Mutual respect between faiths needs to be restored so as to overcome the distrust that poisons so many people's lives, Charles said. "This, of course, is made infinitely more difficult by the stereotypes and absurdities propagated by certain sections of the media," he said. -- ReutersPlease, remember social issues when you cast your DPL vote and Rank NOTA High rather than approve candidates you're unhappy with. In reply to Riku Voipio's criticism of the UDHR, with apologies to Ross Burton for the title.
So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote : > I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If > you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU. Dear Anthony, I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs. > In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if > you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing, > rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences. > Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool... That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks. They poison the -devel list. Best,
So yay for people who aren’t developers, in the n-m queue or maintaining a package, who don’t understand Debian’s processes, yet still think it’s great to pontificate about what Debian’s processes are, go on about how developers are “arrogant experts” and who think “punctuation is pretty cool” is a “poisonous ad hominem attack”. But what I hate most is people who think they’re contributing to Debian by mailing people privately to tell them how horrible they are. Gag. For those playing along at home, the proper process to follow in a dispute with a maintainer is to bring it up to the technical committee, not to try forcing the situation, whether that be by reopening bugs or playing bug ping-pong. It’s really not complicated. It’s even documented (5.8.3 of the Developers Reference).On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 05:13:15PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote : > I'm not disputing whether it's a bug or not, the maintainer is. If > you are *helping* the maintainer, then fine: do an NMU. Dear Anthony, I would love to, but I am not a developer. And I am amazed to see that more energy is spent in arguing rather than solving the problem. I hope Luke will NMU this package and close those shameful bugs. > In my experience you almost always get a better response from people if > you assume they've got a good reason for doing what they have been doing, > rather than just trying to add extra punctuation to your sentences. > Admittedly, punctuation is pretty cool... That kind of sentence reflects your inclination for ad-hominem attacks. They poison the -devel list. Best,
In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):
… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?
Also, I think I have six months worth of new books to read, combining Christmas with my birthday last month. <boggle>
STDIN.to_a.sort_by rand .each l puts lAs Philipp warns, however: "Ruby is full of fun and power; one must watch out that the scripts remain readable". For a fairly toy example, this solution is still fairly readable, however I can see hair growing on this thing if your program grows large. Next, Pierre-Charles David showed his qualifications for becoming a co-author of the next edition of the Pickaxe (AKA "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide"), with his example and explanation. He's kindly given permission for me to reproduce his e-mail in it's entireity, since it's too good to chop up:
Here is the shortest and most readable version of your "randomize stdin" script I can think of:Pierre, your explanation definitely helped, and I hope it helps others too. The third person to help me out is Decklin Foster, through a post in his blog. What particularly caught me about his solution was the neat demonstration of another feature of Ruby which I think I will really learn to love: the ability to dynamically add methods to an existing class. "Aiee!" I hear all the purists scream -- and I can see the potential for severe misuse, too. But, since every good idea seems to get deeply perverted, we may as well have some real useful features to pervert while we're at it. Decklin has the clever idea of adding methods to the Array class that shuffle the elements of the array in a random fashion. His code is beautiful in it's simplicity:#!/usr/bin/env ruby print ARGF.readlines.sort_by randARGF is a special variable representing either stdin or, in the case where file names are passed on the command line, the content of these files (think of Perl's <>). ARGF behaves like an IO object (although I think it is not one). In particular, it responds to the #readlines method which splits the receiver's content into lines and returns an array. In other words,lines = ARGF.readlinesis the idiomatic way of doinglines = [] while line = gets() do lines << line endin your example. The next part (sort_by) uses a new form of the sort method, which I think is not documented in the Pickaxe. It implements the Schwartzian transform technique. In essence, a random number is associated to each element of the array, which are then sorted based on this index. As a general style remark, note that although Ruby supports "while" and "for x in y" loops, they are rarely used, in favor of iterators and/or higher order methods. For example, to gather all the input lines in an array without using readlines, one might writelines = Array.new ARGF.each_line l lines << lorlines = ARGF.inject([]) lines, l lines << lHope it helps, and welcome to Ruby!
class Array
def swap!(a, b)
self[a], self[b] = self[b], self[a]
self
end
def shuffle!
each_index do i
j = i + rand(length - i)
swap!(i, j)
end
self
end
end
He then goes on to rewrite my bumbling example in probably the most
comprehensible manner I've yet seen:
STDIN.readlines.shuffle!.each line puts lineDecklin writes, "Now that is cool.". I couldn't have put it better myself. My thanks to Philipp, Pierre-Charles, and Decklin, for helping me along the Ruby path. So, two new Ruby Rules for me to live by:
Next.