Posted by mop
Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:22:00 GMT
Some tidbits from my Bloglines RSS subscriptions.
"Lint4j ("Lint for Java") is a static Java source code analyzer that detects locking and threading issues, performance and scalability problems, and checks complex contracts such as Java serialization by performing type, data flow, and lock graph analysis."
It’s Wiki++. Typical intranet functionality is available to Wiki users. As seen on John Udell’s blog. (I’ve added John’s blog to my roll.)
Blogs aren’t just for people, you’re processes should be blogging too. Oh yeah.
ISOs and pointers for those brave enough to run Dell servers.
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Posted by mop
Sat, 25 Sep 2004 07:55:00 GMT
Some tidbits from subscriptions recently added to my Bloglines account.
A high volume Wiki of bookmarks related to Java.
- back port of JSR166 to Java 1.4
- JSR has/will result in a new base package for J2SE: java.util.concurrent
- Blojsom
- A Java port of the popular Bloxsom blog server
- CoFE
- Collaborative Filtering Engine provides an "environment in which a community of people come together to share the burden of filtering information".
Spread the news about the better browser.
A Vancouver Java guru with ties to the W3C. See his recent entry about gas prices in the Lower Mainland.
Kevin Kelly’s list of cool stuff. Books, movies, geek toys, survival gear.
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Posted by mop
Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:47:00 GMT
Some clever solutions to file for a rainy day...
Javascript popup object
Matt Kruse seems to have done a good job creating a flexible Javascript object for browser popups. It support tool-tip style boxes, as well as traditional pop-up windows.
Norm Walsh, the don of DocBook, mentioned Matt’s work in his discussion of DocBook annotations.
Tag Soup
John Cowan wrote a SAX compatible parser for ’nasty and brutish’ HTML, called Tag Soup. This lenient parser takes poorly formatted HTML snippets and parses them into a valid tree. Seems like a must-have for any web application that allows users to enter HTML mark-up.
Norm Walsh uses Tag Soup to parse comments authored by visitors to his blog. Interesting that even the comments to Norm’s blog are syndicated.
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Posted by mop
Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:09:00 GMT
A readable article by Amit Singh, as ??? mentioned in their blog (I’ve lost the reference).
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Posted by mop
Tue, 29 Jun 2004 03:45:00 GMT
More fun with character encoding... this time with Perl. I’ve been down the encoding path with Java, discovering on the way some of the flaws in the IO libraries (see esp. FileWriter and FileReader).
Similar to Java, Perl does support Unicode in it’s string representation, UTF-8 actually. It’s nice, ’cause Perl regular expressions can act on Unicode strings -- as long as you’re consistent in using UTF-8 characters. The problems start when using modules that don’t handle anything other than 7-bit ASCII. Same mistakes as you’ll find in Java libraries. To be fair, the Perl modules are centrally organized via CPAN, but not designed/written/QA’d by the owners of Java, so we should cut the Perl module authors some slack.
But you’d think that a Perl module related to XML would be different. The XML:CSV module is a handy tool that uses the Text::CSV_XS library to parse comma delimited (whatever that is) records and spit out proper XML. Unfortunately the CSV_XS module silently fails when it encounters non-ascii data.
Perl itself does a decent job of explicit handling of character ecoding when doing IO. Perl started as a text processing engine, and text based IO is still the bread and butter for the Perl sandwich. There is even an extensive description of Perl’s Unicode and encoding if you go looking. Specify the encoding for any file or stream, before or after it’s been opened, and Perl transparently converts as required.
Ok, so we know that Perl uses Unicode internally, and that some modules expect ASCII only. My immediate problem involves XML so I’m quite happy to use 7-bit ASCII plus entities for the extended characters. Turns out this is easily done with the Encode module. Problem solved, I think.
Update: of course, all this applies to recent versions of Java/Perl. In particular, the clever conversion from ISO-8859-1 to ASCII doesn’t work with the version of Perl in Debian woody. yuck.
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Posted by mop
Mon, 28 Jun 2004 01:26:00 GMT
In-Touch now has a bit of virtual space at RimuHosting. The company is based in New Zealand, but our server is located in Dallas TX. Rimu is unique in that they provide Virtual Private Servers (VPL) using User Mode Linux and a variety of Linux distros, including Debian.
We’re currently on a $40USD/month plan that provides a VPS with 128MB of RAM, 4GB of disk space, and up to 60GB of traffic. I’m guessing the hardware is a dual Xeon running at 2.8GHz. So far rimu.intouch.ca is just used to host the In-Touch blogs, but I may also use it for other In-Touch and customer services. At the very least, I’d like to learn something about UML services.
Some stats from rimu.intouch.ca:
tsai:/home/mpierson# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : User Mode Linux
model name : UML
mode : skas
host : Linux host32.rimuhosting.com 2.6.6 #3 SMP Thu Jun 10 01:10:47 UTC 2004 i686
bogomips : 2510.02
tsai:/home/mpierson# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 125532 95932 29600 0 7896 64668
-/+ buffers/cache: 23368 102164
Swap: 98296 0 98296
tsai:/home/mpierson# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/ubd0 4128448 452448 3466288 12% /
tmpfs 62764 0 62764 0% /dev/shm
The only gotcha I’ve encountered so far is the incompatibility between UML and the GNU-TLS libraries in Debian sid. I orderd the VPS with Debian woody and one of the Rimu admins had to rescue our VPS after a "apt-get dist-upgrade" to sid failed. A few dpkg-divert additions were required for /lib/tls/*, but now rimu is happily running sid.
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