I don't even know David, but I'm sure if you ask nicely he'll ignore you, because he's already written a nice program to "bug me in ten minutes not to post dumb jokes to slashdot.";)
It's a SOCKS proxy server, and all mainstream IM clients already support SOCKS proxies, so all you have to do is configure your chat client to use the proxy.
I've been using it for a few minutes and I think it's pretty damned cool.
A character is not a byte. Don't use FileReader unless you're absolutely sure that either:
The default character encoding resulting from your particular combination of JVM and platform will be correct and non-lossy every time the program is run (e.g. not in Windows, which defaults to ISO8859-1), or;
You're certain that the file contains only 7-bit ASCII.
Readers and Writers deal with characters, whereas InputStreams and OutputStreams deal with bytes. FileReader and FileWriter are miscreants that should be deprecated, because they hide a very important implementation detail, namely that they always use the platform's default character encoding, which is often lossy.
If you want to read characters from a file (or socket) you need to come up with some way to agree on the character encoding and specify it precisely. Not even HTTP does a good job of this--you don't know the character encoding of a request or response until the Content-Type header has been transferred, and often not even then.
What's the character encoding for URLs and domain names? Convention seems to be settling on UTF-8 but AFAIK it's just that.
The equivalent technique that's less risky (but of course much more verbose) is:
BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("foo"), "UTF-8")); String line; while ( (line = r.readLine()) != null ) {// etc... }
Where "UTF-8" is a sane default non-lossy character encoding. If you don't know the encoding that was used to write the file you're about to read, you're sort of screwed. You can try some heuristics to try to detect its encoding, or if you're "lucky" you might find a Unicode Byte Order Mark.
Note that none of this headache is particular to Java, it's just that the designers of Java knew early on that a character is not a byte and formalized that distinction (poorly at first) in the language and libraries.
I know what you're saying; there are maybe one or two companies in the vicinity that I would really be interested in working at, and certainly none is as cool as my current gig.
I saw a handful of truly worthwhile applicants. We hired three, one turned us down (he had a fat telco contract), and the other found a job before we could count the beans necessary to bring him in.
I like the cut of your jib, mister. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? I'm delighted to report that it was on the Canadian national non-fiction bestseller list for a very long time, until quite recently in fact.
The US certainly conducted its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and I don't think genocide is too strong a word, but... The proportion of the pre-contact population wiped out as a result of the accidental transmission of diseases of European origin is almost certainly far greater than the proportion who died as a result of intentional action on the part of settlers and their governments. Of course this doesn't excuse anything in the slightest.
This whole business is often marked by claims that are rarely based on much more than politics and population estimates.
All the nerds I know who are smart and experienced and competent are at least as employed as they want to be. I've interviewed a couple dozen people for software development/management jobs in the last 18 months, and didn't see a lot of truly great candidates--by and large the good ones are still working, and we mostly saw marginal candidates.
Times may be bad now but I think the late 90s "golden age" of companies trying desperately to fill seats with warm bodies is long gone. The free ride is over, and if you're not noticeably great at your job, your employer will eventually realize that there are a lot of people out there who can do it just as well, a great many of whom are willing to do it for less.
There are a lot of world-class techs in India and other outsourcing hotspots, and even factoring in the costs and risks some companies report when outsourcing, it's more and more of a numbers game every month.
They subdivide Canada into provinces and then FSAs (Forward Sortation Areas, otherwise known as the first three characters of your postal code) before letting you drill down to the neighbourhood level. Unfortunately, this particular way they've chosen to break down the geographic hierarchy is oversimplified and basically unworkable, at least for Canada.
My neighbourhood (Mount Pleasant, in the East Side of Vancouver, BC) doesn't follow neat FSA boundaries. The hierarchy should be a little fuzzier, like Country -> State/Prov -> Region -> City -> Neighbourhood, and the "city" part should probably be optional, because there are neighbourhoods that cross civic boundaries. My friend who lives four blocks east and ten blocks south is most definitely in the same neighbourhood, but he lives in a different FSA.
You raise an excellent point. Of all the parties at work in the industry, MS probably has the most motive to fork a GPL Java and the means to make a successful go of it, with their desktop monopoly.
