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I consider myself to be a very patient person (all things considered) - but one thing that causes me to lose my patience is when I hear of proprietary computer companies that spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in order to keep their customers from considering other (and usually much better) technologies. While Microsoft has been the main purveyor of FUD since the early 1990s, SCO used FUD in an attempt to downplay the Linux operatin..
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I consider myself to be a very patient person (all things considered) - but one thing that causes me to lose my patience is when I hear of proprietary computer companies that spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in order to keep their customers from considering other (and usually much better) technologies. While Microsoft has been the main purveyor of FUD since the early 1990s, SCO used FUD in an attempt to downplay the Linux operatin..
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For the past 2 years, I have had a Buddha Shrine in the server closet in my office. I carefully researched proper Buddha Shrine requirements and styles on Google before I chose the above arrangement (Buddha must be elevated and surrounded by objects that represent tokens of life). Why did I do this? Simple. To speed up our current Internet access and reduce the number of times that we need to reboot/reset classroom routers (when caches..
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For the past 2 years, I have had a Buddha Shrine in the server closet in my office. I carefully researched proper Buddha Shrine requirements and styles on Google before I chose the above arrangement (Buddha must be elevated and surrounded by objects that represent tokens of life). Why did I do this? Simple. To speed up our current Internet access and reduce the number of times that we need to reboot/reset classroom routers (when caches..
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My good friend Skoll recently wrote of the motorcycling life : One of me favourite bands Manowar one sang "Riding horses made of steel". What kind of mental image does that provoke? Riding a Harley Davidson to sunset on an empty hightway, a beautiful young girl on your back seat? What a load of bullcrap! Motorcycling is about rain, it's about being soaking wet and freezing your ass off. It's about losing your friends in the traffic bec....
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My good friend Skoll recently wrote of the motorcycling life : One of me favourite bands Manowar one sang "Riding horses made of steel". What kind of mental image does that provoke? Riding a Harley Davidson to sunset on an empty hightway, a beautiful young girl on your back seat? What a load of bullcrap! Motorcycling is about rain, it's about being soaking wet and freezing your ass off. It's about losing your friends in the traffic bec....
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Sometimes, a quick and easy programming language like Ruby might not be so quick and easy. Sometimes, C may be easier. Sometimes, you might complete a task faster with C than with your favorite scripting language. I’ve long been a proponent of scripting languages. In particular, I’ve enjoyed learning and using Ruby. So when I was inspired to program a boggle solver as a code kata, I naturally reached for this nice shining tool in my toolche..
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Sqlplus is my second home, Part 1: HTMLizing your sqlplus output
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tanelpoder.com
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18 years ago
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eng
I have not managed to post anything for a while, but I intend to make it up by starting this series of posts made specially for Oracle enthusiasts, geeks and maniacs among us. Here I plan to post the coolest Oracle stuff I’ve just found out and some of it may actually be useful to you! Lets start. This post is about removing the last major problem with sqlplus in everyday database and application administration work. I would say the com....
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Sqlplus is my second home, Part 1: HTMLizing your sqlplus output
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tanelpoder.com
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18 years ago
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eng
I have not managed to post anything for a while, but I intend to make it up by starting this series of posts made specially for Oracle enthusiasts, geeks and maniacs among us. Here I plan to post the coolest Oracle stuff I’ve just found out and some of it may actually be useful to you! Lets start. This post is about removing the last major problem with sqlplus in everyday database and application administration work. I would say the com....
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Useless default documentation dilutes both code and actual documentation
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www.databasesandlife.com
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18 years ago
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eng
IDEs can create default code, including default documentation, such as: /** * Insert class or interface description here. */ It would be great if people would actually write documentation. Even a single sentence to describe what the class is modeling would be helpful if it’s not obvious from the name. Or object invariants (e.g. boughtCount <= offeredCount). To find a class without documentation is annoying. But to see such an IDE-gen..
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I’m sitting in the airport in Las Vegas on the way back from DEF CON 15. It’s the first time I’ve been at the con, and it wasn’t really what I expected. Frankly, I walked away feeling kinda underwhelmed. Very few of the talks were as technical as I was hoping – they were almost universally broad overviews of an area, with lots of introduction, and relatively little, to my eye, technical meat.
