alfa.org.uk

This is a really informed and informative article about why Microsoft slammed the brakes on Internet Explorer development.

From a Linux 2.6.7 ./configure :

“WARNING: RAID-6 is currently highly experimental. If you use it, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it won’t destroy your data, eat your disk drives, insult your mother, or re-appoint George W. Bush.”

I found a fascinating article about the work of Richard Feynman. While I was at university I did a brief research project into the simulation of genetic algorithms using cellular automata, but I had no idea that Richard had tackled the same kind of problem in 1983 whilst working at Connection Machines.

He outclassed me though. I guess that’s why he has a Nobel prize, and I don’t ;)

My simulation ran as a 500 virtual-node cluster connected as a simple two-dimensional grid. Richard’s ran on a 1,000,000 node cluster connected as a 20-dimension hypercube.

He simulated turbulent flow in fluids. I simulated the growth of rabbit populations ;)

You know what bugs me with some software? When it pops up a dialogue saying “would you like to save your changes?”, and the three options are “Save”, “Don’t Save”, and “Cancel”.

No no no!

If it’s a yes/no question, the options should be “Yes”, “No”, and “Cancel”. Why make it more complicated than it has to be??

Genius.

The new PalmOne Zire 72 uses the IBM Websphere Micro Edition JVM, which I’m on the development team for!

So, buy one. If it crashes you can blame me…

It looks to be a pretty cool piece of kit, too. Built-in digital camera amongst other goodies. Unfortunately it uses SD cards for expansion which isn’t my favourite format, but it does look mighty cool. Intel ARM clone inside…

A few years ago desktops had less computing power than this thing - it seems crazy that J2ME now includes support for video and audio playback in the class-libraries. Onwards and upwards…

This is only of any real interest if you know who both IBM and SCO are, and why the latter is sueing the former.

There’s a great article about the latest developments at ZDNet.

SCO’s biggest problem is Darl McBride’s mouth. Every time the man breathes out, the sparks of controversy burst into flame. He and his cronies have been cruising the world in search of soapboxes from which to shrilly preach their fundamentalist stance; that SCO begat Unix and Unix begat Linux and by golly it’s time to honor thy grandfather. Normally, supporting your company in public is a perfectly respectable pastime, but when you’re trying to build a house of cards, the last thing you should do is blow hard and wave your hands like a madman.

Fantastic. In other news, IBM subpoenas virtually everyone.

I reckon this only has a few more months in it… Which is a shame, because it’s been causing us huge amounts of mirth in the office.

More woes at Sun by the looks of things. Net losses of more than $750 million and headcounts to be reduced by 3,300. Bad news.

Makes it even less likely that they’ll take the plunge and open-source their JRE, as ESR and IBM have asked for.

It makes my particular job more interesting though. Soon, we will rule ze vorld!

I’m sure you’ve all seen this one. Rather than having code looking like:

result = functionCall(foo, true, false, false, true, true);

some bright spark thinks it’d be a great idea to replace the boolean parameters with something more “human-readable”. So, they #define a whole heap of macros and instead they call:

result = functionCall(foo, MACRO_ARG_MEANING_TRUE, MACRO_ARG_MEANING_FALSE, MACRO_ARG_MEANING_FALSE, MACRO_ARG_MEANING_TRUE, MACRO_ARG_MEANING_TRUE);

And then they feel happy that their code is more “understandable”.

No No No No! The problem is in the tool, not the code. If you don’t have a decent editor that allows you to quickly cross-reference across your codebase then get one.

Stop making the code look like a dog’s dinner because you have a bad editor.

The RealOne player sucks. It’s awful. It’s quite possibly one of the most annoying, bloated, crapware-filled pieces of software I’ve ever made the mistake of installing. You can read more than I have the patience to write on the subject here.

But there is an alternative! Finally!

Real Alternative is lightweight and Just Works™. You can download it here. I tested it in Firefox with the BBC website and everything seemed lovely.