At worst it's a zero-sum game (assuming effectively infinite cash reserves) for MS. They have to GPL their extensions, and hopefully whoever stewards the reference implementation will pick them up, but maybe not. After all, JavaSteward Inc. doesn't have 50 gigabucks in the bank.
If MS does a good job, people won't bother downloading the Sun VM for running client code anymore, the competing VMs will suffer compatibility bit rot, the PHBs will get scared about platform fragmentation, and the market will start whispering "no one ever got fired for buying Brand X" in their ears.
Wikipedia rules, I gave CAD $10
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There aren't many sites with the scope, quality and credibility of Wikipedia. I gave CAD $10 and I'd give more if my credit card weren't crumbling under the weight of Christmas.
Re:where are the open source XML repositories
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The difference is that governments' maintenance of the road network constitutes a natural monopoly, because life would be fiendishly difficult if competition were allowed into the picture, at least not without some amazing technical infrastructure.
The IM market is a lot like the OS market--there are tremendous network effects, the cost of switching is high, and no one has much of an incentive to make life easier for other people.
Point taken... I tend to be extra-conservative when giving advice.:)
The reason someone might want to back up/home is that sometimes a new version of a package will decide to migrate its configuration files to a new format, and other times the new version doesn't work as well as the old version.
But RH's QA is pretty good, I personally never bother to back up either/etc or/home when I do an upgrade; I know I can clean up whatever minor damage results.
Having said that, though, RPM isn't so hot at mixing your customized configuration with the defaults included in new packages, so you should always backup/etc (at the very least, and maybe/home) before upgrading, just in case.
After the upgrade, do a search for all the files in/etc that end in.rpmnew or.rpmsave, using something like "find/etc -name *.rpm*"..rpmnew files are newly-installed configuration files that conflict with your existing copy and have thus been renamed..rpmsave files are a backup of your existing configuration file that has now been replaced.
I think the logic is that an.rpmnew should be created when your customized configuration file should still be compatible with the new release, and an.rpmsave is used when the new version of the software could have problems with the old configuration file, and you should manually migrate your changes.
You can do something like "diff -u foo.conf.rpmsave foo.conf" to see what the new default configuration file changes compared you yours, or "diff -u foo.conf foo.conf.rpmnew" to see if there are any new configuration options that you might want to adopt.
In grade 8 we were asked to memorize the first twenty elements of the periodic table. Of course I put it off way too long and ended up cramming the night before the test. So I just made up a little mnemonic poem. Here it is in phonetic form:
Hydrogen Helim Lithium Beryllium (that's as far as I got with the names) Bicknoffnee Namgal Sipsclarkca
In symbolic form, that's H He Li Be B C N O F Ne Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar K Ca. Can't forget the damned thing after seventeen years.
Here's what I like about it that's better than the free version:
The POP3-checking plugin is decent
The RSS plugin is great! I don't have to check Slashdot, kerneltrap and WWDN anymore, I just get notified in a fairly subtle way when new stuff is posted.
When you drag windows around, they snap to each other, to taskbars, screen edges, other windows, etc.
You can configure it so that when a Trillian window loses focus, it either turns translucent or goes black-and-white
One minor downside is that the menus in Trillian Pro don't really work with the X-Mouse feature from TweakUI. But I'd rather live without X-Mouse than Trillian Pro, oddly enough.
All in all, $25 well spent. Considering that I actively use all four major IM networks and IRC, Trillian saves me from wasting a lot of RAM, cluttering up my system tray, seeing ads in IM clients, etc. The only single-network IM client I ever use now is Yahoo, and that's only when I want to do voice chat or see someone's webcam. I never use mIRC anymore.
Note that I'm not affiliated with Cerulean in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer.
Really it's just the scale on which human activities affect our environment that's so unprecedented. Only catastrophic disasters and natural climate change cycles have ever come close to being able to destroy so much habitat or exterminate so many species in so short a time.
But just because our effects on our environment are simply "more of the same" doesn't mean they aren't incredibly destructive and possibly irrevocable.
Note that many groups of humans, not just modern Western civilization, have been responsible for environmental devastation, but again, it's the scale that matters now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even know David, but I'm sure if you ask nicely he'll ignore you, because he's already written a nice program to "bug me in ten minutes not to post dumb jokes to slashdot." ;)
It's a SOCKS proxy server, and all mainstream IM clients already support SOCKS proxies, so all you have to do is configure your chat client to use the proxy.
