rc3.org

Since 1998.

rc3.org header image 1

Entries from May 2005

Hack PHP programmer beats computer science geniuses

May 31st, 2005 · Comments Off

My company is trying to get FogBugz 4.0 up and running on one of our servers, which happens to run a Linux distribution that’s not supported by Fog Creek Software right now. There’s also a limitation in the product, described here, wherein the maintenance script (written in PHP, naturally) can’t connect to your FogBugz instance [...]

[Read more →]

Eclipse assimilates JBuilder

May 31st, 2005 · Comments Off

Borland is migrating JBuilder to the Eclipse platform. I wonder what features they’re going to add to make people want to pay extra for Borland’s offerings. I used to work for TogetherSoft and then Borland when they acquired TogetherSoft, and I found Eclipse (and IDEA) to be more usable than JBuilder or ControlCenter (TogetherSoft’s modeling-oriented [...]

[Read more →]

Pension crisis

May 31st, 2005 · Comments Off

Remember how I compared the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to the FDIC and FSLIC? Well it looks like the pension defaults from United Airlines and others are going to precipitate something like the savings and loan crisis.

[Read more →]

Chilling effect

May 28th, 2005 · Comments Off

Ed Felten has a great example of the chilling effect that the litigiousness of the copyright industry has on all sorts of creative expression.

[Read more →]

Jakarta Commons

May 27th, 2005 · Comments Off

So today I needed to do something seemingly simple, compare two Sets. This functionality isn’t built into the Java class library, so rather than write my own I thought I would check out the Commons Collections. Sure enough, the functionality exists but when I downloaded the package, I was shocked to discover that the archive [...]

[Read more →]

The learning bottleneck

May 27th, 2005 · Comments Off

I still intend to write a rocking package to maintain this site using Ruby on Rails, but I find that I’ve encountered learning bottleneck. My copy of the pickaxe book sits gathering dust as I expand my knowledge of PHP to work on a reporting project, plow through Hibernate in Action (a great book [...]

[Read more →]

DVD annoyances

May 27th, 2005 · Comments Off

Here’s how out of the loop I am. I was watching a DVD of the Bourne Supremacy last night and was shocked to discover that DVDs include previews that you can’t skip or fast forward through! People were probably getting outraged about that years ago.

[Read more →]

Defining torture

May 26th, 2005 · Comments Off

One of the questions that people seem to be unable to answer easily is, what constitutes torture? Slate has published an interactive guide to US use of torture, which includes a list of various techniques we apply and the legality of them. For me, I answer the question by considering a hypothetical. Pretend that insurgents [...]

[Read more →]

Mail Filtering 101

May 26th, 2005 · Comments Off

My friend Jef Poskanzer has published an extensive tutorial on filtering mail to fight spam. The article is targetted at Unix administrators running Sendmail. Update: Another friend mentions grey listing as an alternative for blocking spam at the server level.

[Read more →]

Apps vs frameworks

May 25th, 2005 · Comments Off

Java Developers Journal author Timothy Fisher blogs that all the cool open source Web applications are written in PHP, whereas Java developers seem to focus on writing frameworks. I think there’s a big reason for that. Let’s say that I want to put up a blog or a message board for my own use. I [...]

[Read more →]