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I’m sitting in the airport in Las Vegas on the way back from DEF CON 15. It’s the first time I’ve been at the con, and it wasn’t really what I expected. Frankly, I walked away feeling kinda underwhelmed. Very few of the talks were as technical as I was hoping – they were almost universally broad overviews of an area, with lots of introduction, and relatively little, to my eye, technical meat.
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On July 6th, Richard Stallman gave a talk at the University of Waterloo regarding copyright and its evils. Although slow at the beginning (perhaps because Richard was still finishing his Pepsi and introducing the features of copyright), it turned out to be a powerful and enlightening educational experience. I decided not to write a blog about it until I was able to view it again on video after my vacation and make specific notes. You ca..
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On July 6th, Richard Stallman gave a talk at the University of Waterloo regarding copyright and its evils. Although slow at the beginning (perhaps because Richard was still finishing his Pepsi and introducing the features of copyright), it turned out to be a powerful and enlightening educational experience. I decided not to write a blog about it until I was able to view it again on video after my vacation and make specific notes. You ca..
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I saw this book a short while ago at Chapters (book store chain in Canada). What caught my eye was the humour on the front cover! This book is on how to secure your PC using Computer Associates Internet Security software (with a Windows Vista update!). However, the laptop that the lady on the cover is using is a MacBook! Currently, there are no known viruses or spyware for Macs! But I definitely agree with the subliminal advertising ..
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I saw this book a short while ago at Chapters (book store chain in Canada). What caught my eye was the humour on the front cover! This book is on how to secure your PC using Computer Associates Internet Security software (with a Windows Vista update!). However, the laptop that the lady on the cover is using is a MacBook! Currently, there are no known viruses or spyware for Macs! But I definitely agree with the subliminal advertising ..
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Copying the contents of one directory into another on Linux: not as easy at it looks!
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www.databasesandlife.com
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19 years ago
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eng
Task: You want to copy the contents of one directory into another existing directory. On Linux. I.e. if the source directory is “x” and the destination directory is the already-existing directory “y”, if there are files “x/1” and “x/2” then files “y/1” and “y/2” should be created. If “x” is an empty directory then no files in “y” should be created. Now, this is not as easy as it sounds.
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Anders Nordås shows how to throw a checked exception without declaring a throws clause. The method uses some inherently evil mechanisms (the name of the class “sun.misc.Unsafe” should be a tip of), and like Anders says, this should probably never be used in production. Basically, calling sun.misc.Unsafe.throwException will throw a checked exception without alerting the compiler. The exception is not wrapped, but it cannot be caught by its c..
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DJ Catharsis (Renewal through music for those outside the heard) on [EGR Records] spins Hard Techno and Industrial at DEFCON 14 Black and White Ball. Catharsis, by definition, is a cleansing of the emotions through art. Raised by a professional jazz guitarist (Jack Petersen), Scott Petersen DJ Catharsis has been exposed to many facets and genres of music. Textures of Deep House, Tech House, Broken Beat, and Eclectic Downtempo are expres....
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Minibosses is an independent progressive rock/progressive metal band originally from Northampton, Massachusetts and currently located in Phoenix, Arizona. They are known for their video game music covers, which are instrumental rock variations of the theme music from classic Nintendo video games such as Mega Man, Metroid, and Castlevania. Such covers earned Minibosses the best cover band award in the Phoenix New Times Best of Phoenix 2006. ....
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Minibosses is an independent progressive rock/progressive metal band originally from Northampton, Massachusetts and currently located in Phoenix, Arizona. They are known for their video game music covers, which are instrumental rock variations of the theme music from classic Nintendo video games such as Mega Man, Metroid, and Castlevania. Such covers earned Minibosses the best cover band award in the Phoenix New Times Best of Phoenix 2006. ....
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Regenerator plays at the DEF CON 14 Black and White Ball Los Angeles based duo with a dark electronic dance sound. industrial, gothic, ebm, electro; however you slice it, it's just plain good. :) Harsh male vocals mixed with beautiful, haunting, female vox make for stark contrast. 7 albums - 3 singles - far too many compilation appearances to count here. New album "Disease" available now! - online and in stores everywhere. Remixed b..
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Sometimes, you just do things that bring out the geek within……well……today is one of those days. Guess what you can do with the front bezel of an Apple eMac? Make a family photo frame! Simply find a piece of glass that is 14”x11” and place it on the inside of the bezel. Next, place your picture on the glass (preferably with a nice thick matting to add depth) and screw a 15”x12” piece of pressboard into the existing screw holes on the in..
