timeslayer - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Super-8 home movies (Score 1) 635

by timeslayer on Saturday August 30, 2014 @03:53AM (#47789871) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Old Technology Can't You Give Up?

When showing those movies to the generation that is in them, record their reactions and comments. The new recording of the old with the commentary is priceless: "I remember that day uncle Mark climbed on the ladder with that big movie camera while we all crowded onto the porch." circa 1964 Record the watchers of the recordings, especially if they were younger then. Use new media each time.

Submission + - Interview With Ward Cunningham (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by

CowboyRobot

on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @09:57AM

CowboyRobot writes: "Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, wrote the Fit test framework, is the co-inventor of CRC cards, and is now promoting the concept of technical debt. He recently won the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award and was interviewed by that publication. "The creator of the Wiki dishes on the Wiki, Wikipedia's policies, OO design, technical debt, CoffeeScript and Perl, how to survive as a veteran programmer, and doing the simplest thing that could possibly work."

Cunningham is given the chance to explain his philosophy of coding. "I like the picture and I like the look of the code. It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. There was a learning curve there that surprised me because the programs looked short. The most rewarding work I've done this year is digging through that code and understanding what it does and understanding what it didn't do, and how to approach the problem.""

Submission + - Wikipedia Chooses Lua As Its New Template Language (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by bonch on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @12:52AM

bonch writes: In an attempt to tackle the inefficient complexity of its current template system, Wikipedia will be adopting the Lua scripting language. Known most for its use in videogame scripting, particularly World of Warcraft, Lua is lightweight and designed for easy integration into existing applications. The transition is expected to begin after the release of MediaWiki 1.19, possibly in May.

Submission + - Building Your Own 3D Printer 1

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Monday January 30, 2012 @03:09PM

adeelarshad82 writes: Following a tour of a 3D printer factory, analysts at PCMag wanted to explore the option of building a 3D printer themselves. With the help of a 3D printers manufacturer, Buildatron, they were able to compile a step by step guide on how to build a 3D printer.

Kepler Confirms Exoplanet Inside Star's Habitable Zone 257

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 05, 2011 @02:44PM from the book-your-vacation-early dept.

astroengine writes "Plenty of 'candidate' exoplanets exist, but for the first time, Kepler has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting its Sun-like star right in the middle of its 'habitable zone.' Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the radius of Earth and orbits its star every 290 days. 'This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin,' said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Kepler's results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA's science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.'"

Comment credit card numbers (Score 1) 1

by timeslayer on Friday October 28, 2011 @12:08AM (#37864784) Attached to: ask slashdot: Reduce number of databases

Get rid of credit card numbers as soon as possible: They can be a liability, especially with all the eyes looking through these databases. Phone numbers work well as a unique ID, and you can expect the donees to remember theirs. Email addresses are guaranteed to be unique as well, but some folks use many.

Submission + - Is Process Killing the Software Industry? (oreilly.com)

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @09:09AM

blackbearnh writes: We all know by now that Test Driven Development is a best practice. And so is having 100% of your code reviewed. And 70% unit test coverage. And keeping your CCN complexity numbers below 20. And doing pre-sprint grooming of stories. And a hundred other industry 'best practices' that in isolation seem like a great idea. But at the end of the day, how much time does it leave for developers to be innovative and creative?

A piece on O'Reilly Radar is arguing that excessive process in software development is sucking the life out of passionate developers, all in the name of making sure that 'good code' gets written. TFA:"The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion. Disaffected programmers write poor code, and poor code makes management add more process in an attempt to 'make' their programmers write good code. That just makes morale worse, and so on."

Apple iOS 4.2 Hands-On 212

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 22, 2010 @02:11PM from the ooh-shiny dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Apple's highly-anticipated iOS 4.2 update for iPad, iPhone, and the iPod touch finally arrived this morning, along with an update for Apple TV. The update includes Airplay, which enables wireless streaming of video, photos, and music from your iOS device to Apple TV. AirPlay is an exciting new development for iOS device owners who also have Apple TVs. As long as the devices are on the same wireless network, they automatically detect each other. AirPlay also lets users multitask while streaming video to an Apple TV. Unfortunately though, AirPlay is a one-way street. Users cannot stream something they rented on Apple TV to their iOS device. The iOS 4.2 update also included the introduction of AirPrint, which is the wireless printing solution for the iPad. (The ability to print to a printer attached to a local PC or Mac was dropped from the release, however.) Other minor changes Apple squeezed into this update were: better Word document fidelity in iWork, multi-tasking, and Game Center."

One Man's Fight Against Forum Spam 245

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @12:58PM from the heroes-and-villians dept.

JWSmythe writes "Free Internet Press has an interview with 'Random Digilante,' an anonymous hacker who has been taking over forum spammers' email accounts, and notifying forum operators to delete those accounts. It looks like his reasoning is sound, and his methods are safe, where he won't hurt any real users."

