Slashdot Mirror

It's true, in some ways client-side Java was ahead of its time in terms of technology. I think the biggest problem was the botched job that the browsers did in implementing Java support. Like how Netscape supported Java 1.1 except for the new AWT classes. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Sun would have been better off developing the Java Plug-in right from the start instead of relying on Netscape and Microsoft.

Eric
Deploying Java applets (old set of tips)

no right to interfere with what a person does on their private land

It's more about regulating what happens above the private land rather than on the private land. How far above your land does your ownership extend?

Besides, if you build a rocket and launch it from your private land and land on me as I sit (in private) in my washroom, it's too late to go to the courts!

Eric
Please, people: JavaScript is not Java

This, of course, is why most SF stories in space use a naval system when discussing the military. Star Trek does it that way, for example. And in most cases, when the ship is out of communication range then what the captain generally says is the law. Particularly in stories like Midshipman's Hope and its sequels.

Eric
Why Vioxx is the new Prozac for lawyers

The author is the publisher. Lulu.com just prints the PDF that the author submitted. This is the danger of self-publishing, of course, the fact that you can skip over the normal steps in the publication process such as copyediting, page layout, indexing, etc. Not that you can't self-publish a professional-looking book, but it does take additional work -- you're not done once you've written the text.

Eric
My books (published via a traditional publisher)

A few reasons:

• A large base of existing handheld apps
• A well-designed UI for mobile devices
• A familiar brand for consumers
• Longer-term, may make for easier porting of Palm OS to new devices

Eric
View your HTTP headers here

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Obviously, the biggest selling feature of this scenario is that it gives OS licensees the ability to run the extensive set of preexisting Palm OS applications while letting them do more sophisticated things under the covers without running into Palm OS's limitations. The only hitch is the GUI, which will have to use the Palm OS APIs, so Linux apps will still need a piece written specifically for these devices. It may not be an issue in all cases, though, especially with interpreted languages. A Linux version of Java could perhaps reimplement one of the GUI toolkits in Palm OS terms.

Eric
Crufty stuff: Palm Database Programming: the free electronic version

Multiple choice:

a) the cost of a new wireless device that supports this technology
b) the average damage to your car when you hit a tree while trying to watch a video on your phone
c) per-year productivity lost to phone-based instant messaging
d) your new monthly cellphone bill

Eric
JavaScript != Java

you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get

Surely nobody does such a thing!

Eric
Buy my upcoming book | Buy my previous books | Learn why Vioxx reduced spam

you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get

Surely nobody does such a thing!

Eric
Buy my upcoming book | Buy my previous books | Learn why Vioxx reduced spam

you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get

Surely nobody does such a thing!

Eric
Buy my upcoming book | Buy my previous books | Learn why Vioxx reduced spam

Yeah, they're going about this all wrong. They should be selling this stuff to pharmacies and hospitals -- that's where the technology will be useful!

Eric
Vioxx recall parody

I can't say I'm too interested in the debate -- nothing new here, folks -- but I do like the reference Tim Bray made to Joel Spolsky's essay Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 about the dangers of rewriting code from scratch instead of trying to work with the existing code base. It's an old piece, but I hadn't come across it yet, and I like what he says. Go give it a read, then enjoy your weekend.

Eric
See Wiliam Shatner on my cereal box (soon to be updated)

Aren't most "unlimited" plans actually "high limit" plans? In other words, they're not truly unlimited, they just have very high thresholds and the phone companies count on the fact that most people never reach those thresholds. Check the fine print on your plan... even if there's no expicit threshold, the phone company may still be able to charge you for "unusually high" usage.

Eric
My cellphone customer disservice story

For the curious, these two patent applications (note they're just applications at this stage) by Google cover most of the AdSense/AdWords technology:

Methods and apparatus for serving relevant advertisements

Serving advertisements based on content

Eric
Who is publishing a book about AdSense in the spring

I've used LowCostDomains.ca for a few. They charge $17.45 (Canadian kilopennies) for .ca domains, haven't had any problems pointing them to the DNS my web host (KGB Internet Solutions, also Canadian and great for Java hosting, though the name may former residents of the Soviet Union a pause) maintains.

