Apple Gives Jaguar Free to All U.S. K-12 Teachers

Apple Gives Jaguar Free to All U.S. K-12 Teachers

CUPERTINO, California October 17, 2002 Apple today announced its X for Teachers program that gives a free copy of Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" to every K-12 teacher in the U.S. "Jaguar" combines a stable and robust UNIX-based foundation with Macintosh’s legendary ease-of-use to create the world’s most advanced operating system for teaching, learning and administration. The free copy of "Jaguar" is accompanied by free copies of Apple’s Digital Hub applications – iMovie™ for digital video editing, iPhoto&trad; for organizing and sharing digital photos and iTunes&trad; for building a digital audio library.

A nice idea, but without hardware (maybe some educational discounts on eMacs, if that hasn’t been done?) I’m not sure what good this does. I’d certainly be pushing it at my son’s school, but their old Performas won’t be able to run it.

why I hate programming

pygoogle

Hmm, looks straighforward enough . . .

>>> import google
>>> google.LICENSE_KEY = '...' # must get your own!
>>> data = google.doGoogleSearch('python')
>>> data.meta.searchTime
0.043221000000000002
>>> dir(data.meta)
['directoryCategories', 'documentFiltering', 'endIndex', 'estimateIsExact',
'estimatedTotalResultsCount', 'searchComments', 'searchQuery', 'searchTime',
'searchTips', 'startIndex']
>>> data.results[0].URL
'http://www.python.org/'
>>> data.results[0].title
'Python Language Website'

Watch what happens when I do it.
Continue reading “why I hate programming”

cast your bread upon the waters

how to make SOAP4R read WSDL files?

Here at Google, we’re about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface, rather than have to resort to parsing HTML.

This little message “inspired more than two dozen implementations and 10,000 developers sign up in the first week alone,” according to Sam Ruby.

This contrasts sharply with the position adopted at my last startup: the prevailing wisdom there was to give nothing away, share nothing. Messages in newsgroups and mailing lists that revealed nothing more than the fact we existed, no details about technology or implementation, were considerered a Bad Idea. I can only imagine what the result of an aggressive effort tto publicize an API might have yielded.

David Pogue on MSFT’s fake switcher

Ad Campaign Leaves Pie on Microsoft

What does all of this say about a company’s corporate psyche that it feels the need to fabricate evidence of the public’s love?

Maybe Microsoft is jealous of the genuine affection Mac fans seem to exhibit for their machines. Maybe, improbably, the company actually feels rejected by the quirky (and, as far as anyone can tell, real) people in Apple’s “Switch” ads.

But more likely, Microsoft’s latest blunder demonstrates is neither jealousy nor wounded pride; it’s pure arrogance. The company thinks it can get away with anything. This time, at least, it’s wrong.

Well, I can’t ever recall anyone saying they *loved* any MSFT product: plenty will say it’s faster or better in some other way, but never purely subjective love.

As David Pogue points out, MSFT evidently thinks we’re gullible dolts with their continued professions of ignorance of their own actions (“Once we realized . . . “).

Do the people who work at MSFT, either as employees or contractors not realize that many of their products run, for now at least, on both their OS and the Macintosh? At one point, they supported IE on Solaris.

There seems to be some myopia at work there that rivals Steve Jobs’ fabled reality distortion field. But rather than being based on charisma and passion, it stems from paranoia and fear.

diving into python

I decided Mark Pilgrim’s “further reading” program was intriguing enough to take a whack at building one.

To add to the fun, why not do it in python?

So the most basic step is to look at the logfile and pull out referers (yes, it’s spelt wrong but it looks right: usage and habit).

To that end, I found a script that purports to do what tail -f does.
ASPN : Python Cookbook : tail -f in Python

Description:A simple implementation of the standard UNIX utility tail -f in Python.



import time

while 1:

    where = file.tell()

    line = file.readline()

    if not line:

        time.sleep(1)

        file.seek(where)

    else:

        print line, # already has newline

Looks simple, alright. It doesn’t work.

For one thing, there’s nothing to open a file in there. file = open(“/usr/local/weblogs/httpd-access.log”) would be useful. And we need to do that outside the while block: we open the file, seek to the end, then wait for new stuff to appear (for while not line to be false), then print or do whatever to what we find there.

I’m still trying to figure it out: what seems most worth figuring out is how to delimit a file on newlines instead of by characters since I am going to examine the file line by line.

When will I ever learn that most of the “helpful” scripts and code fragments rarely are?

filling the missing PCI devices

PCI Vendor and Device Lists

This page is primarily intended as an engineering resource for people who need to deal with computers built around the PCI bus. It’s reason for being is that there is no other centralized database of PCI device IDs. This database is entirely user-supported; all the data has been, and continues to be, furnished by those working in the PCI market. Feel free to add info for the use of others!

This is one of those things you find and you’re just glad someone took the time to do it. If you have any “unknown card” messages in your dmesg output, you can find out what they are.
Continue reading “filling the missing PCI devices”

find out about missing PCI bus entries

PCI Vendor and Device Lists

This page is primarily intended as an engineering resource for people who need to deal with computers built around the PCI bus. It’s reason for being is that there is no other centralized database of PCI device IDs. This database is entirely user-supported; all the data has been, and continues to be, furnished by those working in the PCI market. Feel free to add info for the use of others!

venery; collective nouns

rebecca ‘I am not a goth’ blood

goth collective nouns

an amaranthine of goths … an angst of goths … a band of goths … a bauhaus of goths… a bleakness of goths … a brood of goths … a byron of goths …a canticle of goths … a clot of goths … a corset of goths … a cloud of goths … a cortege of goths … an eclipse of goths … an emanation of goths … an echelon of goths … an exquisite of goths … a flock of goths … a flourish of goths … a gloom of goths … a glower of goths … a litany of goths … a mope of goths … a phalanx of goths … a pose of goths … a rapture of goths … a ravish of goths … a scene of goths …a shade of goths …a shudder of goths … a snoot of goths … a shroud of goths … a suicide of goths … a sulk of goths … a thick of goths … a vanguard of goths

another web

I wonder how many groups of alumni from companies, not just dot-bombs, have setup email lists or other virtual gathering places? I know some people who are on three or four mailing lists from old jobs: looks like a news story to me. Yahoo! has almost 27,000 groups with alumni in their names: they’re not all schools . . . ..

The ease of setting up a virtual community, the elimination of distance through technology, and the impersonal aspect or virtuality as aspects of the technology combine to make this possible. Perhaps it puts the notion of the web as an impersonal space to the test, since you can continue an association with old colleagues in a more immediate way than the telephone permits, regardless of location.

Anyone have John Markoff’s email address?