I've been using it for a few minutes and I think it's pretty damned cool.
- The default character encoding resulting from your particular combination of JVM and platform will be correct and non-lossy every time the program is run (e.g. not in Windows, which defaults to ISO8859-1), or;
- You're certain that the file contains only 7-bit ASCII.
Readers and Writers deal with characters, whereas InputStreams and OutputStreams deal with bytes. FileReader and FileWriter are miscreants that should be deprecated, because they hide a very important implementation detail, namely that they always use the platform's default character encoding, which is often lossy.If you want to read characters from a file (or socket) you need to come up with some way to agree on the character encoding and specify it precisely. Not even HTTP does a good job of this--you don't know the character encoding of a request or response until the Content-Type header has been transferred, and often not even then.
What's the character encoding for URLs and domain names? Convention seems to be settling on UTF-8 but AFAIK it's just that.
The equivalent technique that's less risky (but of course much more verbose) is:
Where "UTF-8" is a sane default non-lossy character encoding. If you don't know the encoding that was used to write the file you're about to read, you're sort of screwed. You can try some heuristics to try to detect its encoding, or if you're "lucky" you might find a Unicode Byte Order Mark.
Note that none of this headache is particular to Java, it's just that the designers of Java knew early on that a character is not a byte and formalized that distinction (poorly at first) in the language and libraries.
My question (and compliment) were addressed to Doc Ruby actually. I'm not sure how I feel about the cut of your jib just yet. :)
I know what you're saying; there are maybe one or two companies in the vicinity that I would really be interested in working at, and certainly none is as cool as my current gig.
I saw a handful of truly worthwhile applicants. We hired three, one turned us down (he had a fat telco contract), and the other found a job before we could count the beans necessary to bring him in.
I like the cut of your jib, mister. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? I'm delighted to report that it was on the Canadian national non-fiction bestseller list for a very long time, until quite recently in fact.
The US certainly conducted its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and I don't think genocide is too strong a word, but... The proportion of the pre-contact population wiped out as a result of the accidental transmission of diseases of European origin is almost certainly far greater than the proportion who died as a result of intentional action on the part of settlers and their governments. Of course this doesn't excuse anything in the slightest.
This whole business is often marked by claims that are rarely based on much more than politics and population estimates.
All the nerds I know who are smart and experienced and competent are at least as employed as they want to be. I've interviewed a couple dozen people for software development/management jobs in the last 18 months, and didn't see a lot of truly great candidates--by and large the good ones are still working, and we mostly saw marginal candidates.
Times may be bad now but I think the late 90s "golden age" of companies trying desperately to fill seats with warm bodies is long gone. The free ride is over, and if you're not noticeably great at your job, your employer will eventually realize that there are a lot of people out there who can do it just as well, a great many of whom are willing to do it for less.
There are a lot of world-class techs in India and other outsourcing hotspots, and even factoring in the costs and risks some companies report when outsourcing, it's more and more of a numbers game every month.
They subdivide Canada into provinces and then FSAs (Forward Sortation Areas, otherwise known as the first three characters of your postal code) before letting you drill down to the neighbourhood level. Unfortunately, this particular way they've chosen to break down the geographic hierarchy is oversimplified and basically unworkable, at least for Canada.
My neighbourhood (Mount Pleasant, in the East Side of Vancouver, BC) doesn't follow neat FSA boundaries. The hierarchy should be a little fuzzier, like Country -> State/Prov -> Region -> City -> Neighbourhood, and the "city" part should probably be optional, because there are neighbourhoods that cross civic boundaries. My friend who lives four blocks east and ten blocks south is most definitely in the same neighbourhood, but he lives in a different FSA.
Microsoft Spreads Dirt, Sells Vacuum Cleaners
I'll invite you if you want. You just have to figure out how to find me first, in their godawful UI. :)
You raise an excellent point. Of all the parties at work in the industry, MS probably has the most motive to fork a GPL Java and the means to make a successful go of it, with their desktop monopoly.
At worst it's a zero-sum game (assuming effectively infinite cash reserves) for MS. They have to GPL their extensions, and hopefully whoever stewards the reference implementation will pick them up, but maybe not. After all, JavaSteward Inc. doesn't have 50 gigabucks in the bank.