Obama Highlights IPv6 Issue 442

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @01:33PM from the has-strong-pro-vi-stance-too dept.

alphadogg writes "The Obama Administration bills itself as the most tech-savvy political team ever, but until now it has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6. Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will host a workshop on IPv6 that features high-profile executives from government, industry and Internet policymaking organizations. Some observers are hoping the Obama Administration will use the workshop to issue a deadline for all federal agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites."

Submission + - JavaScript Cookbook

Submitted by r3lody on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @07:45PM

r3lody writes: I have enjoyed other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library of computer texts, so when I saw JavaScript Cookbook by Shelley Powers in the catalog, I jumped at it. The description mentioned that the book would cover HTML5 and ECMAScript 5, so I really wanted to learn the new capabilities of both. I did get to learn a lot, but I wonder if these new features are too new.

Like other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library, this one is organized as a series of specific problems, with their solutions neatly presented and grouped into the major chapters. Each solution has a discussion to flesh out the details. The website has downloadable copies of the examples in the book, which I used to test out the various recipes. ECMAScript 5 is fairly new, and HTML5 is still under development, so I made sure I had the latest stable versions of the major browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) to see how they would cope. The HTML5 features are very sparsely supported as of yet, so those portions of the book should be considered more of a sampling of things to come rather than a definitive set of solutions.

The first five chapters of the book are somewhat unremarkable. They start out easily enough with recipes for handling JavaScript strings. The discussion of String objects and literals obviously implies that the reader is already somewhat familiar with Object terminology and functionality. That makes this book unsuitable for beginners. The following chapter contains recipes for handling regular expressions. It starts off with an introduction to the basics, which are nothing that a somewhat savvy shell programmer should be familiar with. The remaining sections cover pretty basic problems. The only interesting ones I noted handled highlighted found phrases on a web page.

Chapter 3 covers dates, time, and timers. Handling dates is shown to be pretty straightforward, and one-shot and recurring timers are presented in a clear, easy-to-understand manner to wrap up the chapter. The next chapter, Working with Number and Math, consists mostly of basic mathematical solutions. The fifth chapter rounds up the basics with recipes for working with arrays and loops. As a Perl programmer, I found this to be familiar territory – especially the discussions of the splice and map method, and using associative arrays.

Chapters 6-10 provide the first real appetizing recipes in the JavaScript Cookbook. Shelley first discusses building reusability using function definitions, anonymous functions, recursion, scopes and memorization. It's starting with this chapter that you really begin to learn how to use JavaScript rather than just playing around with it.

Event Handling is the first major hurdle a procedural programmer needs to overcome to use JavaScript effectively. Various event triggers are discussed in the sections of chapter 7. While most of the code is easy to comprehend, I ran into problems when using the new HTML5 drag and drop was discussed. I had to ask myself could drag-and-drop be any more complicated? This example worked on all but Opera, but the solution is convoluted. Overall, if you really want to know how screwed up code must be to work in all different browsers, chapter 7 (Handling Events) will demonstrate it. Internet Explorer's differences is the reason for most of the odd workarounds in this chapter.

We would all like each browser to work just like another but, unfortunately, each one has its own quirks. Chapter 8 talks about the various ways browsers handle color support and page sizes. The chapter ends by dealing with dynamic pages and bookmarking their state.

The first time I worked with JavaScript was when I was coding some form handling. Chapter 9 covers the ways to handle forms and modify web pages. The most useful recipes (at least, for me) were the last two, which showed how to hide and display form elements on the fly, and how to modify selection lists based on other form element entries.

All programming involves error handling and usually some debugging. Chapter 10 describes the various ways to handle errors, followed by a well-written set of tips on how to use the debuggers and inspectors for the major browsers.

The following three chapters all deal with manipulating web pages. The first of these contained a lot of discussion of namespaces. Namespaces can be confusing, and I didn't really understand them much better after I was finished reading. In addition, you are presented with several boilerplate templates, with little information as to why you would use them. I also had problems with some of the downloaded samples not running correctly on my browsers. Chapter 12 contains lots of fun ways to manipulate page content, with specific instructions on how to handle IE and its different ways of doing things. Finally, chapter 13 provided some good basics of page manipulation, including creating collapsible sections, and creating tab pages.

Accessibility is the major topic of chapter 14, where you are introduced to ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Many web pages are not built with accessibility in mind, so this chapter is very important for giving the web designer the tools for well-designed and usable pages. Some ARIA techniques are straightforward, but others (such as creating collapsible form sections) are much more complex to get right. This chapter does a marvelous job, even though it is somewhat hard to read.

