Directions of Time". In it, he postulates a slight modification to General Relativity, actually correcting an error Einstein apparently made. According to Mayer, correcting this error accounts for a large number of "anomalies" in observations, including a small but persistent error in GPS locations, the apparent acceleration and deacceleration of the Voyager spacecraft and so on. The blockbusting part is when the change is applied to cosmology — according to Mayer, the expanding universe, the Hubble constant and the "big Bang" theory are no more. They are artefacts of his discovery — gravitational transverse red shift. The Universe is not expanding. The book is freely available for download at http://afmayer.net/index.html Happy Slashdotting."

Submission + - The Best and Worst Intenet Laws

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @06:32PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "When a U.S. legislator describes the Internet as a "series of tubes" you just know that you're going to end up with some wacky laws on the books. Law professor Eric Goldman takes a look at the best and worst Internet laws in the U.S. Eric offers an analysis of the biggies such as the DMCA, but also shines a light on lesser known laws like the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002."

Submission + - Wifi Health Danger

Submitted by

Zaffle

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @04:55PM

Zaffle writes: "Britain and New Zealand's top health-protection watchdog wants the wireless networks, which emits radiation, to be full investigated because of the concern for students' health. Several European provincial governments have already taken action to ban, or limit, Wi-Fi use in the classroom.

Recent research has linked radiation from mobiles to cancer and brain damage. And many studies have found disturbing symptoms in people near masts.

Professor Olle Johansson, of Sweden's Karolinska Institute, who is concerned about the spread of Wi-Fi, says "thousands" of articles in scientific literature demonstrate "adverse health effects" from Wi-Fi.

"Do we not know enough already to say, 'stop'?"

For the past 16 months, the provincial government of Salzburg in Austria has been advising schools not to install Wi-Fi, and is considering a ban."

Journal Journal: Screwed Via Small Print 3

Journal by gbulmash on Sunday April 22, 2007 @02:41PM

Seems that EULA's aren't the only places companies try to screw you. A big source of consumer losses are sites that autorenew subscriptions. They get you signed up and then a month or a year later, after you've forgotten about them, the charge shows up on your credit card or PayPal account. This isn't just porn sites, but sites that seem otherwise legitimate. Some understand that the fight over the refund and the angry ex-customer aren't worth the hassle and will process the cancellation of

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