If MS does a good job, people won't bother downloading the Sun VM for running client code anymore, the competing VMs will suffer compatibility bit rot, the PHBs will get scared about platform fragmentation, and the market will start whispering "no one ever got fired for buying Brand X" in their ears.
There aren't many sites with the scope, quality and credibility of Wikipedia. I gave CAD $10 and I'd give more if my credit card weren't crumbling under the weight of Christmas.
Let's see... A <digital> element contains zero or more <frame>s, each of which can contain an <image> with a URL.
The difference is that governments' maintenance of the road network constitutes a natural monopoly, because life would be fiendishly difficult if competition were allowed into the picture, at least not without some amazing technical infrastructure.
The IM market is a lot like the OS market--there are tremendous network effects, the cost of switching is high, and no one has much of an incentive to make life easier for other people.
Damn! Those alien bastards are gonna pay for shootin' up my ride!
The quote was coined by JWZ, in the original version of his famous post on the state of Video in Linux, now redacted, alas.
Point taken... I tend to be extra-conservative when giving advice. :)
/home is that sometimes a new version of a package will decide to migrate its configuration files to a new format, and other times the new version doesn't work as well as the old version.
/etc or /home when I do an upgrade; I know I can clean up whatever minor damage results.
The reason someone might want to back up
But RH's QA is pretty good, I personally never bother to back up either
RH upgrades have always gone very well for me.
/etc (at the very least, and maybe /home) before upgrading, just in case.
/etc that end in .rpmnew or .rpmsave, using something like "find /etc -name *.rpm*". .rpmnew files are newly-installed configuration files that conflict with your existing copy and have thus been renamed. .rpmsave files are a backup of your existing configuration file that has now been replaced.
.rpmnew should be created when your customized configuration file should still be compatible with the new release, and an .rpmsave is used when the new version of the software could have problems with the old configuration file, and you should manually migrate your changes.
Having said that, though, RPM isn't so hot at mixing your customized configuration with the defaults included in new packages, so you should always backup
After the upgrade, do a search for all the files in
I think the logic is that an
You can do something like "diff -u foo.conf.rpmsave foo.conf" to see what the new default configuration file changes compared you yours, or "diff -u foo.conf foo.conf.rpmnew" to see if there are any new configuration options that you might want to adopt.
In grade 8 we were asked to memorize the first twenty elements of the periodic table. Of course I put it off way too long and ended up cramming the night before the test. So I just made up a little mnemonic poem. Here it is in phonetic form:
Hydrogen Helim Lithium Beryllium (that's as far as I got with the names)
Bicknoffnee Namgal Sipsclarkca
In symbolic form, that's H He Li Be B C N O F Ne Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar K Ca. Can't forget the damned thing after seventeen years.
Here's what I like about it that's better than the free version:
One minor downside is that the menus in Trillian Pro don't really work with the X-Mouse feature from TweakUI. But I'd rather live without X-Mouse than Trillian Pro, oddly enough.
All in all, $25 well spent. Considering that I actively use all four major IM networks and IRC, Trillian saves me from wasting a lot of RAM, cluttering up my system tray, seeing ads in IM clients, etc. The only single-network IM client I ever use now is Yahoo, and that's only when I want to do voice chat or see someone's webcam. I never use mIRC anymore.
Note that I'm not affiliated with Cerulean in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer.
Are you sure you meant penultimate, meaning second-from-ultimate?
Really it's just the scale on which human activities affect our environment that's so unprecedented. Only catastrophic disasters and natural climate change cycles have ever come close to being able to destroy so much habitat or exterminate so many species in so short a time.
But just because our effects on our environment are simply "more of the same" doesn't mean they aren't incredibly destructive and possibly irrevocable.
Note that many groups of humans, not just modern Western civilization, have been responsible for environmental devastation, but again, it's the scale that matters now.
It details stack-based, heap-based and network-based DOS vulnerabilities. Wheee!
Actually, I was talking about my post as redundantly informative. :) Yours was sort of hinting in that direction, but you showed admirable restraint. :)
And once again it's time to trot out last month's exciting story in The Register, Missing RIAA figures shoot down "piracy" canard, which was based on RIAA's Statistics Don't Add Up to Piracy by George Ziemann
Karma whoring or redundantly informative? You decide!