Got me a nice domain name: 2π.net
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
I recently discovered International Domain Names. As I mentioned here to Phil Pilgrim a while back. So I just had to get me one, 2π.net.
Must be about the shortest memorable domain name one can get now a days. Cheap to.
Anyone like to do me a favor and try it out? You can get there as http://2π.net or if you don't happen to have a Greek keyboard xn--2-umb.net
The server there is hosted on AWS and is serving up an experimental control panel of buttons, leds, graphs, a terminal connection back to the server and a webgl animation.
Hope to get that collecting data from a Propeller soon.
This link is an example of a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack on 2π.net
https://xn--2-umb.net/buy?type=oneClick&item=badassQuadCopter&quantity=5000
To be fixed...
Must be about the shortest memorable domain name one can get now a days. Cheap to.
Anyone like to do me a favor and try it out? You can get there as http://2π.net or if you don't happen to have a Greek keyboard xn--2-umb.net
The server there is hosted on AWS and is serving up an experimental control panel of buttons, leds, graphs, a terminal connection back to the server and a webgl animation.
Hope to get that collecting data from a Propeller soon.
This link is an example of a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack on 2π.net
https://xn--2-umb.net/buy?type=oneClick&item=badassQuadCopter&quantity=5000
To be fixed...
Comments
Actually I'm not sure what happens. Never registered a domain name before.
But think currently this is not a proper DNS record but a redirect from the guys I got the name from.
Does the page work though?
edit: Lol, this version of Firefox is 28
In fact, anything you type there should be broad cast to all other connected browsers. We have a chat system!
Sorry but this is all JS. If you view page source on that page you will see only a very few lines of HTML. I hate HTML!
I also hate CSS.
The website works though, and I think it would be really cool to hook this up to a web IDE, like PropWareIDE. Some simple backend logic would automatically allocate all available propellers to users as they logged in. A user might get a warning like "you're #x in the waitlist for a propeller. you'll be able to compile and download binaries, but won't be able to remote test your application until a board is available"
Thanks.
We, msrobots and I, already made a web based IDE for Spin that edits and compiles compiles Spin in the browser. With the help of a back end server msrobots had it saving the projects and programming a propeller.
It worked but it was ugly. Ever since then I have been looking for a easy way to make a nice UI for it. This propanel is part of that journey.
There is no reason we could not put a syntax highlighting editor into such a thing and have it send source back to a server for compilation and prop programming.
The terminal is indeed intended to get results back from the Prop(s)
Thank you for that
I remember seeing that web IDE a while ago but couldn't remember where it was or what it was called. Glad to hear you're already thinking of connecting the dots! I can't wait to see it take off!
http://tauday.com/
Ha, I tried tau. Wouldn't let me register τ.net , τ.org etc.
Once again that nasty behemoth, Microsoft messes with everything universal.
While ASCII is a universal defacto standard, Microsoft insisted on creating its own Unicode scheme that is proprietary versus the public domain scheme.
At one time, I had a desire to make a Unicode Forth that would simply accept Chinese characters for more compact and more culturally acceptible code, but immediately ran into all the MS versus the world nonsense in Unicode formats.
Why not register your site name in EBCDIC? I suspect the world is not ready for Heater.
If you think Unicode is wonderful, you should attempt to input Chinese from a keyboard. Getting 7000 characters generated from just about any keyboard is a bit daunting, but I have learned the four most predominant ways to do so. It is much easier to do in Android on a padfone that permits graphic entry.
can you show or share us this one?
btw: @parallax: i hope you like the chocalate
Chinese will be forever daunting. I actually think my brain has morphed into being more visually oriented by studying the written language for 20 years. And then there is the whole thing with tones.
My personal preference for computers is to stay with ASCII. It is delightfully simple. I am also wary of all the GUI aspects. I guess I am a bit primative.
If one could have an extended ASCII with the Greek alphabet in the extention; that would be handy. But culturally it is so Occidental. Unicode was intended to be globally inclusive.
I often wonder how all this would play out in a military conflict. In past wars, Morse Code played a big role. But the Chinese version of Morse Code is indeed slower to process. Somewhat a similar problem as ASCII versus Unicode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
Of course EBCDIC takes us off into a whole different direction. I guess IBM still uses it for something.
Being lazy and convinced that CSS is a total design failure I try to stay away from it as much as possible. So I use bootstrap to style everything: http://getbootstrap.com/
Out of the box bootstrap papers over the different browser quirks and makes things a lot less ugly than unstyled HTML. It also gives you a responsive layout. Try making your browser window as small as possible and see how everything on that page gets juggled around to fit nicely.
But bootstrap can be enhanced there are hundreds of themed versions. The one I used there is "cyborg" from here: https://bootswatch.com/ https://bootswatch.com/cyborg/
There are pay form bootstrap themes here: https://wrapbootstrap.com/ If you search around for "bootstrap themes" you's find a load more.
I'm using react.js to create the components on that page along with react-bootstrap which makes life easier still.
I've often wanted Greek characters on my keyboard! Working in math-heavy fields (e.g. map projections, right now), I've often wanted to use π instead of pi, φ instead of phi, etc. Okay, maybe I'm in the minority.
Are you suggesting that everyone should only use 0-9, a-z, A-Z? Or were you including extended ASCII? OEM or ANSI? It's hardly universal.
Even so, the problem is not the character set (whether it's ANSI Extended ASCII or Unicode). The problem is that the keyboard is substantially unchanged since it showed up. It is ridiculously cumbersome to type characters that are not printed on the keys.
Exactly! The mechanical keyboard is just outdated. On my Android devices, I love being able to hold on a letter and get a sub-listing with its various accented forms, or hold on a "$" and get various other currency symbols. Then there's the relatively painless ability to cycle through character sets. Frankly, if our big, clunky mechanical keyboards all had the same capabilities, we would not be having this conversation right now...
