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I used NS-diagrams a lot back in the 1980′s to design well-structured programs – there’s no possibility to jump in and out of the middle of loops if you use NS diagrams – and they are very easy to understand. Here is a simple example of processing an order, for example: We have deleted our commented links page. A lot of them were out of date and maintaining them required quite a high effort, due to the way they were originally formatted. All our links, even the obscure ones like these are now on del.icio.us. The only exceptions: we have moved the lists of our CDs and books to the site menu at the top right of this page.  The original Ergo Brick The recent announcement of the 2″ x 6.5″ x 6.5″ Apple Mac mini reminded me of Jerry Pournelle’s approach to portable computing back in the mid-1990′s: … Then came Ergo’s Brick, which was no larger than a disk cartridge and contained your whole computer. Plug in a keyboard and monitor, or plug the Brick into a docking station, and you were set. That worked well, and I used to carry it to the beach… Jerry was writing about how he liked to split writing between his home and his beach-house and the $2,495 16 MHz 386sx-based brick offered him the convenience of a small (well, somewhat larger than the Mac mini – 3″ x 8″ x 11″ – and I guess disk cartridges were bigger in the early 1990′s too) PC that he could tote between the two locations, keeping a separate keyboard and screen to plug into it at each place. John Beeler has a good introduction to del.icio.us. If you haven’t experimented much yet, take a look there to get some ideas on what it can do for you. Click through to the human clock and watch the page for a couple of minutes… It seems that ducks, like people, have regional accents: While cockney ducks make a rough “shouting” quack so that their mates can hear them above the din of urban life, their laid-back counterparts in the west country give off a Cornish burr of a quack, rather like a “giggle”  Sometimes it pays not to be on the cutting edge of technology. According to several reports, large numbers of vehicles in the USA having Bluetooth phone kits connected to their navigation systems have had their onboard electronic systems infected by a computer virus. How long until Symantec brings out Norton Anti-Virus for BMWs? No, typoGenerator is not what you might think. You type some text, typoGenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the images found, using randomly chosen effects. Then it places the text in the image, using random effects as well. The result is a typoPoster.   I’ve been playing around with del.icio.us recently. If you haven’t run across it yet, it is a fairly niffty bookmark manager which allows you to classify (or “tag”) your bookmarks, so that you can find them easily. It allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet and also to find bookmark collections of other users who have linked to the same site that you have bookmarked, which in turn can lead you to new interesting sites that they have found. You only need your web browser to access del.icio.us, but there is a nice freeware Mac client available, which makes the experience even more convenient than it already is: Cocoal.icio.us (there doesn’t seem to be any Windows client available at the moment), and if you want to back up your bookmarks into your Safari bookmark collection, the program you need is Chistina Zeeh’s delicious2safari.  Screenshot of cocoal.icio.us We’ve added a link to our del.icio.us bookmarks in the menu on the right, but we still have a large backlog to transfer and tag. Members of the British Antarctic Survey have discovered that a huge sheet of ice, resting on land in the area of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), is disintegrating and flowing into the sea. The sea level is rising world-wide by 0.2 mm / year as a result and it will raise the sea level by about 3 metres if it completely disintegrates. As recently as four years ago the ice sheet was thought to be completely stable, and unlikely to become unstable until some time between 2100 and the next 1000 years. As well as putting the obvious places, such as Bangladesh, under water, a rise in sea level of this magnitude will affect much of coastal Europe. |
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Copyright © 2000 - 2012 John & Ruth Keys, all rights reserved |
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