Mikhail_Edoshin

65 ms·

781.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
[not related to content] I usually print interesting articles to XPS because the XPS reader on my tablet is so much faster than web browsers. As I've been doing this I've noticed that lots of sites out there just cannot be printed
782.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I remember reading Bill Gates's own writings on how he chooses where to put those money. He has a very clear and developed strategy; it's basically investment except that the profits come back not directly to to Gates, but to the
783.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
You probably know Archimedes names for big numbers too :) What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but i
784.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I love to cook myself and I agree that using scales yields a more stable result (provided the ingredients are stable). But to be simpler than volume-based units the scales have to be pretty sophisticated, like the modern electronic scales.
785.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I agree that weighting is the key to stability for professional cooks and bakers, but up to a gram or not depends on what you're weighting, how much of it, and for what purpose (and yes, the gram itself as a unit is irrelevant). This i
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Light year is not just a name; year is a natural length of time and light speed is also a natural constant. The whole unit is natural and is based on things that make sense on such distances. This is same for all natural units; they grew up
787.
by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Not that inconsistent; if you look up the scale, you'll see that most ratios are powers of two; sometimes there's an occasional 1/3, like the teaspoon to tablespoon ratio. What is convenient is that the ratios are small; as s
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Can you actually name this number without looking in a dictionary? I cannot. Nine and a half zillions, I guess. So Alpha Centauri is like 44 zillion meters away; very enlightening.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units. Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because millimeters are too big for character sizes and too small for page units and cent
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Metric is overrated. It's both too recent an invention and a part of the long gone movement that thought everything is to be rebuilt, you know, "rationally." It didn't turn out more rational as a result, at least not the
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Some functionality is missing. E.g. no users, thus no way to see what else that user has uploaded. On PB some uploaders maintained rather interesting personal collections.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
The only app I wanted to use that required v3 Python was Beancount, but I couldn't get it to work, because it required v3.3, while Cygwin only has 3.2 and I myself was unable to compile Python v3.3 or later on Cygwin. (It doesn't
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
My impression is that Microsoft is fairly reliable when it comes to supporting old formats and standards. E.g. I can still send Word and Excel DDE commands and this is a tech from 90s, Windows 3.1 and stuff. OOXML is certainly more powerful
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Yes, they say that the amount grows "up to the amount you have in your Snowdrift.coop account which you of course control".
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Yes, here it is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066%28office.10... It only describes the data part and doesn't document Excel options such as print settings and filters; if you need them, create
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I second SpreadsheetML; it's plain XML (not multi-part compressed .xslx) and it supports multiple sheets, formulas, formatting, and some other bits like named ranges, print settings, and such.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Thanks, that's informative. I haven't seen it used much either; the only real use I saw (aside from viewing) was an XPS printer driver for a Canon inkjet printer. (I've also heard that it produced better results than the stan
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Does anyone use Microsoft XPS? It looked rather interesting; like PDF without any interactivity (except for links) and with special support for publishing (color management, job tickets, etc.). And internally it is a collection of XML docs
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
How do you manage to change C or Python source code? Omit a ";" in C or ":" in Python and it will refuse to compile.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
So the problems are real, it's just that XML and XSLT (and now JSON schema et al.) solve them badly (to your taste)?
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
How could you miss components, the new web revolution? :) Here it is being presented by Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toYLLcoY14 It's basically custom HTML tags like: <tabs> <tab>Alpha&lt
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
I really don't understand how programmers can hate XSLT (and XML for that matter). It's a marvelous piece of technology, truly. Maybe the whole stack is so ahead of its time that nobody gets it?
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Compiled XSLT stylesheets must be very efficient; they're automata, like regular expressions.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
Yep, everyone hates XML and then gets excited over "microformats" or "components" :) These hundreds of languages have no pattern matching but all have mutable state; XSLT is declarative and this removes a ton of complexi
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
It seems they have a C version of Saxon in the works. Also, I was surprised to learn there's a JavaScript version: Saxon-CE.
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
XML Schema describes a language to define a CF-like grammar and a set of extensible types, while JSON is a serialization notation for a data model that has strings, integers, real numbers, booleans, arrays, and dictionaries. No wonder they&
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
This is same as saying that one shouldn't use parser generators or even describe the grammar of a language in Backus-Naur form. Any language is usually very well equipped with tools to read strings and BNF is absolutely not a programmi
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 12y ago
As far as I understand this is a limitation of the underlying processing model (tree automata and such, although I'm not an expert). That is I suspect it would be equally hard to describe such an unordered collection of required elemen
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by Mikhail_Edoshin 15y ago
I'd recommend Robert Boice's book "Procrastination and Blocking." It helped me a lot. The basic idea of the book is that the cause of procrastination is impulsiveness (as in the Piers Steel's book mentioned below, except that Boice was ther