Steve's personal weblog

Gas on Ice: "Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that they can produce natural gas from an existing gas hydrate deposit in nature. "

Hektor.ch - interesting project - using a computer-controlled spray can as a large-scale plotter.

Using the java.lang.Character Class and Handling Uncaught Exceptions: "All the exceptions that an application typically tries to catch are subclasses of java.lang.Exception, and so are caught by this technique. This excludes exceptions like OutOfMemoryError, which are descendants of java.lang.Error. If you really want to catch everything (not necessarily a good idea), you need to use a 'catch (Throwable e)' clause. " - something I need to do for my Java photo resizer - sometimes it runs out of memory, and I don't handle that very gracefully. Maybe this will help.

Career Calculus: "The key to a great career is to focus on L, the first derivative of the equation. L is the rate at which your cluefulness is changing over time. The actual value of C at any given moment is usually a distraction. Only one question matters: With each day that goes by, are you getting more clueful, or less clueful? Or are you just stuck?"

Developer Testing, discussions about best practices: "Was there any way they could get a quick sanity check on code without having to wait an hour?
The solution was to install CruiseControl on a second machine and create a new Ant target that just pulls the changes, compiles all the code, and runs our smoke tests. This cycle typically takes about 2 minutes, meaning that after a check-in the developer can expect email reassurance (or blame) in their inbox in under 5 minutes. "

FUH2 | F%^& You And Your H2: "The government rewards you more savings for buying an H2 than you'd get for buying an electric car. "

shtoom - pure python VoIP. I wonder if it will work with our new VoIP phones? Wonder if it works with Skype? I recently signed up with Skype, but I haven't used it. Because it is skype-to-skype only, I don't currently have anyone else to call :-(

Joel on Software - Bionic Office: " I sneer at silly building managers who still think that one LAN port per office is about right. For lawyers, maybe."

Aleron Unveils Superfast Ultrawideband - "UWB is 25 times more power efficient than Wi-Fi." - and cabable of hitting speeds of 480 Mbps! The range is short (10 M) but if these things also acted as repeaters, as many have suggested, your whole house could get covered pretty easily.

milov.nl 2389: integrating javascript into stylesheets

Top 15 Ant Best Practices
- found this through Glenn's blog.

Kev's catalogue of this and that.: September 21, 2003 - September 27, 2003 Archives - Someone named Kevin shows how to deal with dependencies in a pretty stylish way with Ant 1.6 (include ability), XSLT, and a dependencies.xml.