oofoe

There was a short story, which appeared in one of the HP calculator-centric publications of the 70's or 80's, I think written by a certain George R.R. Martin or Gordon Dickson, which attempted to extrapolate the HP 41CX into a portable voice activated assistant that could schedule appointments for you. I remember thinking that was pretty far fetched for a calculator. I don't think it would have made much more sense if the author had referred to the device as a "phone"...

For what it's worth, just being able to chain the calls makes this worthwhile. Thanks for making the effort and taking the time to release it!

Another possibility might be to use multiple solid state laser transmitter/receiver pairs located close together, kind of like ink-jet printer nozzles. Because they're discreet, you would lose some resolution compared to a continuous scan system, but it might be OK for the purpose of staying in a road.

And, since the vehicle is moving (most of the time) anyway, maybe multiple returns can be integrated something like a synthetic aperture radar system to form a more complete picture.

This was a good article about the realities of deploying an overcomplicated and fragile system from the political and practical point of view.

BTW, after reading the article, make sure you catch the author's byline at the bottom...

The traditional FORTH "overlay" is to use FORGET. You create a dummy word to serve as a marker, like ": OVERLAY ;" or something, then later, you can "FORGET OVERLAY" and load in new code to replace it. This only affects the dictionary -- the stack and heap (if any) aren't touched.

The new ANS hotness is the "MARKER" word, you just say "MARKER OVERLAY" and then you can just invoke OVERLAY later and it clears things out for you. See Elizabeth Rather's comment here: http://computer-programming-forum.com/22-forth/c67f31fe1e09b...

It sounds like the previous commenter is just getting the groceries themselves because the ASDA is so close by.

For what it's worth, in my opinion, if you need more than an 80 character line in Python, you're doing it wrong.

I currently maintain a large Python codebase where the original authors /needed/ big long lines. Anytime I see one of these big wads of bubble gum, I know I can rewrite it to be simpler, clearer and shorter (I've done it enough now). Fortunately, there are increasingly fewer of them...

It's important to remember that you're not just writing for the computer -- while it can take almost anything syntactically correct that you throw at it -- some human, somewhere will still have to read and understand that code.

It may be you, six months later.

Well, I did say "maybe"... I guess what I was trying to get at is that before I would enthusiastically recommend their products to other people. Now I don't use them, so I never mention them to anyone.

I don't seem to have a problem using separate installers for something like Blender, but the activation energy seems too high for installing "small" utilities[1].

That said, if I could get larger applications from Ninite, I'd pull from there in a heartbeat!

[1] Utilities may not /actually/ be small.

The big problem for me (and maybe Piriform?) is that now I don't have any of their products on my systems because I can't get them through Ninite. I used to religiously install their CCleaner, their defrag and system information tools. They're all very good, but I'm not going to walk through three separate installers for something that Ninite used to do in seconds.

When I bring up a new system, I just go to Ninite, check some stuff and I'm done. For most machines, there is nothing else to do.

I suppose this is sort of a cautionary tale... "Don't try to take your installer back from Ninite after they've showed everyone how it can be so much better."

Is it possible that because it's so expensive, you could make it yourself for a much better return on investment?

Is it so expensive that you could burn out three cheap laser printers a month for a fraction of the cost? What if it was one moderately expensive printer every two months?

What if you had a Raspberry Pi managing your print queue across multiple networked printers and you bind them with a surplus GBC machine? You could keep a supply of "nice" pre-printed covers available to wrap around books when they're ready.

One nice thing about this is that you could start small, and scale fairly easily. Use human labour (that's already running the shop) to fill in the gaps in automation.

It might be worth looking at Don Lancaster's web site (tinaja.com) for some thoughts on how to do this stuff before any pre-packaged solutions existed (look for "print-on-demand" resources).

I like bookstores a lot. I hope you'll be able to find a way to make it work for you!

Nor should they.

