jmilkbal

Buildkite's Directory of Brand and Design writes about the challenges of standing out and going back to Buildkite's roots.

The power structures will never allow it. The conditions for a society of leisure have theoretically existed for some time now. We will simply end up with a a planetary ruling class that lives opulently while the other 99% live in abject poverty.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Working HD Active Protection System for newer Thinkpads - DESCRIPTION: Around the time of the release of the Thinkpad W530, Lenovo had changed the way in which the HDAPS system was done on Thinkpads. In the past, the tp-smapi* packages and the hdapsd daemon made using Thinkpads with rotating platters excellent, but the newer models now receive errors, and there's some notion that maybe the kernel has some kind of support for APS systems now. It's quite frustrating to know I've sacrificed protection by having a newer model while we wait for SSDs to become as trustworthy as our HDDs. - No Affiliation

Ada had OO from Ada 95, though it doesn't look anything like the OO in most mainstream languages of today. In Ada 95, tagged types were introduced which were based on Ada's powerful record types and Ada 2005 introduced interfaces in a style similar to Java. Java and Ada have both taken plenty from each other over the years.

Edited because I was misleading about the introduction of OO.

T'was programming language satire at it's finest, in my opinion. :)

During a presentation, I tried to show a ranged type implementation in Java. To put it mildly: it's a mess.

There is at least one error in your "About Ada" section. The language was not designed by the Department of Defense, though it did meet specifications laid out by DoD called the Steelman. The language was designed by Jean Ichbiah and his team at CII Honeywell-Bull for a competition held by the High-Order Language Working Group, a group within the DoD. Four languages were submitted: Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, of which Green won and became Ada.

http://www.adahome.com/History/Steelman/steeltab.htm http://www.adahome.com/History/Steelman/intro.htm

These articles give the worst impression of Ada possible. It's not the it's a specialized language for the military, but a language created to cleanup the DoD's software nightmare of the 70s, which is not unlike the software nightmares of today. It just happens that they had a pretty good grasp, even at that time, of what helps make good software easier to write, large software projects easier to manage and maintain, and strong ideas about how much a language should intervene if the programmer is doing things that look pretty dumb.

Ada has a neat OO system (not like the Javas or C++s), built-in state-of-the-art tasking (since 1983!), ranged types (one of the things I can hardly bare to live without), but also simple things like switches that aren't useless and just a general appreciation for what a discrete type can allow you to do. It has generics, too, though I know they've been proven irrelevant by newer languages. Have you seen that new Java 8 date time stuff? It's playing catch up to Ada. Ada's numerics are, hands down, the best facilities of any mainstream language.

Most importantly, it's probably already available for your Linux distribution because it's a part of the GNU Compiler Collection, which means that it's on the commercial OS you've settled for, as well.

An out of print book that I always recommend to those who are interested in playing with Ada is John English's "The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming". Enjoy.

http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/docs/craft/html/c...

SEEKING WORK/FREELANCER - Omaha area or remote

Looking for PART-TIME contract or salaried work.

I've been working on a development team for several years as a contract worker. I'm looking for a better arrangement while I continue my university education pursuing degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics.

Most of my experience in the upper levels of the web stack, but I'm very much interested to attack other areas of the stack, development process, documentation, etc., open source tools and open source platforms.

With my current hat, I've been working to connect backend to frontend and developing the frontend using typical, but not remarkable web tech. I'm especially interested in participating in high-quality development processes with great people.

I've developed APIs, managed conversion of a project from long-lived HTTP to websockets, improved backend database libraries, written great technical documentation, and more. My strongest backend language is Ada which is a reflection of the kind of qualities I value in software and processes.

My interests are across the board including (but not limited to) full-stack for web, Android and Windows mobile apps, data science and visualization.

Please get in touch. CC3cZk at wh.ftml.net.

SEEKING WORK - Remote from Omaha, Nebraska, USA

I creating reliable software by using safe languages as much I can with high test coverage and excellent documentation. A current project is a standards-based, web front-end and associated back-end code for a call center contact management system written in Ada, adding new features and updating and rewriting existing code. Also, create a complete RESTful API and more modern, more extensible interface from the ground up.

I've developed solutions in many languages on both front- and back-ends using languages like Ada, Java, C and PHP on the back-ends and standards-based HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the front-end using well-known tools like jQuery, Prototype.js, SASS, LESS, Bootstrap and a host more along with custom written tools when necessary.

Recently I converted a display that updates in realtime from a Mozilla technology that never caught on, long-lived HTTP requests, to WebSockets working through bugs in the third party library's implementation and working with the vendor to get them fixed quickly.

@jrdkmbl or send mail to ir0.us mailbox jk

I am an Ada developer, but I think it is objective to say that anyone who opposes a language because there fingers will have extra work probably doesn't belong in this field. If you consider the development process as a whole—research, planning, development, verification, etc.—those extra keystrokes add an exceptionally marginal amount of time to the development process, but reduce time so much more by making the code more intuitive to read. Don't let me lead you to believe that Ada's words make it intuitive; that would be disingenuous, but the syntax has been formed since its inception to be readable by developers and non-developers alike. This is an important distinction with something like Java, neverminding that you don't have to explicitly instantiate generics in Java. One of the key objectives of Ada is code that is especially intuitive to non-developers. There's a lot going on in the language. I hope this helps.

