Java : System properties
An idea came to my mind, as how to, develop a system anaylysis program in Java that would present to the user, his/her complete system specification - including what processor is used, how much ram etc. Just a passing thought, and I hope it will get some form, in the coming days.
Your comments on the same, are heartily welcome
Currenlty I am gazing through various rooms in irc.freenode.net, namely ##linux, #apache, ##c, ##c++, #python, #mysql, and #ubuntu. All these rooms seems to be pretty interesting and with less trash/filthy talk compared to other such providers.
Oh, its getting time, to leave for the classes at NIIT, and we have been informed that classes would be from 1:00 to 5:00 today, because we are having exams in the next week at NIIT. So me, looking forward for an interesting session on XML, today afternoon.
bye guys
Justin
Labels: google groups, IRC, java, usenet
Emacs touch
I recently came across a thread in comp.lang.python namely The Modernization of Emacs which stressed the need for changing emacs to "appeal to the masses" I actually clicked the thread just because of the sheer number of replies to thread - 269 last count. But upon reading, I found it really interesting. I had almost given up learning emacs, after I felt it was not worth it, but this reply by Bjorn Borud made me start thinking.
I am quoting his reply here and I bet these, are worth a read.
Sometimes it is better than what you had before, but often it is not really better, just different. a good example is the web and the applications we implement in terms of the web. take forums for instance. in a strict technical sense, web-based forums are inferior to NNTP-based forums.for my uses, web forums are a huge step back from NNTP.
There are two types of "user friendly". there's "user friendly" and then there is "beginner friendly" which is often mislabeled. the latter is more important for applications which are to be used casually. like utilities you only use once or twice per year -- those need to be "beginner friendly".
for applications you are likely to use for prolonged periods of time (like programming, video editing, music production etc), it does not make sense to optimize for "beginner friendly". at least not at the cost of making the application less "user friendly".
applications you spend a lot of time using are worth an investment in learning how to use them. what creates friction in an application you know reasonably well is when common tasks are fiddly. for instance, while menus are often good for casual use and lower the initial threshold for absolute beginners, depending heavily on menu navigation becomes too fiddly if you are performing a certain task 2-3 times per minute. it is not _user_ friendly.
Emacs is rather "user friendly", but not very "beginner friendly". when I was first confronted with it, the sort of text editors I was used to were Wordstar and derivatives of it. I was rather annoyed that it didn't do what I expected, so I just used a different editor.
a few years later I bemoaned the fact that Emacs was so hard to use during a conversation with a friend. he asked me if I had actually made an effort to learn Emacs, which of course I hadn't. so I figured I might as well give it a shot.
so I hope, no I think i WILL become an emacs Pro some day
:)
Bye
Labels: emacs, google groups, newsgroup, python
