Oh, and after you’ve spent $100,000 to put our system in your theatre, you’d have to be pretty damn stupid to say “I’m not going to enable the plugin in my browser to use it”.

Any two, well, OK, maybe, if it’s insanely great. But all three? That tells me the architecture team is lazy.

One thing I took away from my Google interviews was that all these young punks expect you to have memorized every single class in the Java API document.

As an actual 25-year-old, let me just say: oh HELL no. Reference works are there for a reason. But perhaps I’m old by Google standards.

And speaking of references, yes, the language you’re thinking of is perl, but there’s no need to actually experiment; it’s documented in the perlsyn(1) man page: “Note that, unlike C and Pascal, these are defined in terms of BLOCKs, not statements. This means that the curly brackets are required–no dangling statements allowed.”

http://www.nagios.org/

We also have an application with this kind of display which they call an “animation” screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvsr9Ig6Pss

Each object has a couple of “at rest” default images plus animations for when it’s doing something like processing a file. Here’s a few seconds of what it does. You right-click to control the resource, double-click to open and view contents, drag to move on the screen. Note the line between TBS-Newsdrive2 and CTP2 is blue, indicating data flow. The devices offline have the universal Ghostbusters logo over them. At the end I’ve scrolled down to show some of the windows that we just leave open on the screen to show the files queued up for the individual resources.

You can also create new devices but because this is in-production I can’t demonstrate it for you.

This is a pretty common kind of interface so there must be toolsets that let you do this on a web page or in a java app.

We use some Java apps that apparently work great when there are few users and they’re all in the same room as the server, but are super slow resource hogs when the user base is widely distributed. Be cautious in extrapolating performance if you will have users in a lot of different locations or lots of users. Strongly consider using web pages rather than java apps if timeliness is an issue.

$ cat x
if (1)
print “Hello\n”;
$ perl x
syntax error at x line 2, near “)
print”
Execution of x aborted due to compilation errors.
$ cat y
if (1)
{
print “Hello\n”;
}
$ perl y
Hello