We just got Contribute 3 today, so we haven't had long to deal with it, but it does seem to clear up one of the major problems I had with carrying the Mac as my main computer on trips.
I do a lot of work on the road. I try to keep up with my novels—a page a day is a book in a year—and of course there's so much e-mail that if I let it get ahead of me I may never catch up. There's also my web page, The View From Chaos Manor where I record my own thoughts, and perhaps more importantly, post mail I find interesting. It may be immodest, but I think I have the most interesting mail of anyone in the computer industry.
At home this is simple. I use Microsoft FrontPage 2003 in connection with Outlook 2003. For security reasons, all Outlook messages are converted to plaintext before I see them. In plaintext any included links are still there, but I have to actually want to go look at the place the link points to before I will see it. I only follow links from people I know, or places I am pretty sure of. Incidentally, this is probably the most dangerous thing I do, and using a default browser other than Internet Explorer for this purpose seems indicated. Anyway, once I determine a letter should be posted, I can copy it, and use the paste special feature in FrontPage to transfer it to the mail section of my web site. Then I can add comments if I so choose, and send that page up to the Mazin Zidane server where my site is so admirably maintained. The whole process takes only seconds (plus whatever thought I put into the reply) and I am very used to doing things that way.
When I began to travel with the Mac, I soon discovered that there isn't a good Mac substitute for Microsoft FrontPage, and FrontPage doesn't run on a Mac except in emulation where it ran far too slow in the last version of the Mac PC program. Incidentally, that may have changed: We are getting a new version of the VirtualPC software, and we'll see.
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
How Do You Do Nightly Builds and Tests when there is No Overnight? Software Production in a Geographically Distributed Environment
Attend this Webcast and find out how to overcome common build-test-deploy challenges that affect all members of a distributed team, including:
<ul>
<li> Communication difficulties, because of time-zone and cultural differences</li>
<li> Workflow challenges, like lack of documented procedures and build and test handoff problems</li>
<li> Slow build and test cycles, broken builds, and other factors that hamper distributed team productivity</li>
</ul>
Thursday, September 25, 2005 " 11am PT / 2pm ET
</p>
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
