mr_dbr · HackerTrans

mr_dbr

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Transparent Telephony - Part 1 - An Introduction

neverfear.org

3 pointsby mr_dbr17 lat temu0 comments

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16 lat temudiscuss

> We're talking about a traffic spike that is 30-to-1 type ratios. In other words, 30 times more IPv6 traffic is coming out of Google's data centers than before.

Given that Google enabled IPv6 traffic to a high-bandwidth service like Youtube, is the spike really of any note?

If a week ago 100 people were using Google Search via IPv6, then today one person views a single Youtube video, that would easily account for a "30-to-1" spike

The actual number of users with IPv6 would be interesting, the fact there was a traffic spike seems quite irrelevant..

17 lat temudiscuss

Same thing applies to tutorials which don't mention version numbers and such...

17 lat temudiscuss

http://www.macruby.org/ not sure if it's rewritten in ObjC or just integrated-with

17 lat temudiscuss

This seems like an absurd, silly idea..

1) Have any laptops (or MP3 players) actually been used to smuggle explosives onto a plane?

2) Aren't laptops and such searched for explosives anyway? (x-ray'd, sniffer-dog'd etc - my hand-luggage was randomly swabbed for explosives)

There is some logic to banning such electronics, but it's the same logic that lead to water bottles and metal butter-knifes being banned..

The linked news-item (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27plane.html ) seems to be a better argument for giving all airline passengers guns than it is for banning laptops..

17 lat temudiscuss

It looks fine to me..

17 lat temudiscuss

Futurama proposes a different reasoning for the inevitably changing human-robot ratio (I couldn't find a clip of it, so.. use your imagination):

Fry: Well, so what if I love a robot? It's not hurting anybody.

Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.

Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.

[He presses a button and a film title, I Dated A Robot!, appears on the screen. In the movie a couple sit in a cafe and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]

Narrator: [in movie] Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to ... tragedy.

[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]

Billy: [in movie] Neat-o! A Marilyn Monroe-bot!

Monroe-bot: [in movie] Ooh! You're a real dreamboat, (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen.

Narrator: [in movie] Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next.

[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom where he kisses the Monroe-bot. His mother walks through the door.]

Billy's Mom: [in movie] Billy, do you want to walk your dog?

Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Mom. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.

[Enter his dad.]

Billy's Dad: [in movie] Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?

Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Dad. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.

[The girl from the cafe, Mavis, walks in.]

Mavis: [in movie] Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.

Billy: [in movie] Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out.

Narrator: [in movie] Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily, Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route. Then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty football field.] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand drifts across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of human and robot couples making out on beds.] They're trapped! Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex ... and sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?

[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but still with his Monroe-bot and still making out with her.]

Billy: [in movie] Farewell!

[He dies.]

Narrator: [in movie] The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [A fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with laser shots.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't date robots!

[A "Don't Date Robots!" caption appears on the screen and the movie ends. The Space Pope is displayed on the screen with "Crocodylus Pontiflex" written around him in English and alien.]

Announcer: [voice-over; in movie] Brought to you by the Space Pope.

(stolen from http://www.futurama-madhouse.com.ar/scripts/3acv15.shtml )

17 lat temudiscuss

Given that Gemcutter is a relatively new service, my first guess would be the graph is skewed if they switched to gemcutter before other popular Ruby projects (more so if FXRuby is a dependancy for another popular gem which is hosted elsewhere)

Then again, their download page http://www.fxruby.org/downloads.html only mentions RubyForge..

17 lat temudiscuss

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/516406/latex-equivalent-t... lists a bunch of possible options that would be rather trivial to integrate (either a modified version of Markdown, or the editor)

17 lat temudiscuss

The whole sentence regarding an if blocks (lack of) scope seems.. wrong.

> .. since y has never been declared in that given scope. I don't quite know how Pythonists handle this, but I can imagine many situations where this will be the cause of much confusion

Given the following code:

    if some_irrelevant_function():
        x = 2
    else:
        x = 5

    print x

The author is claiming it would be less surprising for that to raise a NameError exception, complaining x is undefined?

> To resolve it you have to manually call 'del y'

No. You just have to be sane with the usage of your variables. I have never run into a situation where this has been a problem.

> I don't have the numbers for Python, but I can't count the number of C app's that have suffered from memory-leaks and what not, based on the lack of automated garbage collection. With Pythons use of scope, I imagine quite a few bugs will follow.

Err, no.