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Sometimes, you just do things that bring out the geek within……well……today is one of those days. Guess what you can do with the front bezel of an Apple eMac? Make a family photo frame! Simply find a piece of glass that is 14”x11” and place it on the inside of the bezel. Next, place your picture on the glass (preferably with a nice thick matting to add depth) and screw a 15”x12” piece of pressboard into the existing screw holes on the in..
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This is probably old news to most, but since I usually fly SAS my flight yesterday to Manchester for the State of the Map and GUADEC conferences was the first time I ran into Finnair’s check-in SMS service . I was sitting in a meeting about three hours before the flight and suddenly got a message to my cell phone: FINNAIR check-in: AY937 Helsinki-Manchester 17.07.2007 departure 16:00 seat 15A window. Confirm by replying A. ....
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This is a good term for a commonplace management error: http://www.answers.com/topic/concorde-fallacy
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This is probably old news to most, but since I usually fly SAS my flight yesterday to Manchester for the State of the Map and GUADEC conferences was the first time I ran into Finnair’s check-in SMS service . I was sitting in a meeting about three hours before the flight and suddenly got a message to my cell phone: FINNAIR check-in: AY937 Helsinki-Manchester 17.07.2007 departure 16:00 seat 15A window. Confirm by replying A. ....
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Sony rang on Friday. They wanted to know the guarantee number (the number that I don’t have, which should have been on the invoice; the invoice which originated from them, and I’ve sent them back twice already). I took the opportunity to ask how the repair was going (as their website where you can track the repairs doesn’t work). They told me the battery was broken and they had to send off for a new one, which hadn’t arrived yet. There ar..
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Why can Scrum deliver surprising results already in the first month of adoption? Because it helps the team focus on what’s really important. We had Jeff Sutherland visit Oslo XP meetup a few weeks back. Jeff is co-creator of the Scrum method (with Ken Schwaber) and CTO of PatientKeeper, a US health information company. His presentation focused on the effects of Scrum on distributed teams, and on the effects of adopting Scrum in projects.
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Yup - it’s vacation time again! And this next week I plan to do nothing but relax, get a tan, drink “Muskoka Dry Pale Ginger Ale” and read a few books that I haven’t had the time to open yet. And yes, my daughter is going to swim all week long - that is her in the water with the kids from the cottage next door. Now you are probably wondering why I am blogging on my vacation……shouldn’t a vacation be devoid of TV/phones/Internet/computers..
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Yup - it’s vacation time again! And this next week I plan to do nothing but relax, get a tan, drink “Muskoka Dry Pale Ginger Ale” and read a few books that I haven’t had the time to open yet. And yes, my daughter is going to swim all week long - that is her in the water with the kids from the cottage next door. Now you are probably wondering why I am blogging on my vacation……shouldn’t a vacation be devoid of TV/phones/Internet/computers..
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There's a problem persisting boolean fields using Hibernate 3.2.2 to MySQL 5.0, if you allow Hibernate to generate your schema, and you leave Hibernate to generate the schema in the default way. It works fine on MySQL 4.1 and it doesn't matter if you use boolean (primitive) or Boolean (object) types for the fields. With a class such as: public class MyObject { protected boolean myField; public boolean getMyField() { return myField; } ..
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My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense . The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships , and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune, but also with friendly people and beautiful scenery. I left Helsinki....
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My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense . The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships , and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune, but also with friendly people and beautiful scenery. I left Helsinki....
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My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense . The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships , and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune, but also with friendly people and beautiful scenery. I left Helsinki....
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My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense . The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships , and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune, but also with friendly people and beautiful scenery. I left Helsinki....
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In Java there are the classic four protection levels which members (fields and methods) can have: private, protected, package-level and public. Any member can have Javadoc (including private members). But when one generates the Javadoc, which protected levels should be included? Generated Javadoc is used by humans. These humans are probably not you. And thus are probably clients of your classes, either within or outside of your organizati..
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The iPhone went on sale in the US yesterday. And yes, for the past several months since its introduction, I wanted one badly…..but after hearing from those who have one, I am not so upset now that the iPhone is not available in Canada until later this year. Basically, those who have one say that it “feels like a 1.0 device”, which it is. It uses the old EDGE service rather than new and fast 3G Mobile service in order to save battery pow..
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