Very cute video. I like the way the mouse pointers scares away the 'nasties'.
3,269 karma · joined July 21, 2009
Can you explain shortly how to make Xcode 6 build iOS 5.1 apps? Or do you have a link? I haven't been succesful in googling it.
"I was born in the mid-sixties and got in touch with software programming at an early age. It became my hobby, along with the field of electronics. I was very keen to get to know exactly how things worked and what was happening, even up to the level of the silicon. In those days I spent more time reading datasheets and computer manuals than I did reading comics. "
I find great joy in exploring new technologies. At the moment, I'm learning Docker.
A rebours - J.K. Huysmans (in dutch translation: 'Tegen de keer')
Bad Astronomy - Philip Plait
"At least one employee had complained to Downtown Project management, calling her “a bully,” one source told us. Also working against McCabe was the fact that she did not follow Holacracy, the flat power structure favored by the Downtown Project leadership."
Now, if pylons turns out to be a roadblock to an expansion they want to make, that'd be a reason to swap it out for something different.
"The surrounding mountains were still covered with snow, and the playa itself was firm but had a large lake covering about a fifth of its surface, perhaps an inch or two deep at its edges, concentrated at the playa's south end where it's lowest. We ventured out, armed with cameras, shortly before sunrise. The temperature was just above freezing. The wind, from the south, was quite stiff and very cold. When we reached the lake, we found to our great surprise that the entire lake was moving with the wind, at a speed we estimated at about one half of a mile per hour. The sun was on the lake by now and we could see a few very thin ice sheets that were now dissolving back into water. This whole procession was washing past many of the famous rocks. It's easy to imagine that if it were only few degrees colder when we were there — as it probably had been a couple of hours earlier — the whole surface would be great sheets of thin ice. Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor. Certainly a lot more horsepower than wind alone, as has been proposed. The wind was gusty and moved around some, and since the surface is not perfectly flat and with rocks and various obstructions, the water didn't flow straight; rather it swapped around as it moved generally forward. Ice sheets driven by the water would move in the same way, accounting for the turns and curves found in many of the rock trails."
"Aesthetically, a slightly taller can looks nicer. The Golden ratio is approx 1.6, so a can with a height of approx 1.6x it's diameter (3.2x the radius) would be very appealing."
However, it is a myth that the Golden Ratio is the most appealing ratio. Many things, from the Parthenon to paper sizes, don't have a golden ratio and that doesn't make them less attractive[1].
Also, the supermarket in my neighbourhood sells soup in a variety of containers (cans, tetrabriks, plastic bags) and if only the standard soup can would sell well, I wouldn't see the other packages.
[1] http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4325
"Perhaps the best known pseudoscientific claim about the golden ratio is that the Greek Parthenon, the famous columned temple atop the Acropolis in Athens, is designed around this ratio. Many are the amateurs who have superimposed golden rectangles all over images of the Parthenon, claiming to have found a match. But if you've ever studied such images, you've seen that it never quite fits, at least not any better than any other rectangle you might try. That's because there's no credible historical or documentary evidence that the Parthenon's designers, who worked more than a century before Euclid was even born, ever used the golden ratio in any way, or even knew of its existence."
Also, http://www.travelbughawaii.com/Ioke.htm, about a few contractors which had to shelter during Hurricane Ioke in Johnston Island's only surviving building, the windowless concrete Joint Operations Center, in August 2006.
http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heineme...
"The architecture of Rails is that it's going to be full stack. Which means this is not going to be just one piece and then you have to go out shopping for another ten pieces to build an web application. I wanted something more... you have the entire box. With Rails today, just using Rails and nothing else, you can build an awesome application from the bottom up. That meant including the database, the templating, the MVC structure, bla-bla-bla. The core reason of why I wanted to do this was because I wanted all the pieces to fit together just as well as an integrated Apple stack. Apple products were definitely a leading inspiration for the design of this."
"when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want"
There's a skeptoid episode about this phenomenon: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4105, 'When People Talk Backwards'. Is has more audio examples, from the same researchers. They were using "three-tone sinusoidal replica", or a complicated sine wave sound. They found that people were able to perceive speech, when in fact there were no traditional speech sounds present in the signal. (from the skeptoid podcast transcription).
"In 1988, Robert Day, David Shaw, and Steven Ignell submitted a report to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) detailing the results of four years of sample collection and analysis of plastic fragments found floating in the Pacific Ocean. They found concentrations highest in the North Pacific Gyre. The authors cited wind and currents as the primary force driving the higher concentrations to the center of the Gyre. Concentrations of what? Number one, monofilament fishing line fragments; and number two, something called neuston plastic. Neuston plastic refers to particles that have been broken down to a small size and are now floating just at or below the surface of the water. Most plastic floating in the open ocean degrades quite quickly, due primarily to ultraviolet radiation. It becomes brittle and crumbles. When it reaches microscopic size, it competes with phytoplankton as a food source for zooplankton, and enters the food chain. That's not good for anyone. The authors used 203 sample stations, each about 450 square meters in size. 52.2% of these contained plastic fragments.
Got that? Only half of NOAA's football-field sized sample areas, in the center of the densest part of the Pacific "Garbage Patch", contain even detectable levels of microscopic plastic. Unacceptable to be sure; but hardly a solid island."
There are some critiques on Pascal: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html , 'Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language'. A summary from the article:
" - Since the size of an array is part of its type, it is not possible to write general-purpose routines, that is, to deal with arrays of different sizes. In particular, string handling is very difficult.
- The lack of static variables, initialization and a way to communicate non-hierarchically combine to destroy the ``locality'' of a program - variables require much more scope than they ought to.
- The one-pass nature of the language forces procedures and functions to be presented in an unnatural order; the enforced separation of various declarations scatters program components that logically belong together.
- The lack of separate compilation impedes the development of large programs and makes the use of libraries impossible.
- The order of logical expression evaluation cannot be controlled, which leads to convoluted code and extraneous variables.
- The 'case' statement is emasculated because there is no default clause.
- The standard I/O is defective. There is no sensible provision for dealing with files or program arguments as part of the standard language, and no extension mechanism.
- The language lacks most of the tools needed for assembling large programs, most notably file inclusion.
- There is no escape. "
Many of these were fixed in Borland's Object Pascal, by the way. Written by Anders Heijlsberg, who also designed C#.
Together with the 'View/Zoom/Zoom Text Only' option enabled, I can comfortably read almost any web page, without having to scroll horizontally. Also, quite some sites show a bit breakage because their developers use fixed heights for container DIVs etc... (a container should size itself to its content, instead).
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342
The podcast starts with: "It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. In a moment that's since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the printout — 6EQUJ5 — which caught his attention. So much so, in fact, that he circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin.
It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. It came from the direction of Sagittarius. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72 seconds. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate ever detected for an alien radio transmission."