Programming Esoterica
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 my blog as a handy place for these notes?
It's just one fewer place to look, and who knows someone else might benefit from it. The downside, it will be a jarring bit of geekdom to throw in the middle of my other random ramblings and for many people it would be patently meaningless.
So forgive me ahead of time, this is just another foray into my experimenting with blogs and what they mean and what they are good for. And here we go…
[GEEK] Bootclasspath
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 was still stumped:
I can't locate an rt.jar with debug info
From what I read, you can't easily rebuild it from the java system sources because some stuff does not compile
I tried recompiling hashmap.java with -g to get debug info and putting the resulting .class files into a .jar and placing that jar at what I believe is the front of the classpath. I did this in Eclipse by adding it as a library in the project properties, and then moving it "up" to the front. Didn't seem to do it.
I tried taking the same built .jar file and putting into the jre spec in Eclipse, at the top, and that didn't do the trick either
I've posted to newsgroups and emailed friends and still have not found the problem.
Bootclasspath to the rescue? From reading around, I have a new angle. It would seem from the above article that in fact, java does not look for the system class jar (rt.jar) where you would expect it to. In fact it looks for it (on Windows) in c:Program FilesjavaJ2SDK1.4 etc. Secondly it looks like before any other class path is searched, the Bootclasspath picks up rt.jar and that is probably why my previous attempts at diagnosis have failed.
Java -X command lists some additional switches to the Sun Java VM, including -Xbootclasspath/p: which that allows you to pre-pend a directory or jar to the bootclasspath.
The “dark” side of LinkedIn
Well, not really dark: This is in reference to Shel Isreal's recent bit about LinkedIn. Shel notes that LinkedIn is actually good for recruiting. He cites some examples of folks who assembled a team using LinkedIn to locate candidates.
Think about the other side: You're the CEO of a company. You've discovered LinkedIn. It's kind of cool. You introduce some of your team to it. Before long everyone is on LinkedIn.
I remember a recuriter friend cautioning me that we shouldn't have people supply both their first and last names in the their voice mail greetings in our brand new startup. It would make it too easy for the best people to be poached by other recruiters just dialing through the directory.
LinkedIn is an order of magnitude worse/better/more.
A new kind of EVIL Spyware
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 ads, popups, software installing itself or claiming to do so. It's really ugly. I had never seen that before.
Anyway, my usual medicine for thar problem was Ad- Aware. It's free, and it has been very effective in the past. In this case, it didn't successfully clean the machine. In fact it seemed to have no noticable effect!
I checked Download.com, where an app called Spy Sweeper was said to have been the PC Magazine Editors Choice. I ran that and it was far more successful. At least with the regular spyware. The word highlighting one is still there. More later.
New version of iTunes
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 🙂
Howard Stern in New York Times
For Howard Stern fans out there, here's a good article.
Outlook Haters, anyone?
David Coursey writes an interesting bit about 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 of folks switching from Microsoft. A couple of points:
I can't believe that David feels that Outlook 2003 is so much better than the previous version (Outlook XP.) I am usually a Microsoft fan but in this case there are various really bad design choices which make Outlook 2003 a constant aggrevation for me to use. The Spam filtering is one thing that is new and good, but not meaningful to me because I am already using a very effective spam filtering app (Matador)
Then again I am not an Outlook hater. I am amused when people I work with berate Outlook how awful and useless it is, and insist on using Eudora. The profoundly good thing about Outlook, which I am surprised no-one has competed with is the integration of email, calendar and addressbook.
Synergies are everywhere : I can use a single addressbook for both my email addresses and phone numbers. I can use email to deliver and process appointments and calendar updates. I can use the addressbook to point to someone's free-busy information. These are incredibly important integrations: the three functions (email, calendar and addressbook) belong together.
Testing BlogJet
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's the clever thing: the preceding two paragraphs are automatically offered to me when I install BlogJet, which encourages me to try it, and at the same time, advertise it. In fact, I found out about BlogJet when I saw this post. Very clever. I think I am going to like this utility! (And this last paragraph was indeed written by me, myself…)
Thoughts about software licensing
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, so you might have seen them.)
Anyway, the connection is that starting sometime next month when I wrap up my current consulting project I will be devoting more time on BlogBridge to see if I can't get it to a real stable and usable form, and who knows, try to sell it? Progress has been accelerating lately - there's another developer working on it part time now (Aleksey, in the Ukraine) and things are coming along nicely.
So in my future will be the question of a software license. Right now all the code is open source and the source in fact is all available free to anyone on SourceForge.net. I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it, but I think I can make sense out of having a commercial ("for pay") license of the running, supported, tested and deployed version of an open source product.
Coupled with the fact that BlogBridge will have a service component which will be hosted on www.blogbridge.com, which opens the door to a subscription model as well. I think you'll like that when you hear about it 🙂
Anyway, I will write more about my plans as they evolve. For now, I just wanted to point to Dan's interesting pieces.
Spain Security Situation
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 live in Spain, and also looked at the various State Department notices, and all in all decided that the risk wouldn't be major. I did expect to see a major security presence -- you know, soldiers with machine guns in the airports, etc. But otherwise I wasn't especially worried, but curious what we'd find. I remember how shell shocked we were in the U.S. two months after 9/11.
Well, here's the surprising thing. There was almost no noticable security presence or sense of mourning, danger, worry. At the airports there was no more than the usual security presence. At the railstations there was nothing noticable. Nothing at all.
In the high velocity train, you had to check in and go through a metal detector like at an airport, but again very casual. At the main Madrid rail station there was again nothing noticable.
In each city we stayed in hotels located right on some central plaza. The Spanish love to hang out! In Madrid, in the Puerto Del Sol area, at 10 and 11 at night, on a week days, there were throngs of people, walking around, or sitting in cafes drinking beers or coffee, and having a good time. Like Time Square in New York.
I was pleasantly surprised. Friends here that hear that story are amazed.