Up to the 3DS, I could play games from anywhere (I like Japanese games a lot). I have happily purchased three different generations of Nintendo portable machines and the software to go with them.

I have not purchased the 3DS.

Try this: The more a company grows, the more efficiently dysfunctional it becomes...

A lot of people here seem to think that complaining about a five to six second start time is just whining. I believe you're wrong -- it is a legitimate and valid complaint and here's why:

Most software can't run for very long. A lot of high-end software can be /very/ unstable (hello, Maya! ;-). The user is not just starting that software once at the beginning of the day for a long productive day of work, they are all to often starting it again after a crash. Or after they shut it down to get enough RAM to run Excel. Or after rebooting Windows for /another/ mandatory update from IT.

I once had to restart a particular high-end compositing package thirty times in an hour. Twenty seconds of the average two minutes were spent staring at the splash screen. But I had to do it, because I needed thirty frames rendered and a particular plugin crashed after running one frame.

The user is not starting your software to admire your credits or the clever graphic design of your logo. They are starting your software to /use/ it get a job done, a job that they have in mind to do and any distraction at all (even a harmless splash screen) is a new stumbling block on their way to resuming their task.

I heard of a study done back in the mainframe days that determined that anything that took less than two seconds felt instantaneous to the user. However, anything longer (even five seconds!) took "forever". In my years of programming, I have found nothing to disprove this (possibly) apocryphal conclusion.

Your user's time is valuable. Your user's mental state and flow are valuable. As programmers on Hacker News, we all know about concentration and flow, right? Extend your users the same courtesy you expect from your tools. Help them keep things going, don't break their rhythm and don't let them lose context.

While it is true that NewLisp isn't going to win any awards from either the Avant /or/ the Vieille Garde, I would argue that just because its philosophy is different from what you believe is most performant doesn't make it a bad language. Ruby's defenders should back me up on that...

As I understand it, scoping is handled by "contexts", which can be inconvenient if you expect every function to be a single standalone snowflake, but just fine if you`re tossing off quick scripts which don`t require hermetic degrees of encapsulation. You can also force scope by using 'let' or declaring private variables as arguments, among other things. Certainly Emacs Lisp seems to do OK with similar constraints.

As mentioned elsewhere in this post, the deep copy thing may not be as bad as you make it out to be -- certainly it's never particularly troubled me.

As for cons... It seems to me that cons is a rather obsolete construct, referring to a long obsolesced hardware feature. I can't get too unhappy about someone trying to make it more immediately useful in a modern context.

We've talked about what you don't like about it -- here's what I think NewLisp has gotten very much right:

  * It's simple to use.
  * It's small and self contained.
  * It has a REPL and you can do introspection. 
  * It has conveniently and reasonably named built-in functions.
  * It deals well with a UNIX-derived file system.
  * It's easy to pick up and start using, but you can still do fancy stuff.
  * The documentation contains worked out examples for every built in function.
  * The main developer is very responsive and helpful.
  * Trivially cross-platform with downloads, not compiles.

I have found NewLisp to be very convenient for many of the problems I have applied it to. I have used it for everything from dynamic web pages to image processing to ad-hoc render farms. So, I certainly feel that it may be invaluable for someone who is interested in Lisp, but has been intimidated or discouraged by the "official" compilers and needs to get some real world work done.

Apparently one of the guys involved in early Air Force space suit research had lost an eye in an accident (no, not Yeager, can't remember the name right off). It created a bit of a stir when they tested him post-accident and discovered that his depth perception had actually /improved/ now that he only had one eye.

Unfortunately, despite this, they weren't willing to let him go back to flying fighter planes, which is why he got into space suit research...

Sorry, small clarification:

Houdini is actually descended from the PRISMS package developed by Omnibus Computer Graphics (one of the very first CGI studios (and actually still in business in Japan!)). SideFX (started by two of the original programmers) bought the rights to PRISMS when Omnibus (North America) went under. They opened for business in 1987 and have been going strong since!

