Posted by mop Wed, 09 Feb 2005 17:52:00 GMT
I had the pleasure of witnessing a high-spirited basketball match between the McMaster Marauders and the Western Mustangs last weekend. These young women play hard and look good doing it!
Of course watching paint dry would be exciting in the presence of two beautiful girls. Thanks to Kate and Suzan. ;-)
What is a marauder? Or a mustang? Neither moniker seems very appropriate.
Posted by mop Wed, 09 Feb 2005 17:05:00 GMT
Shame on me for not adding Lawrence’s blog to my ’lines earlier. Lessig is the Stanford law professor who provides the academic backbone for Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wired authored a fine bio in 2002.
Two nuggets gleaned from Lessig’s blog...
A reverent description of Gilberto Gil’s ’performance’ at the World Social Forum in Brazil.
Lawrence presents Wilco as the Future of Music
Posted by mop Tue, 30 Nov 2004 01:43:00 GMT
X, as in eXtreme, not XML. XDoclet leverages metadata encoded withing Java classes as Javadocs, generating content (Java classes, JSPs, etc.) as part of a build process. The model is well suited to EJBs, Struts, as well as mixed content (generated plus hand crafted) files. XDoclet is also easy to apply in ad-hoc situations.
The premise is simple enough: put a custom javadoc tag in a Java source file then apply an XDoclet transform to produce a helper class, a JSP, a unit test, whatever. The transform can be as simple as an XDt template that references the custom javadoc tag, or a custom Java-based processor that applies complex logic to the tag-encoded metadata.
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.
Posted by mop Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:30:00 GMT
Lucene is a Java system for "high-performance, full-featured text search". The software apears to be mature, and the community has produced a fair bit of documentation. A replacement for RDBMS-based searches?
No doubt that the searching is more intuitive, and would make it easier for users to perform keyword searches. Not sure that a Google-like engine could match RDBMS for field-based searching and fancy list navigation.
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.
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.
Posted by mop Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:47:00 GMT
Some clever solutions to file for a rainy day...
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.
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.
Posted by mop Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:03:00 GMT
Some notes about my experience installing Debian on an AMD64...
It’s a refurbished E-Machines T6000 with 512MB RAM and a 160GB Western Digital disk. TigerDirect was clearing them out @ $850. It’s a nice small box, and quiet too.
I tried to re-partition the disk to save the pre-installed Windoze OS with no luck. Apparently the Mandrake install disk is able to re-partition XP disks but I was too impatient to burn a Mandrake CD.
I was also too impatient to burn a Debian-AMD64 CD, although this approach is apparently quite mature. Instead, I chose the ’chroot’ approach. Bootstrapping with a normal x86 (backwards compatible CPU platform!) allows the 64-bit OS to be installed in a chroot environment. The debootstrap makes the process almost foolproof. Not quite mike-proof as I was still groking chroots and grub. The biggest mistake I made was failing to mount a proc file system in the chroot dir before switching to the new root.
FWIW, I think it may have been possible to install Debian from CompactFlash, via the USB reader -- maybe in another lifetime.
The pure-64 port of Debian more-or-less duplicates the packages in Debian Sid. Packages that do not compile for 64-bit are excluded (e.g. OpenOffice), and some packages compile but segfault (e.g. Xprint). I have yet to run XFree or even xfb via VNC, but have heard some success stories. PostgreSQL works as advertised, as does the Blackdown Java port (1.4.2-rc1).
It’s worth noting that the Debian community is still divided about the future of the AMD64 port. The controversy arose because some would like to see the pure-64 port become the official Debian AMD64 port, even though there is no clear way to support 32-bit applications. Bi-arch solutions tend to be klugy, although it seems to be a necessary evil.
So far I can only provide circumstantial evidence about the relative performance of my AMD64 box. It appears to be quite zippy when tasks are in-memory and sluggish when accessing the disk. I need to add some RAM before benchmarking the H database.
albert:/home/mpierson# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ stepping : 8 cpu MHz : 2000.162 cache size : 1024 KB fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 3923.96 TLB size : 1088 4K pages clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: ts fid vid ttp
mpierson@albert:~$ /usr/local/jdk/bin/java -version java version "1.4.2-rc1" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build Blackdown-1.4.2-rc1) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build Blackdown-1.4.2-rc1, mixed mode)
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8385 [K8T800 AGP] Host Bridge (rev 01) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI bridge [K8T800 South] 0000:00:07.0 Communication controller: Conexant HSF 56k HSFi Modem (rev 01) 0000:00:0e.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80) 0000:00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 0000:00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 0000:00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 0000:00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 0000:00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 81) 0000:00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86) 0000:00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [K8T800 South] 0000:00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 60) 0000:00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78) 0000:00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 0000:00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 0000:00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 0000:00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 NorthBridge 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600] 0000:01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AP [Radeon 9600] (Secondary)
albert:/home/mpierson# cat /proc/version Linux version 2.6.7-5-amd64-k8 (root@athlon.lowpingbastards.de) (gcc version 3.3.4 (Debian 1:3.3.4-3)) #1 Thu Jul 15 01:13:32 CEST 2004
