April 2004 Archives

Well, I had to move rot13.org again. Again, it's because of disk failure at good old griffin which was hosting this domain from early beginning. After all, that server was my donation (twice) to HULK. First time, Pentium SMP machine, and second time dual Celeron box. We changed disks much more often, but this time with root disk crash and more than 2000 files in /lost+found it seems that I have to make real move. So I did. Good luck, griffin, old friend, hope to see you soon.

On the brighter side, I added some layout around top-level page, www.rot13.org. Yes, it's self-promotion, so sue me! I would also like to share my furl links. If this blog is interesting to you, links might also be. It's really useful service.

Also, comments are working again. I had to remove calendar until next version of Bryar, but we can live without it.

Did you ever wanted to search your Mailman archive? Why don't you use SWISH-E?

Well, you couldn't because swish comes just with index_hypermail.pl but after one night of hacking, I present to you: index_mailman.pl. I will test it a bit, and if everything goes well, I will probably submit it for inclusion in swish-e distribution.

After upgrade of my laptop (HP Omnibook 6000) to kernel 2.6, my middle button on Synaptics touchpad remained dead. I tried with xev and no events got generated. So, I went hacking and after 6 hours I had patch which is available at my Linux page. And, it's just three lines.

What is the moral of this? If you do kernel development, better get payed by hour, not by line-of-code.

Why would I write about Java in 2004? Isn't Java well-understood topic and something with reached consensus?

If you have to ask yourself those questions you are marketing or CFO. Us techies have very different attitude: we either love our technology or some outside power (like, errr... earning for living) is forcing us to use one.

While, I'm fortunate enough to work with technologies that I love (which include Linux, PostgreSQL, perl, Open Source software and much much more...) I didn't gave much thought why I never did anything in Java beside this little applet back in 1996.

And then, I accidentally stumbled upon book Bitter Java. With that title, I had to flip few pages... And, guess what. It's one of best books that I read (without need for technology described in it).

While my opinion on Java hasn't changed (based on cover as Paul Graham would say), I would recommend Bitter Java as one of best technical books that I read lately.