----

> Now in one Python doc I found they actually refer to this type of data [dictionary] as immutable

Assuming the docs actually say this, they are incorrect and should be amended.. Dictionaries are absolutely mutable.

> Lambda

Err. The complaint here is you cannot use "?" in an identifier...?

> To Pythons credit it actually pinpointed the exact character which caused the exception - You shouldn't except that much help from Clojures backtraces....yet

Not to make this into a "languageX vs languageY" debate, but I'd say having decent error messages is far preferable to being able to use symbols in an identifiers name..

17 lat temudiscuss

Good or bad, I'd say Apple are pretty much stuck with ObjC. Cocoa and all the other frameworks OS X uses are written like they are because of the language's syntax. This is demonstrated by how crappy the PyObjC code looks (compared to "regular" Python):

    notificationCenter.addObserver_selector_name_object_(
        notificationHandler,
        "handleMountNotification:",
        NSWorkspaceDidMountNotification,
        None)

To make it work with some other language (say, C#/C++/Ruby/Brainfuck/Python or whatever) would basically be a complete redesign of the framework, which in turn would basically be a complete redesign of OS X.. And why? Objective C is a perfectly decent language.. I'm not sure anyone would be using it where it not for Carbon/Cocoa, but it's not a bad language at all

17 lat temudiscuss

The git checkout [filename] behaviour always confused me..

Yes, it's documented, but git seems to really try and make it difficult to lose any work.. but has a command that makes it simple to irreversibly lose your upstaged changes, without so much as a warning?

At least "git revert" sounds like it might undo changes.. In what way does "checkout" imply both "checking out" branches, and reseting a file to it's previously commited state?

17 lat temudiscuss

I present to you, Ubuntu in D Minor:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=bc9a7de093071754ed24a2875...

...it's not actually in D Minor, but it's certainly Ubuntu (ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent, converted to a proper, listenable MIDI file)

Only done the encoding just now.. Basically the code loops over each byte in the file, ord()'s it, creates a note with that value and advances to the next beat.. Decoding should be simple enough, but the simple MIDI library I was using only creates MIDI files.

One slight problem is the file is about 5-6 hours long, so I don't think we'll be sharing torrents via background music on Youtube videos quite yet.. A more time-efficient way to pack the bytes into notes is definitely possible (currently it only plays one note per time-slot), but that would have taken far longer than I wanted to spend on this...

The Python code, including the required smidi.py module: http://gist.github.com/202593

17 lat temudiscuss

Good point, or you end up with situations like http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7702913.stm

> When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

That said, using Google Translate to make an initial translation should be fine, as long as you get someone who actually speaks the language to check it over before release.. For smaller projects, it's going to be easier to get someone check over a file, than getting them to manually translate hundreds of phrases

17 lat temudiscuss

It'd also be nice if the scroll-position was saved when you close the application.. When you reopen the file, it's always back to page 1..

17 lat temudiscuss

Their plan seems to be, give stuff away for free, charge for more storage. I would have been surprised if they charged for the iPhone application..

17 lat temudiscuss

When invites are available, perhaps something similar to the GMail Invite Spooler (http://isnoop.net/gmail/ ) could be created?

It would certainly beat the inevitable mass-posting of email addresses in comment forms (and worse, there's no way to be sure when someone has received an invite)

17 lat temudiscuss

Not at all... http://dslrfilm.com/?p=340

17 lat temudiscuss

They should just switch to Objective-C/Cocoa and that code would be perfectly normal!

17 lat temudiscuss

http://www.stifflog.com/2007/05/09/erlang-for-the-practical-...

Not the best tutorial ever, but I found it helpful.. It describes a fairly simple, but non-trivial task (creating an RSS feed from your email inbox, generating the RSS feed, and directly interacting with the POP3 protocol over SSL)

Also, most of the code will require slight modification to work with the most recent version of Erlang. This seems like a bad thing, but it forces you to actually understand the code and determine what broke, rather than just copy-and-pasting everything.. For example, the regexp module had changed name, so I prodded around the erlang library code to see where it went, and if the arguments had changed - in doing so I realised how simple (most of) the code was, something I wouldn't have done if the tutorial was "better"..

17 lat temudiscuss

More importantly, why hasn't http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth taken off?

This is more practical (and cuter) than using brand-logos.. Pictures of kittens and other animals are easy to find, whereas getting a wide enough range of companies willing to let you use their logos will be far more difficult.. It would be like having a captcha where there are only 5 possible strings to enter..