They have a number of "firsts" to their credit -- for instance, Houdini was the first major 3D package on Linux. Debuted in 1999, although I was beta-testing it before that.

For procedural 2D and 3D graphics, there is absolutely nothing like it. However, it's hard for most users to understand, so its popularity has never been great. Anyone doing serious FX work knows all about it, however.

(My old boss used to be CTO of Omnibus, in charge of PRISMS development.)

Three words... "substantial non-infringing use".

Very nice.

For what it's worth, I interviewed with them shortly after their acquisition by Sony. The gentleman I talked to told me that Sony corporate had dictated that they give up GOAL for C++ so that their code would be interoperable with the rest of the company.

Perhaps the poor could also furnish infants for the rich man's table?

I see that the spirit of Swift is alive and well...

Required reading: http://www.tinaja.com/glib/casagpat.pdf

More on this page: http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp Yes, the web page colour scheme is /terrible/, but it may save you a great deal of time, trouble and perhaps your sanity.

This resource might also be helpful: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Software_patents_wiki:_home_page

tl;dr: Small scale patenting is a mug's game.

Should I be worried about how many of these I actually own?

By the way, I think the one in the Royal McBee advert is the predecessor to the machine immortalized by the immortal programmer's programmer in the pseudo-poem "The Story of Mel".

The biggest problem with Libre Office is that they have fixed passwords in the the spreadsheets (as in if one is set on the Excel spreadsheet, LO will respect it and demand it before you can make changes). Unfortunately, that means that I can't unprotect my company's timecard spreadsheet to fix the dates that OO (and LO) mess up.

Therefore, I'll just stick to my ancient version OO for now...

Please check out the Ben Nanonote -- this is just the sort of thing that it might be good for. I know that some kind of inform interpreter has been ported for it, but a nice little adventure client could be very spiffy!

Project page: http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote

Sales site: http://sharism.cc/ (You can also use ThinkGeek, I believe.)

I have one of these things with the latest firmware (OpenWRT linux with some modifications). It is an incredibly cool device. You actually have a keyboard that has all the stuff you need for programming (or general unixy/emaily things), a pretty nice colour display and a reasonable amount of horsepower. I like to think of it as an SGI Indy that I can put in a pocket...

A while back, I wrote a very small Python HTML rendering library that gives some of the benefits of this notation while still being Python source code. You _may_ find it interesting if this is the sort of thing you find interesting...

http://hotwax.cjmunday.com/python.html#sec-1.2

See the CherryPy file browser example later in the page for a demonstration of how it's used.

This reminds me of a (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso and a carpenter.

He had called in a carpenter to build a bookshelf. After sketching out the design, he handed the sketch to the carpenter and asked how much it would cost to build. The carpenter asked him to "just sign the sketch."

However, from the article, it doesn't seem that Picasso was all that free with his originals. Too bad for Monsieur Le Guennec.

Side note: Should you have the chance to see it, the film "The Mystery of Picasso" (http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Picasso-Pablo/dp/B00007ELEI) is very enlightening. I didn't much care for Picasso's celebrated works, although I knew that he was at least a competent artist in the traditional sense as well as the modern. This film shows how he develops several paintings, from the initial concept to the final work, and you can see how he starts from a traditional framework, then pushes it out of all recognition. I still don't /like/ most of his paintings, but I can much better appreciate how he got there.

Can I ask what you're using to do the parsing? Or did you write your own?

This is definitely the kind of thing that I could see doing with REBOL's parse operator, but Python doesn't (seem to) come with such a tool built in.

Thanks!

Well, he did say that he'd read all of Knuth's books...

(See http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...)

I usually get a month of out of 4 AA's. It's very power efficient...

I'll give you Erlang, but the Ruby solution is cheating rather.

You might enjoy the topic of the Professor's symposium in the "Futurological Congress", by Stanislaw Lem.