Eric
Check your HTTP headers here

GroupWise must be gaining traction. Research In Motion is going to support it for its BlackBerry platform it:

BlackBerry Enterprise Server support for Novell GroupWise

Eric
Some BlackBerry programming stuff

If anyone's interested, I have some land in northern Alberta (Peace River) that can be had... mind you, it gets pretty cold there in the winter (nothing like going to school when it's -40 out!) so you might only want it as a summer property. Especially if global warming actually makes winters worse -- speculation on my part, that wasn't addressed by the article.

Eric
How to detect Internet Explorer from the headers

Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s. Mind you, those "features" allowed me to resurrect some semi-useful postings I had made:

Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified

The ANSI Standard: A Summary for the C Programmer

Eric

Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s. Mind you, those "features" allowed me to resurrect some semi-useful postings I had made:

Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified

The ANSI Standard: A Summary for the C Programmer

Eric

Thanks for getting that song stuck in my head.

No kidding! Of course, it's probably meaningless to most of the readers, who are clueless about the eighties. (As opposed to us, who were clueless in the eighties.)

This brings up an interesting point, though. I've often wondered if the number of unique words in a song's refrain had any correlation with its popularity ranking. I mean, look at songs like "One More Night" or "Sussudio"... No! More songs of the 80s running through my head!

Eric
Some BlackBerry programming stuff

Another misleading article title! I thought maybe Wal-Mart was selling defective cameras. Now I have to go look elsewhere for my Christmas shopping...

Eric
JavaScript is not Java!

Aren't most satellite channels commercial-free? That would seem like a good reason to me. Besides, even if there are dozens of channels in your area, there may not be any you really like.

Eric
How to make money with Vioxx

... for something good to watch on all those channels I have. I suppose this could make me turn off the TV more quickly and pick up a good book instead.

I wonder how they'll make money on this? Maybe they'll do the picture-in-picture thing and show a relevant commercial while you're watching the video clip. (AdWords would work better, but you'd need to be able to click on links.)

Eric
View your browser's HTTP headers here

Ah, a way to identify geeks at birth!

Eric
Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified

with URL spoofing in IE, it's an even bigger problem

Has anyone developed any anti-phishing plugins for the various browsers? It should be easy to do for Firefox and Mozilla, of course, and you can even write an ActiveX (cough) browser handler for IE, if I recall my MSDN documentation correctly. The plugins wouldn't be perfect, of course, but they could detect some obvious cases like numeric-only IP addresses being clicked, or maybe even do some analysis of your hosts file. Better than nothing, it seems to me...

Eric
Why the Vioxx recall reduced spam (humor)

Same thing with my wife -- because I've warned her, she's been on the lookout for these things. The bank scams are pretty obvious for us, since we're not based in the US and the ones we get are for US banks, but the Paypal ones are the tricky ones. It's going to get to the point where you just don't click on a link you get in an email.

Eric
How to masquerade your browser

You know, the one where the guy is chasing his MP3 player down the street. I didn't realize that they were turbine Energizer batteries. Duh!

Eric
See your HTTP headers here

Transparent aluminum gets closer and closer!

Eric
William Shatner on my cereal box

was there really a market for another beginner's book in Perl?

In a free market -- not to be confused with a GPL market -- this is called competition. Just because there's already a good book out doesn't mean that a better one can't be written. Not to say that this one is better than the other. Also, publishers like to fill in their catalogs with books on all the hot/important/niche topics on the chance that one of them will really fly and to make themselves appear current and relevant to book buyers.

Also, with computer books there's a definite shelf life for most books. All my published books are way too old, for example, to be considered current anymore, though a lot of the info I put in them is still valid. People looking at Learning Perl might think it's too old as well, since the third edition was published in 2001. It's hard to write books that aren't out-of-date before they're even shipped to the store, but when the copyright date is no longer in the same or previous year, it gets harder to sell them... The rule of thumb I've heard is that for most computer books the first sixth months are the most critical, that's when you'll see the most copies. That's why it's important to get good reviews up on Amazon as early as possible and to promote the book like crazy around its publication time. As with anything, there are exceptions to this, like the venerable C Programming Language.

