384 karma · joined August 15, 2007
As of writing this, there are seven comments from users having registered since this article was submitted consisting of mostly single word responses out of style with this site.
In which case, only the width would have to be the same.
*Someone more interested than me could perhaps see if any relationship exists.
Really all you should do is just write them a letter stating that you feel you can no longer work for them and you disagree with their business practices. Something professional and polite.
Once you have made your position clear and walked away there should be no reason for them to bother you afterwards. If they do you should just ignore their emails/calls.
Can you really spot people like this in the future? As you've stated above, there were some suspicions but nothing concrete and you did your research and found nothing. Did you look up their names as well as their company name? Often or not they'll just start a new company when one gets a bad name but you might find mention of their names with previous ... activities.
They lied about their original intent, perhaps they knew you'd get cold feet if you knew their business plan. So perhaps they'll not be surprised when you stop working for them.
"If Vinay Deolalikar is awarded the $1,000,000 Clay Millennium Prize for his proof of P≠NP, then I, Scott Aaronson, will personally supplement his prize by the amount of $200,000."
It's good you've got some web app ideas to work towards, that makes learning a lot easier I think.
Firstly you'll want to learn HTML so you can make your pages.
Next you want to decide what language you'll use in the web server - do you know any languages already? I would be biased in this case and suggest Python. But there are other languages that will suit you just as well - Java, Ruby, PHP and so on.
The above would be enough to get you going and write your web games.
Then later on I would recommend:
CSS - To style your web pages.
Javascript - To add more interactivity/functionality to the browser.
SQL - Initially you can just use plain text files or simple key-value stores that most languages have bindings for (I'm thinking of the shelve module in Python for example). But eventually you'll want to store more data or query it in interesting ways.
Secondly I was curious as to how a consumer group managed to get enough cash together to make this. A quick search reveals http://techrights.org/2009/05/04/consumer-watchdog-exposed/ which suggests that Consumer Watchdog is a for-hire astroturfing organisation hired by Microsoft.
Certainly Google aren't completely innocent and raising awareness among people about privacy on the internet is a good thing. But this ad doesn't seem to have come about from the goodness of someone's heart.
Partially I suspect there's no need to be choosy if it costs next to nothing to submit here and partially because having another site linking to the spammy site is good for SEO.
Recently I've stopped doing this as much, I half suspect it's a mixture of exercising more at the moment, going out in the sun and the fact that I don't think there's much new material out there. Maybe I've simply become bored of it.
So much of what we read on these social sites and on our RSS feeds are just people vying for our attention. It's like being in a room with people all shouting at you sometimes. Newspapers want your eyeballs, bloggers want you to read their opinion. CLICK MY ADS!
You're right, it really does trash your attention. Now that I've eased my use of it I find myself working away and then being surprised (and a bit disappointed!) that it's going home time!
Look at the top entry here on this site at the moment - it's about a guy responding to some other guy about some Apple stuff or other. Do I feel more enriched by reading this or getting on with some work? Does what he said have any bearing on my existence? Do you really need to read articles like "10 jQuery widgets that will change your life!"?. Do you really need to read the 200th article on the oil spill? Is reading it going to magically clean it up?
So in response to your actual question I would suggest working out some sort of routine - only spend an hour or so during lunchtime and after work so you have set times you should be working. Just have a quick skim over the first page of these sites to see what's going on. Longer articles can be saved for later and read when you really don't have anything better to do. It'll still be there.
I don't know why people vote this rubbish up.
Edit:
<script> works to some limited extent although I've discovered Chrome will refuse to run such scripts. Can't seem to get the error message to show up again, something along the lines of "script contents seen in location. Will not run".
Which is probably a good thing.
It's a list of 5 websites. No commentary, nothing.
Adobe seems to focus on putting out new features first and fixing existing work second. I've seen it before in companies whose development schedules are dictated by sales. "Hey, I spoke to this guy, he said he'd buy 100 units if we ...".
Out of interest, I've recently discovered the Sumatra PDF viewer:
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
It's open source, for Windows and faster than Foxit, the reader usually mentioned as an alternative in this situation.
Note also that strings passed to start_response() as a status or as response headers must follow RFC 2616 with respect to encoding. That is, they must either be ISO-8859-1 characters, or use RFC 2047 MIME encoding.
start_response is to set the HTTP headers. So I suspect that's a requirement of the HTTP spec for headers (correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't believe WSGI cares about the character set you use for the HTTP message body.
e.g.
+6 -> ++++++