Bockit

Not sure about portal, but I've used a PS3 controller with software that emulates xbox 360 controllers. It was fairly difficult to get set up and then running every time but once it was running it was rock solid. Played my way through Lara Croft: Guardians of the light with it.

I think it was this: http://motioninjoy.com/download

I quite like the suggestion at the end of the article, that there may be benefit taking some user-centric design methodologies and applying them to API design. I wonder if there are any APIs that already do this and what the general consensus is on their perceived quality.

> It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, see the FAQ.

It seems pretty specific to me. If you have evidence, present it.

I can see an argument for it being too broad, but it saddens me that a question such as this is closed when it has the potential to be very interesting.

I suppose it also has the potential to devolve into a giant drugs flamewar, which may be why it was really closed.

To quote from the source[1]:

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions

Which is appealing to me, and many others I suspect.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Sorry for the delayed reply. Yes, I would very much like to see that. I'd love to try it out, and would happily give feedback on using it in a couple of personal projects. My email's in my profile.

In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to use the CSS framework of my choice e.g. bootstrap, semantic markup for the reasons the author described in the article, and, the ability to extend my semantic classes with the .span2, .container, etc. classes from the framework.

I actually thought about doing it this way by just importing the bootstrap CSS and extending from the various parts, but I realised elements inside the element I'm going to extend from container won't have the container parent class and thus won't get the correct CSS applied.

Does anyone know of something that solves this?

This is more of an aside than a comment specific to the article.

Over the past year I've felt that the term "troll" is increasingly being confused with what would have been called "griefing" back in my gaming days. My early encounters with trolling were that it was your fairly basic ribbing of friends, nothing particularly malicious. Nowadays, anything and everything seems to be labelled as trolling when I feel that the circumstances with malicious intent would be better labelled as griefing. Not only do I think griefing is a more apt description for the behaviour being associated with trolling, I think it allows for a distinction between harmless fun and out-to-cause-harm when describing activity on the internet.

Proper distinction between the two modes would, imo, help keep frames of reference and hopefully prevent knee-jerk reactions to what is currently labelled as trolling affecting a more wide variety of interactions.

Also, it would probably help a lot when the next newbie asks you what "trolling" means as well.

I don't recommend anyone visiting the demo page at work, it's not just the word "penis" getting spammed.

I'm not giving best practises as I'm myself fairly new to Django, this is just a couple of packages to take a look at.

I've been deploying two projects to AWS very recently and we've been using django-pipeline and django-storages (with s3 boto storage) for asset management. ./manage.py collectstatic and all your static files are up on S3. With a bit of finagling around[1] you can even have user uploads hit there seamlessly as well.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10390244/how-to-set-up-a-...

EDIT: Pipeline isn't necessary for storing static files on S3, but if you want to compile SASS/LESS/cs files or any transforms really it works really well.

If I have a Core 2 Duo, should I be concerned?

I'm imagining a setup now where we host their staging environment as it would effectively just be disk space, and when they want to publish changes it could render using this and publish to wherever the static files are hosted (S3, their own service, provide them as a zipped download, etc.).

Our last 2 clients have asked for static solutions because they don't have the capacity to maintain django apps down the line and don't want to hire new staff or continue paying us for maintenance.

We ended up developing both sites in django, which made it easy for them to add copy during development and see how it would actually look on the site. Once finished, we got the HTML output and sent it over for them to put up on their servers.

We were pretty happy with how it turned out, and I think django-medusa being able to automate the whole rendering to html files would be nice if we have to do it again.

Do you have any alternatives you would recommend?

I realise you're joking, but for anyone looking for advice regarding how to play SC or SC2, I recommend http://wiki.teamliquid.net/

I thought it was interesting seeing the cruft of earlier versions in the automatic update cycle (more noticeable in FF than chrome, about 2% total of market share) that doesn't seem to be disappearing. It would be interesting to see how that changes over the next, say, 5 years. To see if it decreases and finds a level that it stays at, or to see if it increases and becomes an issue.

Just a preface, I'm giving this anecdotally, not claiming it to be the cause.

I was at a birthday lunch the other Sunday and it was an extended family kind of event, when my mum, who is considerably computer illiterate, was talking about DuckDuckGo. You can imagine my surprise, DDG to me has always been something of a geek's search engine.

Apparently it had been covered by the morning news, as a viable alternative to google. Not only this, the segment was apparently recommending people opt out of google tracking their usage, brought about by the recent privacy changes.

I don't know if you consider their privacy policy change a recent gaffe, but I would consider that story to be an indirect result of those changes.

I get that what you're trying to do is keep it syntactically correct javascript, but just in case, have you looked at HAML [1] and/or Jade[2]? Both templating languages that allow you to write HTML in that kind of way. Even less syntax than what you're writing there.

I guess you have the overhead of the template language and rendering them though still.