Fixed it. Had to get in there and turn off "forwarding" and change the IP address in the DNS records. Crappy web interface does not nake that obvious to do. http://xn--2-umb.net/ should now go straight to the server.
For some reason browsers might insist on "ununicoding" the host name so you see http://xn--2-umb.net/ in the browser. Chrome does here. Firefox does not.
Seems to me the problem is that a keyboard only has a limited number of keys and can only output a limited number of codes. To work around that software has to accept some kind of "compose" sequence in interpret that as the required unicode character.
Well, of course everything has a different understanding of composition. Googling around I find there is one
way to do it X with Gnome, another way with X and KDE, another way for vim another for emacs, etc etc etc. No doubt Windows and Macs have yet other ways.
Or I have to have a language specific keyboard, say greek, and an OS configure to translate it's key codes into the right greek unicode.
Clearly a keyboard should emit Unicode directly. Preferably as UTF-8. Then that stream from the keyboard could run into standard-in of any program and "just work".
That means my keyboard needs to be smarter. It should turn key codes into unicode. It should have a built in means of selecting any unicode character. Perhaps it needs a screen of it's own (touch screen) to select language etc. Perhaps there is a project in putting a raspberry Pi between keyboard and PC and doing all that!
UTF-8 works to preserve legacy software and legacy data without having to waste time in conversion.
Documents in Windows UTF-16 do not easily convert to UTF-8. Seems to be a proprietary format to me. But it may just be the Microsoft way versus the rest of the world.
Here is a quote from a site that gives the Linux point of view of UTF. http://michal.kosmulski.org/computing/articles/linux-unicode.html
" Two very common encodings are UTF-16 and UTF-8. In UTF-16, which is used by modern Microsoft Windows systems, each character is represented as one or two 16-bit (two-byte) words. Unix-like operating systems, including Linux, use another encoding scheme, called UTF-8, where each Unicode character is represented as one or more bytes (up to four; an older version of the standard allowed up to six).
UTF-8 has several interesting properties which make it suitable for this task. First, ASCII characters are encoded in exactly the same way in ASCII and in UTF-8. This means that any ASCII text file is also a correct UTF-8 encoded Unicode text file, representing the same text. In addition, when encoding characters that take up more than one byte in UTF-8, characters from the ASCII character set are never used. This ensures, among other things, that if a piece of software interprets such a file as plain ASCII, non-ASCII characters are ignored or in worst case treated as random junk, but they can't be read in as ASCII characters (which could accidentally form some correct but possibly malicious configuration option in a config file or lead to other unpredictable results). Given the importance of text files in Unix, these properties are significant. Thanks to the way UTF-8 was designed, old configuration files, shell scripts, and even lots of age-old software can function properly with Unicode text, even though Unicode was invented years after they came to be."
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I really can't begin to believe that the mechanical QWERTY keyboard is out-dated when people can easiliy enter 50 words per minute while composing documents, and some can go as fast as 120 words per minute.
I grew up at a time when everyone in my junior high learned to type as it was considered necessary preparation for a college education. I fear we have take a step backward by attempting to eliminate the skill.
The problem with 'standards' has been with us a long time. The USA still refuses to use metric, while even the U.K. accepts it. I am not sure that UTF is a standard or several. But I am sure that Asian languages are simply more challenging to read and write, especially those that never considered a phonetic alphabet (Korean is actually phonetic, Japanese is a mix of Chinese characters and a phonetic alphabet, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese really don't have any strict phonetic coorelation to characters.)
In reality, anyone can assign Greek characters to their keyboard if they are using a GUI OS. I do appreciate that there are a lot uses for Greek in maths as I actually try to teach my students the Greek alphabet along with learning English -- just so they can sort out math and engineer texts in English.
Being a native English language user, ASCII is really all I personally need. If I desire pi, I just spell 'pi'. On the other hand, if Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Russian, or one of many other languages was my native tongue, GUI seems to be an easier way to go. But we should be candid and admit that computer programing favors ABC and got very far before Unicode settled in.
Read up on the Unicode Consortium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium
They could have went with UTF-8 like the rest of the world. And of course, IBM had to have UTF-EBCDIC.
So for Windows, Microsoft adopted one of the most common Unicode Standard transformations. Microsoft didn't invent it, nor is there anything "proprietary" about it.
Unicode was originally a 16 bit encoding. It was soon realized that 16 bits was not enough to get everything in so it stretched to 21 bits, or whatever it is. So there was a 16 bit and a 32 bit encoding.
It's not surprisingly MS implemented what existed at the time. It was UTF-16 because using 32 bits for every character of string is seen as wasteful of RAM, disk space and bandwidth.
UTF-8 was invented later. First implemented and used by the plan-9 operating system. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt Notice the famous Unix names in there?
Now, as far as I can tell, unicode started out as a plan to unify all the different encodings used by all kind of operating systems. ASCII and all it's the different variants and extensions. EBCIDC etc etc etc. So far so good.
On the other hand it became a plan to identify and assign a number to every possible squiggle that humans have used in written communication since the dawn of time. That encompasses all languages, from all eras, everywhere.
Madness!
On the other hand why not? Why should we not be able to OCR the Deadsea Scrolls into a text file?
So Unicode is all about identifying and numbering those squiggles.
Loopy is a bit confused over UTF-16 vs UTF-8. They are just different ways of representing, in binary, the numbers assigned by unicode standardized squiggles. A lower level implementation detail.
Loopy is correct to say that it is annoying and causes problems moving documents around from Windows to Unix or whatever.
I used to have one of these phones. Coolest phone ever