If you're in the US, don't forget to file quarterly income tax estimates. Your employer used to do this for you on every paycheck (that's why you file a W-4) but now it's your responsibility. There are penalties if you are late, and the later you are the greater the penalty. gobootstrap.com is a free site that makes this relatively painless.
Vlissides' generation gap pattern can help solve a lot of the maintainability issues with code auto-generated from a DB's structure. The idea is that you use some tool to auto-generate stubs from your model, and then you extend (in the formal OO sense) those stubs. When your model changes, you can regenerate your stubs without trying to do some ugly merge between your customized templates and those that reflect the new structure.
Select text in the URL-bar on the Macintosh. Hit the left arrow key, which should put you at the start of the block of text. But doen't- unlike the behavior in the text entry boxes on a webpage. WTF?
I think the problem exists on Windows too; it just depends on how you highlight the text. Highlight right-to-left and the left arrow will position the cursor where you expect it; double-click or highlight left-to-right and the position will be wrong. I also have this same problem in Thunderbird 1.5 on Windows and MacOS in all text fields. This makes the applications near-unusable without a mouse if you're editing text of any real length.
I filed a Thunderbird bug before I realised the problem crossed both applications. You can cut-and-paste the link (direct links from slashdot are blocked) to vote for it:
The videos are here (where the panel visibly ripples after the impact) and here.
The accompanying slide presentation has the details: the 1.7 pound foam block was fired at 531 mph and, where it struck a T-seal between two panels, displaced them and caused a 4/10 inch gap. This fake wing was made of fiberglass, but given the results, a test with actual shuttle wing material from the Space Shuttle Discovery is planned for today.
Kernighan and Pike's The Practice of Programming is an excellent book on general issues like style, algorithms, testing and portability. They emphasize simplicity, clarity and generality as the keys to writing better programs, regardless of the language or the application. Examples are in many languages -- C, C++, Java and Perl at least. Brief Table of Contents (extended TOC)
Style 1 Algorithms and Data Structures 2 Design and Implementation 3 Interfaces 4 Debugging 5 Testing 6 Performance 7 Portability 8 Notation
When I use my credit card to make a purchase, I am intentionally giving away my credit card number, name and address, but when i hand a bouncer my driver's license, I am intentionally giving away only my age. Authenticating my identity is totally different than saving all my personal information in a private database. Collecting personal information is fine, but what bothers me about this is that they're doing it under the guise of something completely different.
What i've never understood is, if the RIAA or MPAA folks don't want people to make copies of digital works, why do they keep releasing digital works? If there's no CD available, then i can't copy it.
Piracy is a social problem, not a technical one, yet the recording industry keeps insisting on technical solutions. They released products into the market place which people realised they could use in new and interesting ways which hadn't occurred to the industry folks. So now the RIAA is stomping around shouting, "Wait! Wait! That's not what I meant!" Well, that doesn't mean we need to legislate the rights of the consumer. It means the recording industry should be smarter next time.
You shouldn't get federal legal protection for making stupid business decisions, you should get the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. It seems like we're going about this whole problem bass-ackward.
When did Bruce Sterling write The Hacker Crackdown? Ten years ago? This isn't exactly news. Incidentally, read Sterling's book if you haven't already -- it covers the early days of hacking AT&T unix systems, phone phreaking, the history of the US Secret Service and more. The EFF has it in a dozen-odd formats, there's an ebook version for the PalmReader, and just for grins you can even get it of The WELL's Gopher server(!).
Netaid, part of the UN Development Programme doesn't offer work abroad, but uses the Net so you can work locally to help those abroad. A lot of the assignments are more oreinted toward research/advocacy/education, but there are tech needs associated with those things too: sysadmins, DBAs, Web developers, etc. This is part of the UNDP's Information and Communications Technology division.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're in the US, don't forget to file quarterly income tax estimates. Your employer used to do this for you on every paycheck (that's why you file a W-4) but now it's your responsibility. There are penalties if you are late, and the later you are the greater the penalty. gobootstrap.com is a free site that makes this relatively painless.
I once used TOAD a lot, but I've been using TOra for years. How does Oracle's tool compare?