Eric

According to the ISBN buried in the BN.com link, it's an Apress book by James Lee and Peter Wainwright. See GoPriceIt for more details. Or just go straight to the Amazon entry for the book.

Eric

Forgot to mention: Steve Punter's Southern Ontario Cell Phone Page is a great resource for information on the North American cellphone market from the consumer viewpoint. (Well, it's really about the Canadian market, but the same technologies are used in the US.) He has a good explanation of the various technologies available in the North American market, and links to all the carriers in Canada. I find the coverage maps (like this one for my area) pretty useful.

At least the BlackBerry is designed and built here, so we're not totally behind!

Eric
Basic info about BlackBerry development

This is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck. I even wrote up a simple book price check application that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.

This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.

Eric
See what your browser is sending

This is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck. I even wrote up a simple book price check application that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.

This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.

Eric
See what your browser is sending

This is the next step from applications that exist today. For example, J2ME-enabled phones can run Piranha Pricecheck. I even wrote up a simple book price check application that I was going to use for an article but never went too far with it.

This stuff is quite easy to do with Amazon's web services. On a mobile phone, oddly enough, the ISBN is also really easy to enter from the keypad, since it's all digits except for the trailing X that sometimes occurs (modulo 11 check digit) and you can infer that.

Eric
See what your browser is sending

Sorry, you're right, I missed that bit about the conditional comments. Yeesh, what a kludge! Anyhow, my original intent was to show people how to detect if Firefox was being used and to show a "Spread Firefox!" button instead of a "Get Firefox!" button but some non-IE users took offense at the implication that they should be getting Firefox too. Can't please everyone, I guess!

Hopefully some viewers learn something new when they read the article (and the HTTP header viewer).

Eric

Your signature line:

How to detect Internet Explorer

For those who are browser agnostic and simply wish for a browser to work on their web pages, it's more useful to check for the existence of a feature. Since Javascript allows you to check whether a function or object is defined without causing an error, one can gracefully fail -- simply don't use a feature if it's not available -- instead of trying to respond properly to innumerable browser versions. Feel free to read more on this from Quirks Mode.

As a side note, if all one wishes to do is detect Internet Explorer, even clever Javascript is more work than necessary, let alone server side shenanigans. IE supports conditional comments which can easily provide for any sort of IE criticism you want. And last I checked, Opera doesn't see these things (correct me if I'm wrong), so it would be more useful if all you were doing was haranguing people for using the default browser of their OS.

More proof that consumer-oriented books are gaining traction, now that computers and related technologies are in the mainstream. Much bigger potential audience. A lot of developer info is available for free these days, too, which makes a developer-oriented book a harder sell. It will be interesting to see what the bestsellers are in the next few years.

Of course, there will always be developer-oriented material, especially innovative series like "Head First" that buck convention. (You either love or hate that series.)

Eric
Palm Database Programming: The Free Electronic Version

He is suing because Google has indexed unauthorized mirror sites

Really, it comes down to this: he's suing Google because he can't sue those mirror sites. They're just following the Lawyer's Axiom of Transitivity: if A is related to B and B is related to C then if A sues B and B has no money, then A must sue C.

Eric
Why the Vioxx recall reduced spam (parody)

I hope they do this carefully and with lots of planning, because it's so easy to end up in "DLL hell" (or "shared library hell") if you don't. It would be nice to keep the option to install these apps completely separately so that you can upgrade one without affecting the other. Sure, more disk and more memory, but these things are cheap today and continue to get cheaper.

Eric
How to detect Internet Explorer

Yes and no. If the majority of people are using Windows and IE, there's a better argument for building browser extensions and other client-side Microsoft technologies (like Windows itself). Move people to other browsers and you take that away.

Eric
How to detect Internet Explorer (pretty relevant)

People often equate J2EE with web applications and so do the J2EE-vs-LAMP comparison without the right information. J2EE is more than just web applications. You can build non-web clients that use the J2EE component model (they can even be built in other languages and use CORBA mappings). J2EE provides connections to legacy systems. J2EE supports asynchronous messaging. You can do pretty much everything transactionally with J2EE as well, so that if something fails along the way you can rollback your changes.