The next chapter covers creating media-rich and interactive applications. This chapter was pretty deep, and the examples were not necessarily bad, but the techniques required need the coder to really think clearly about how to accomplish their goal.

Chapters 16 and 17 cover JavaScript Objects and Libraries. In the Objects chapter, there is quite a bit of discussion around ECMAScript 5, which is not yet well supported in the browsers normally available. As one example, Shelley does say regarding the preventExtensions feature "by the time this book hits the streets, I expect (hope) at least a couple of browsers will have implemented this feature". The Libraries chapter was more problematic in that I was not able to follow along and get the supplied samples working correctly. In addition, the coverage of jQuery was only a high-level overview, leaving the reader wanting more. In her defense, Shelley acknowledges the breadth of the jQuery topic and refers you to the jQuery Cookbook for more information. Overall, I found chapter 17 unsatisfying and abrupt in its coverage.

Communication via Ajax is the main topic for the recipes of chapter 18. Without a proper web server at my disposal, I could not properly evaluate the workability of the solutions. I was also somewhat amused that one of the solutions was described with the caveat that it's not a recommended procedure. I would ask why it was included in that case.

The Working with Structured Data chapter starts by covering JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), but then adds in recipes for handling hCalendar Microformat Annotations and RDFa. The transition was a little jarring, and not overly useful, in my opinion.

The penultimate chapter covered the issues around persistent information. While using URLs and cookies to maintain some state are discussed, much of this chapter revolves around new capabilities made available in the new HTML5 specifications. Unfortunately, most browsers either do not support, or only partially support these features, so the information is only useful as a "taste of things to come".

The final chapter covers the use of JavaScript in non-browser environments. Widgets and gadgets are simple JavaScript applications that are easily coded and disseminated. There are discussions of creating applications for the iPhone, Android phones, and Blackberry phones.

As I step back and reflect on this book, I think that many topics are solutions that cannot be implemented because the typically available browsers don't support the new features yet. If a web page designer wants their site to be available to users now, they need to focus on the features that are well entrenched across the internet. Having so many solutions based on features and capabilities that are still being defined is only useful as academic exercises. I would have preferred that the JavaScript Cookbook be more useful for the state of the web right now. That is why I'm rating it only 7 out of 10.

Open Source VLC Media Player Coming To iPad 232

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 09, 2010 @02:58PM from the might-make-'em-temptinger dept.

Stoobalou writes "The people behind VLC, quite probably the most useful media player available right now, have submitted an iPod version to the Apple software police. VLC — which is rightfully famous for having a go at playing just about any kind of audio or video file you care to throw at it — should appear some time next week, if it makes it through the often unfathomable approval process implemented by Apple. The Open Source Video Lan Client has been tweaked to run on the iPod by software developer Applidium."

NSA Director Says the US Must Secure the Internet 250

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @01:27PM from the self-proclaimed-internet-police dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "The United States has a responsibility to take a leadership role in securing the Internet against both internal and external attackers, a duty that the federal government takes very seriously, the country's top military cybersecurity official said Tuesday. However, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the US Cyber Command, provided virtually nothing in the way of details of how the government intends to accomplish this rather daunting task. 'We made the Internet and it seems to me that we ought to be the first folks to get out there and protect it,' Alexander said. 'The challenge before us is large and daunting. But we have an obligation to meet it head-on.' It's unlikely that any of Alexander's comments Tuesday will do much to quiet the criticisms of the Obama administration's security efforts thus far. Speaking mostly in generalities, Alexander emphasized the administration's commitment to the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a plan developed by the Bush administration and recently partially de-classified by Obama administration officials."

Submission + - Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by Kilrah_il on Saturday September 04, 2010 @07:15AM

Kilrah_il writes: The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measure lately by scientist from University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: “This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it’s not simply systematic errors” in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that “it’s a competent team and a thorough analysis.” But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, “it needs more proof before we’ll believe it.”
The ramifications of this study are profound, if correct, because it might suggest that other constants, such as the gravitational constant, are not so... constant.

Can an Open Source Map Project Make Money? 304

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 28, 2010 @06:30PM from the one-of-the-coolest-projects-ever dept.

Roblimo writes "Bing and Mapquest both use output from OpenStreetMap.org. Mapquest supports the project with money for equipment and access to the code they've written to integrate OSM's work with their display. Bing? They just take from the project and do nothing for it in return. This may be okay in a legal sense, but it is a seriously nekulturny way to behave. Even so, having Microsoft's Bing as a reference might help the project's founder make money. They've put a lot of work into this project, and it's doing a lot of people a lot of good, so they certainly deserve some sort of payback, either direct or indirect. They have a few ideas about how they might legitimately earn a few bucks from their project while remaining free software purists. Do you have any ideas, yourself, about how they might turn a few bucks from OSM?"

Slashdot Top Deals