Vlissides' generation gap pattern can help solve a lot of the maintainability issues with code auto-generated from a DB's structure. The idea is that you use some tool to auto-generate stubs from your model, and then you extend (in the formal OO sense) those stubs. When your model changes, you can regenerate your stubs without trying to do some ugly merge between your customized templates and those that reflect the new structure.
Select text in the URL-bar on the Macintosh. Hit the left arrow key, which should put you at the start of the block of text. But doen't- unlike the behavior in the text entry boxes on a webpage. WTF?
I think the problem exists on Windows too; it just depends on how you highlight the text. Highlight right-to-left and the left arrow will position the cursor where you expect it; double-click or highlight left-to-right and the position will be wrong. I also have this same problem in Thunderbird 1.5 on Windows and MacOS in all text fields. This makes the applications near-unusable without a mouse if you're editing text of any real length.
I filed a Thunderbird bug before I realised the problem crossed both applications. You can cut-and-paste the link (direct links from slashdot are blocked) to vote for it:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315 548
YDL 3 and 4 didn't ship with a usable Java distribution, but IBM offers a great 1.4.2 version one here: https://www6.software.ibm.com/dl/lxdk/lxdk-p.
The videos are here (where the panel visibly ripples after the impact) and here.
The accompanying slide presentation has the details: the 1.7 pound foam block was fired at 531 mph and, where it struck a T-seal between two panels, displaced them and caused a 4/10 inch gap. This fake wing was made of fiberglass, but given the results, a test with actual shuttle wing material from the Space Shuttle Discovery is planned for today.
Here are some of the headlines from news.google.com:
Shuttle Wing Under Gun
Investigator Amazed by Shuttle Foam Force
Foam theory faces pivotal test
Tests Show Foam Causing Wing of Shuttle to Deform
Foam chunk was shuttle's undoing, tests indicate
Kernighan and Pike's The Practice of Programming is an excellent book on general issues like style, algorithms, testing and portability. They emphasize simplicity, clarity and generality as the keys to writing better programs, regardless of the language or the application. Examples are in many languages -- C, C++, Java and Perl at least.
Brief Table of Contents (extended TOC)
Style
1 Algorithms and Data Structures
2 Design and Implementation
3 Interfaces
4 Debugging
5 Testing
6 Performance
7 Portability
8 Notation
De gustibus non est disputandem.
The fact that you don't fancy somebody's writing style style doesn't make it crap; it just means you don't like it. Lighten up a little. Sheesh.
When I use my credit card to make a purchase, I am intentionally giving away my credit card number, name and address, but when i hand a bouncer my driver's license, I am intentionally giving away only my age. Authenticating my identity is totally different than saving all my personal information in a private database. Collecting personal information is fine, but what bothers me about this is that they're doing it under the guise of something completely different.
What i've never understood is, if the RIAA or MPAA folks don't want people to make copies of digital works, why do they keep releasing digital works? If there's no CD available, then i can't copy it.
Piracy is a social problem, not a technical one, yet the recording industry keeps insisting on technical solutions. They released products into the market place which people realised they could use in new and interesting ways which hadn't occurred to the industry folks. So now the RIAA is stomping around shouting, "Wait! Wait! That's not what I meant!" Well, that doesn't mean we need to legislate the rights of the consumer. It means the recording industry should be smarter next time.
You shouldn't get federal legal protection for making stupid business decisions, you should get the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. It seems like we're going about this whole problem bass-ackward.
When did Bruce Sterling write The Hacker Crackdown? Ten years ago? This isn't exactly news. Incidentally, read Sterling's book if you haven't already -- it covers the early days of hacking AT&T unix systems, phone phreaking, the history of the US Secret Service and more. The EFF has it in a dozen-odd formats, there's an ebook version for the PalmReader, and just for grins you can even get it of The WELL's Gopher server(!).
Netaid, part of the UN Development Programme doesn't offer work abroad, but uses the Net so you can work locally to help those abroad. A lot of the assignments are more oreinted toward research/advocacy/education, but there are tech needs associated with those things too: sysadmins, DBAs, Web developers, etc. This is part of the UNDP's Information and Communications Technology division.
Global Technology Corps is run by the US Department of State and sends people abroad to build LANs and such.
Trust For The Americas sends folks abroad to teach tech, and also to setup the infrastructure -- building networks, etc.
you mean the automatic pilot is running Excel 97?