[1] http://haml-lang.com/

[2] http://jade-lang.com/

EDIT: Added links.

Does anyone have any thoughts on if making patents non-transferrable would help the current patent situation?

I'll admit I have barely begun to think about the implications so it may be dumb from the outset but I think:

* No transferring to patent trolls

* No situations like the link

I haven't really thought about the opposite side of things, was kind of hoping people here would have strong opinions on the matter.

I've been using Flipboard[1] on the iPad to read pic heavy subreddits that I don't necessarily want to see everything from but like to browse from time to time.

Yahoo pipes[2] turns the subreddit's top stories .json representation into an RSS feed, and then Twitterfeed[3] posts that RSS feed to a custom twitter account which I can then follow on Flipboard.

I got this setup from http://miguelrios.org/reddit-in-flipboard/ and a handy trick is to combine subreddits. So for example I have the 'SFW Porn Network' reddits all combined using the + e.g., /r/earthporn+cityporn+... etc.

[1]: http://flipboard.com/

[2]: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

[3]: http://twitterfeed.com/

This combined with the recent typography in IE promotion they just ran makes me think they're trying to push IE as a quality browser again.

I very quickly shot up to 150 friends and have only recently, years later, broken 200. I don't expect it to accelerate any time soon.

I don't go out of my way to delete people I don't speak to, but I do lose friends over time, either people removing me, or people deleting facebook. The rate at which I lose friends is just slightly slower than the rate that I'm adding friends.

I did a semester of 'Religious Studies' focusing primarily on non-monotheistic religions as an undergrad and when we studied the origins of religion the absolute earliest things to be considered religious was when some kind of ritual was put into the treatment of the dead.

The example of the earliest known burial on the wiki page you linked sounds like one of the specific events we studied.

"The earliest undisputed human burial dates back 90,000 years. Human skeletal remains stained with red ochre were discovered[by whom?] in the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel. A variety of grave goods were present at the site, including the mandible of a wild boar in the arms of one of the skeletons."

I may be missing something but I think you can do what is proposed with VirtualBox. I use it for my virtual dev machines and run them in headless mode. For example the command:

vboxmanage startvm "Name of VM" --type=headless

to boot an image up, takes about 10 seconds to be ready to ssh into (You can ssh immediately it just waits till it has booted to connect).

vboxmanage controlvm "Name of VM" poweroff

If you want to turn it off from the outside.

Those are both fair distinctions (Silent vs Notifying and the deceptiveness vs 'bad').

Just as a thought experiment, let's assume this is deliberate. Is this:

1) That big of an issue? 2) Surprising?

I'm going to say no to both. They're competitors.

Thinking through it more though, I could see that it seems anti-competitive and, thanks to facebook's position in the market, monopolistic. Though it's not as if facebook is the only way to share links to material on the internet so I don't think that really counts.

I'm currently building a website for a cafe who roast their own beans etc. They sell alongside their in-premises coffee bags of the ground beans made to customer specifications. The next stage of development will be adding a store for people to order these (and other) products online.

I wonder if similar opportunities exist in the restaurant space.

Regarding the PDF menu question I recently took on a client, a cafe, who was asking for a drupal-backed website. For menus I laid out the options of having it backed by the CMS, or PDF downloads. I explained the benefit of having the menu be HTML vs PDF and ran through the workflows of updating it via cms vs uploading new pdfs.

The response was overwhelmingly PDF menus, only for the simplicity of the workflow. Despite a demonstration of how easy it was to use the CMS to update the menu they really just didn't want to spend the time doing that.

Admittedly my degree wasn't a comp sci but a design degree, but when we did the programming half of it students were encouraged to use others' code on the condition that it was properly attributed. It was strongly suggested to add our own comments to demonstrate understanding of what was happening.

If I can't find a menu item but I'm pretty sure it exists/should exist I type in versions of it into that help text area (on OSX) to find it. It works probably 60% of the time, the other 40% being that it didn't exist in the first place, or I was completely wrong about what it should be called.

Can't it work both ways? Serve the #! links and provide canonical content located at the (almost) same uri sans #!.

If you visit http://mysicksite.com/article/1 javascript changes all the links to the #! format. Then when the user clicks the links they enter #! land.

Now the user copies a link from their address bar and puts it into the wild. Someone gets that link, http://mysicksite.com/#!/article/1, and visits it. Rewrite with htaccess or whatever method you employ to serve the content at http://mysicksite.com/article/1, using javascript to change all the links to the #! format.

I posted this in the reddit thread about the Gawker/lifehacker problems recently, but was too late for anyone to really give me a response. For those of you that have worked with these kind of systems before, would this solve the problem the original link was describing?

EDIT: Ahh I think I get the problem now, of course after I post it. Server doesn't get the data from the uri trailing the #! I think?