Actually, comparing J2EE to LAMP is wrong in another way. A J2EE server can run on Linux. An Apache web server is often used as a front end to a J2EE server (especially when you integrate the app server within an already-existing web server infrastructure). You could use MySQL (though I think you'd better off using ASA, but I'm biased) as long as you make sure to use transactional tables. There goes the "LAM" part of "LAMP".

So really, you're comparing the Java-based J2EE framework against similar Perl/PHP/Python frameworks. At least, that's what you should be comparing. Maybe for pure web apps the latter are better. I don't know, but you have to compare oranges to oranges.

Eric
JavaScript is not Java

True, but if you're in a business (like book writing) where you want people you don't know to contact you, it's far from ideal. That's why whitelists don't appeal to me.

Eric
Palm Database Programming: The Free Electronic Edition

But it would be more on-topic if you had replied to the actual story about the IsNot patent application. Someone reading this story without having read that one would find your reply confusing.

It will be interesting to see if this patent application actually gets rejected or not by the patent office.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...

Eric
How to detect Internet Explorer

From the patent application: Such a language construction is ungrammatical, requires more typing and violates the philosophy on which BASIC rests. It would be helpful therefore, if a single more intuitive operator could perform the function that the combination of the two operators Is and Not typically performs.

Microsoft is simultaneously announcing the publication of an updated version of The Elements of Style, revised specifically for Visual BASIC programmers.

"We're concerned with the literacy rates among VB programmers," says Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. "How can programmers learn to write correctly in English when they're exposed on a day-to-day basis with ungrammatical programming constructs?"

Not everyone agrees with the initiative. Some people are expressing concern that Microsoft is concentrating on grammatical correctness at the expense of program correctness. Stay tuned for further details on this exciting development in the annals of programming history.

Eric
More humor here

I suspect that he means make a version of the Emulator (or the newer Simulator) that is more tightly integrated with the system I don't think you'd necessarily want a Palm device to suddenly appear on your screen, I think you'd want Palm applications to work seamlessly with the other applications on the system. Interesting thought, for sure, and definitely a challenge. The main obstacle would be a legal one, not a technical one -- getting the ROM images to install in the emulator/simulator. Doubt PalmSource would let you do it without actually licensing the OS.

Eric
Palm Database Programming -- The Free Electronic Version

Another book on programming interviews (from the interviewee's viewpoint) is Programming Interviews Exposed. Seems like a decent book for preparing for Microsoft-style interviews.

Eric
JavaScript is not Java, damn it!

they may also promote an inaccurate view of science

Unlike Alias. Or Star Trek. Or (insert name of favorite show).

Isn't CSI just a darker "Quincy, M.E."? Or am I showing my age?

Eric
Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified (speaking of showing your age)

Design pattern fans should check out Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied by John Vlissides, one of the Gang of Four. Short, but interesting reading.

Eric
How to detect Internet Explorer

I always forget to check who actually submitted the content

Perhaps the solution is to make this kind of thing more explicit via some kind of ratings system whose value would be displayed at the top of an entry. Multiple ratings, probably: content could be rated as could the individual contributors. Similar features exist on Amazon and eBay, of course. The problem would be figuring out how to make such a system work, because they are definitely susceptible to manipulation.

Eric
Check your HTTP headers here

Tomcat is many things:

• an open-source servlet container developed by the Apache Foundation
• the reference implementation for the Java servlet specification
• a container for JavaServer Pages
• a standalone web server
• an add-on for Apache and other web servers

The key is understanding what a servlet is. A servlet is an instance of a Java class that is invoked in response to an HTTP request. In other words, it's custom Java code for handling and responding to HTTP request by web browsers and other clients. Think the Java equivalent of CGI applications. If you like Java, servlets (and the JSP technology that is built on top of them -- JSP pages compile into servlets) are a nice way to build dynamic websites.

You can use Tomcat in standalone mode or by hooking it up to a web server like Apache -- it ships with a module for the latter that directs servlet requests from Apache to Tomcat and back.

It's getting easier to find hosting services that offer servlet support, and they usually run Tomcat to do it. Personally, I use KGB Internet, but check the list of servlet ISPs for other alternatives.

Eric
who has a Java-powered website