All my blog posts and articles
Page 137 of 141 (2815 total posts)
Remember when the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union ended up breaking up? People talked about the power of decentralizaiton, about how simple faxes were used by individual Soviet citizens to tell the world what was going on and topple the ultimate centralized power? Or the impact of th...
Read more →Here’s a handy bit of esoterica: To force Log4J to report on it’s initialization sequence do this: java -Dlog4j.debug=true (And no, I usually don’t use log4j, I use the Java 1.4 built in logging facility, but some of the libraries I like still use log4j.)
In order to debug a hairy problem, I need to step into some Java system classes (hashmap.java) HashMap.class is to be found in rt.jar, part of the standard Java distribution (1.4.2_04) but it does NOT have debug info compiled in. So what to do? I think I did a pretty exhaustive set of steps but I w...
Read more →As I delve into programming esoterica, in the past I’ve written down little handy items of information that I discover through a lot of work, for possible future reference. 6 months later, the details will have escaped me, and so I have my written notes to refer back to. Well, I thought, why not use...
Read more →Well, not really dark: This is in reference to Shel Isreal’s recent bit about LinkedIn. Shel notes that LinkedInis actually good for recruiting. He cites some examples of folks who assembled a ...
Read more →Good evening sportsfans. There’s a new version (4.5) of iTunes for Windows. All I can see after a quick look-over is a new feature called “Party Shuffle” that appears to create a quasi-random mix, based on a few parameters. Suitable for parties, I guess 🙂
One of my computers has gone totally haywire with spyware, popups popping all over the place, and more. Here’s the new spin, which I hadn’t seen before. When surfing the web, arbitrary words on web pages are turned into links, and when you innocently click them, you are sent off the deep end with a...
Read more →For Howard Stern fans out there, here’s a good article.
I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso And here’...
Read more →David Coursey writes an interesting bitabout how the competitors to Microft Office (i.e. Star Office, Word Perfect, what not) need to get themselves an Outlook competitor, because that’s the only (or main) reason standing in the way o...
Read more →Dan Bricklin’s written a bit on a topic that’s been indirectly on my mind lately. It has to do with BlogBridge, the Blogging tool that I’ve been developing as a back room project for a while now (I post periodic updates, s...
Read more →Several people asked me about what the security situation in Spain felt like. I have to admit it did give me pause to be going to Spain little more than a month after the terrorist attack on the trains in Madrid. In fact our travel plans included several long train rides. I checked with friends who ...
Read more →In the accompanying photo you can see one of the ubiquitous TV screens sprinkled all around the Spanish subway system. They display up-to-the-minute information about arrivals and departures, in real-time, also ads and other commercial announcements. Very useful! [ that we are away. Granada is a nice little town in Southern Spain, with a Moorish or Middle Eastern influence. We spent hours yesterday wandering around the Alhambra, which was great, although we are paying with our feet today… Tomorrow we leave for a few days in Sevilla. See you there.
Office XP for $59.95! It must be some kind of bootleg, but it’s quite blatant. I wonder what the catch is…
A good little insight from Rafe Needlemanin his new column over at ZDNet. “The reason it won’t last: If you can get a telephone with any area or country code, the whole idea of a vanity area code will eventually evaporate. It won’t be like a real-world address, which for the most part still represents a physical location. While roaming cellular phones have already begun to make area codes irrelevant, VoIP will finish the job. Soon, area code will be one of those anachronistic telecom terms, like dialing, that doesn’t mean anything close to what it once did. “
How would you like to be able to “implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being”? I came across this link. It just has to be a prank.
The true story comes out about the most excellent subservient chicken gimick. I mentioned ita few days ago when I first saw it; it was amazing how quickly it spread. Here is an articlegiving some background on how it was done, where it came from and what the thinking was: “In fact, CP+B came up with about 400 different actions that the chicken could do, and then filmed them in the course of a day in Los Angeles.”