I use Ada everyday developing a predictive dialer and contact management system for call centers and it's web-based front-end. Interest has been steadily growing since I started with the language in 2006. One, possibly useless, indication is that the #ada channel on freenode used to hover in the single digits and now regularly hovers around 70. People regularly enter the channel asking how to get started.

AdaCore, who are the chief stewards of the official GCC Ada frontend, GNAT, have been publishing weekly "gems" that are extremely informative for years.

http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems

Get started..

Ada is quite a long way from COBOL. Having just completed its latest revision about a year and a half ago, Ada is very much cutting edge. Ada 2012 is hardly a maintenance revision like you may find for COBOL; it adds tons of new stuff like contracts and substantial improvements to concurrency and SMP support. Ada 2012 was too long after it's previous revision, Ada 2005, which was standardized in 2007, and was quite more substantial than even 2012.

We're working on municipal fiber optic internet in Omaha and this is fantastic ammunition for a project like ours.

Language was also less ambiguous because they didn't leave out important punctuation or relative pronouns. I expected Tolkien to be a on Hitler's side because I interpreted the title as "Tolkien Snubs a German Publisher, Asking for Proof of His “Aryan Descent", but the author means "Tolkien Snubs a German Publisher Who Asked for Proof of His “Aryan Descent". Writing ain't what it used to be, even if only the clergy and royalty could do it!

I am a freelance Ada developer who is currently working on a contact management system for call centers for a small company. It's the usual array of DB access, webserver and AJAX/websockets. The product is exclusively in Ada though it relies on Freeswitch currently and has recently allowed some Python scripting for calls. The front-end is handled by Ada Web Server which is a rather good Ada HTTP library among other things. Mounds of concurrency and threading in the product back-end.

http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/

I haven't spent any time looking at Go because I'm pretty satisfied with Ada, but these libs do smell a bit like the Ada time handling functions which only get better through each ISO revision. Not handling dates like POSIX is nothing new, but it some of us just haven't been exposed to it. Of course, Ada would never guess at a format. Blasphemy. The more you know™

http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6.html http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6-1.html http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-D-8.html

To the contrary, labels and breaks are the better design because they are far clearer than testing for termination in each outer loop. Get more than two loops deep and your problem suddenly becomes unmanageable without labels and breaks.

However, if there are other actions like logging or reporting that are occurring it may be better to not use them. Here's some Ada:

  Outer: loop
    Inner: loop
      Handle_Head: declare
        Head : Human_Head;
      begin
        Acquire_Head (Head); -- Entry will block until head is acquired.
        exit Inner when Head = No_Head;
        exit Outer when Head.Exploded;
        Log ("Head unexploded.");
      exception
        when Brain_Error =>
          Log ("Brain deficiency detected.");
      end Handle_Head;
    end loop Inner;
    Log ("Head exploded.");
  end loop Outer;

Nope, it's just a redirect to Google with your query filled in for the appropriate query string argument.

If you want to use Google privately, use Start Page (http://startpage.com) or Ixquick (http://ixquick.com).

Perhaps map key codes to object properties with, you know, real names so comparisons to e.keyCode mean something in the future.

  var appKeys = { "Esc": 27 };

  else if (e.keyCode === appKeys.Esc) {

Some JS libs do this for you and there are some nice libs that make key handling convenient and powerful as well.

I'm displeased with the association that open means unapproachable by all but the chosen, but the project is indeed worthwhile and maybe, just maybe, it can be honed to a level that a normy could use it. :)

Response from Gandi support:

  Thank you for your feedback. 

  This is due to the way our system was originally designed with some registrars. Indeed, this is not the case for all the extensions and varies according to which registry is returning the whois information. 

  However we agree that it might cause issues so we are currently working on a new authentication system to fix this. This new system should be released in a few months from now. Thank you for your patience and for your understanding. 

  If you have any further questions, please let me know.

The EFF using Gandi is enough of a blessing for me. I've also never heard of Gandi enforcing their ToS in that manor. I did quite a lot of research on Gandi before choosing them. Finding complaints about their behavior is difficult.

The expectation of this release has been a fun ride for me. We were using long-live HTTP requests in our product for pushing data to the browser, a very elegant method but only implemented by Mozilla. Now were transitioning to websockets which aren't nearly as nice for this use, but I'm enjoying putting the newer, better-supported method in place on front- and back-ends.

The root of terrorism isn't terror for no reason. When we smoke we know the repercussions, all manor of cancers. When we pull a trigger, we know that our target will be maimed. However, we do not that when being a certain place at a certain time will cause serious injury to our person or other people, we are taking an incalculable risk, certainly. As as society we can not even begin to contemplate uncertainty. when you confront the average person with uncertainty they crumble and apparently governments are no different.

There are also so many more things that kill more Americans each year than terrorism which receive barely any attention. The disproportionate amount of focus on terrorism seems less like actual protection (neglected elsewhere) and more like the power grabs they appear to be.

She starts to lose me when talking about using the MS Windows kernel as a "hypervisor", but she acknowledges it's a poor solution and defends it by supposing it'd be better than nothing. Otherwise, it's a decent discussion of security through virtualization.

Thank you. Mozilla is a force for good. Mozilla have done nothing to show they are not worthy of our trust and you demonstrate that we have no reason to question it still.

Mozilla observing the effectiveness of their campaign is not the same as building a complete profile on you. This is quite different from using a phone with Android or iOS or using Chrome whose primary goals are such. Be safe out there, use Mozilla products and have a little faith. Mozilla is the only mainstream force for good in its area.