Older blog entries for Dacta (starting at number 16)

Played with apache xerces & xalan java xml & xsl things last night. Very, very nice..

Had a bit of trouble getting the IBM 1.3 JDK working - I was looking for "classes.zip" or "classes.jar" to add to my classpath, and I couldn't find it. Turns out they have changed it to "rt.jar".... duh! Someone should have told me..

It's pretty impressive now it's working, though.

Riding lots... getting attacked by lots of birds, in particular magpies.. I'm going to draw eyes on the back of my helmet. I've been hit by one, once - not fun.

Saw the Searia (sp?) Leone track team trying to qualify their 4x100m team for the Olympics today. They were running at some school sportsday for the competition. That's what the olympics should be about. There seems to be quite a few teams in town. I think I saw some people from another African team run training when I was on an early morning ride. Their coach was sitting out the front of a caravan park down at the beach, and they had so many clothes on, it was funny.

Having ISP problems... it's taking 3 seconds to ping telstra.com.au, and I'm losing 50% packets! Found out that telstra is doing unlimited ADSL for $100 a month... that's a little much, but if it were $50 I'd be there, and $75 would have me real, real tempeted.

Start work on Monday... must do some more Java

Joe Haldeman is a god

nymia, there is already a GPLed transaction server out there. It's called (surprisingly) GTS (Gnu Transaction Server), and it implements the distrubted transactiosn services specified by the Open Group.

I don't have a direct link, but I was on the mailing list for a while. Have a look at this page towards the bottom on the page.

How do people like to learn new languages? I tend to try and write a program in them (learn by doing), but I need to pick up two languages (Java, which should be okay, and Powerbuilder, which I'm not that interested in) for my new job.

I've taken the Java job. The other company rang me back 5 minutes after telling them I was no longer interested to offer me a permament postion and $2.5K more than the job I took. Oh well....

On the subject of religous wars, this is my phlisophy: Extremism is always bad. That is as true in software as it is in politics. If you ever find yourself in the most extreme position in an arguement, reconsider your position.

Long time no entry....

Spent way too much money on a new bike. A Giant TCR2, in the ONCE colors. Nicest bike I've ever owned, and my friend (who owns a $3000 Viner) is jelouse when we hit the hill or sprint. Rode way too much and my ankles swelled up.

Now it's raining, so I've decided to get a job. I've got two semi-offers. One is ASP, possibly moving to PHP web development. It's contract, 3 days a week, and plenty of money. The other is Java/JSP/MTS(!)/Sybase, full time.

I don't know what to do... I don't really know either ASP or Java, so that makes both of them interesting. The Java job would be a better career move, but more work, and it's with a Sybase DB, which I don't like. The web development people seems to be a fun bunch of people, but the Java people seemed really smart. I guess the money totals abou the same either way, but I don't really care about that.

Ambivilance: Doesn't mean I don't care, it means being pulled in two ways equally and being unable to choose (or something like that)

Finally saw "Three Kings" on DVD - great movie. Also saw "Girl Interrupted" - very smart movie. If you've never suffered from depression or anything like that you should see it, not that it is really about depression. That's where that thing about Ambivilance came from - which is something I suffer from occasionally. The movie got me thinking about how difficult it must be for people who have never suffered from depression or anything like that to understand it. I'm glad to say I've never had really bad depression, but I've had a couple of spells that I suspect would have been diagnosed as clinical depression. My GF could never understand me when I was like that, I could never explain how I felt. Depression: "you are neurotic and depressed, it doesn't mean that you are sad" - Everclear, "Normal Like You"

Code wise, haven't done much. A little PHP and some ASP, and trying to remember all my HTML+CSS

Got my delphi RSS components up on sourceforge.. at last. The project has the original name of DelphiRSS. DelphiRSS.SourceForge.net is anyone is interested.. It's 2:00am... I'm going to bed, real soon, now.

Using Galeon as my webbrowser now. Beautiful... the best Linux browser since Netscape 1.1, IMHO. It's not quite ready for prime-time yet (no right-clicking on URLs to open them in a new window, for instance, and no animated "page loading" icon), but it it so much better than Netscape 4, and so much faster than Mozilla.

I'd almost put in the IE5 league for speed - it's that good.

On my Redhat 6.2 system, it didn't work until I installed helix-gnome. Try it for yourself!

There's the most stupid discussion ever on Slashdot at the moment - someone complained about MS removing DOS from Windows ME, and claimed it was aimed at stopping BeOS & Linux. God.. they have only been trying to do that for what? 5 years?

Short story of the day:

The strangest moment of the week came when one RIAA lawyer, in a moment of frustration, asked us how we'd feel if someone took Pan and gave it away to millions of users for free. After the Pan team stopped laughing, the Andover lawyers had to explain why we liked the idea so much. There's a Salon article here somewhere.

from http://www.superpimp.org/, about the PAN newsreader.

Now my computer is back together and working, I'm hacking together a PHP website for my DelphiRSS code. PHP is nice, but it's taking me longer than writing the Delphi code did in the first place, mainly becuase my ISP is being stupid at the moment. Oh well.. it's relaxing.

Another funny thing. My website was somethign I setup mainly so I could have a nice email address. Then I found out that google had an affiliate program where you could get paid (Okay, it's 3c a hit - no one is going to get rich) to search using their engine, so I put that on there, and told my friends to use it.

Since it had even less stuff on it that even the real google search page, they actually used it. One of them works for a very large multinational electronics company, and he got a few of their teams using it, too, espcially for the Altavista translations (which are also on there). Anyway, I only found out about this on Friday, so I checked my balance, and I found I'd made $6 or so. I'm gonna be rich! (Okay, so that was over the course of a month....)

Now I've decided that this is crazy, so I've made it as ugly as possible - the idea being that all sites try and look good, so the really ugly ones stick in peoples minds, and hopefully they will remember to use it.

And you thought those programs never worked.....

Just got back from the Groove Terminator & Sonic Animation concert. I feel much better, if slightly drunk.

It's 1:40 am, and I don't feel like going to bed. Maybe I should try coding.. hmmm...

NT (grrr!) won't boot if a drive bigger than 7.62 Gb is attached to the computer, unless you have service pack 4 or greater installed. Of course, you can't install SP4 until you have NT installed.... I just installed it on a 1.7 Gb drive.

How can people complain about installing Linux? RedHat 6.2 installation was beautiful! Smooth as silk - even my SCSI CD burner works out of the box. I remember my first Linux install - copying Slackware (can't remember the version - it had a pre version 1 kernel, though, I think) floppy images from the Uni network, and installing them on my 386. That was fun!

Found this on Slashdot today. RSA implemented in Javascript. That's pretty cool!