Steve's personal weblog

OK, maybe this is what happened to that plane that hit the pentagon...
A video showing what happens when an F4 Phantom slams into a reinforced concrete wall at 500 MPH
Not much left to look at.

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Flip-flopper in Chief: "George Bush's image as a strong and decisive leader is a creation of journalists too lazy to notice that the president has a long history of changing his positions to suit his political needs."

Applications development in one-tenth the time- ADTmag.com: "TenFold has a PC-based version of EnterpriseTenFold called Tsunami on its Web site (http://tsunami.tenfold.com) that Walker says will prove to doubters that a user can build an enterprise app in just a few hours. By following a script, 'anyone can build a complete, enterprise-scale CRM application that is like SalesForce.com, only better,' Walker claims"

Java Certification Simulators for Java Certification Success: "Java has evolved from being a language to develop platform independent client application to providing the architecture for developing N-tier enterprise application. It is important that you keep yourself updated with all the changes so that you are not left behind with obsolete systems. Taking certifications and update exams is a structured way of updating yourself with the technology. Therefore you should think of Java Certification from the day you decide to work on it."

The Trac Project - Trac: "Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies."

DamageControl - Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix: Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix

There are many Continuous Integration systems available. This page is an attempt to keep an unbiased comparison of as many as possible of them. The goals are:

• Make it easier to choose an appropriate CI tool for your project.


• 'Healthy comptetition aid' for the people involved in the development of these various CI systems.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Cheney Spits Toads: "Without Zell Miller around to out-crazy him, and unplugged after a convention that tried to 'humanize'' him with grandchildren, horses and wifely anecdotes about his inability to dance the twist, Mr. Cheney is back as Terrifier in Chief."

ouch.

Cooking For Engineers: "Cooking For Engineers

Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!"

OK - this is actually interesting. A different way of looking at cooking. I know how to cook, and I know how to read recipes. But I like this.

Source Control HOWTO: "Source Control HOWTO
I have started writing a series of articles explaining how to do source control and the best practices thereof. See below for links to the individual chapters in this series. The Introduction explains my motivations and goals for writing this series."

Dude, I Love Math: Commons Math 1.0 RC1 Released: "Dude, I Love Math: Commons Math 1.0 RC1 Released

The Commons Math team hopes to release the first stable version of Commons Math 1.0 in the next two weeks, based on community response for the First RC.

Commons Math, released under an Apache 2.0 license, provides functions for statistics, linear algebra, random data generation, root finding, interpolation, gamma and beta functions, arrays, factorials, complex numbers, distributions, matrices, and solving linear systems and much more.

Here is a listing of the packages included in the commons-math library, and brief notes on what they implement:

* Analysis: implements of common numerical analysis procedures, including root finding and function interpolation
* Complex: implements complex number type and implementations of complex transcendental functions
* Distribution: implements common discrete and continuous distributions
* Linear: implements linear algebra support
* Random: implements random number and random data generators
* Special: implementations of special functions such as Beta and Gamma
* Stat: implements data storage, manipulation and summary routines
* Util: implements Convenience routines and common data structure used throughout the commons-math library"

9/11 and the plane that hit the Pentagon
The link above will show you a movie that lays out the premis and basic evidence that American Airlines flight 77 did NOT crash into the Pentagon on September 11th. If true, this is very disturbing.

Pragmatic Automation - If you just can’t convince the boss to buy those lava lamps, or your team is dislocated and can’t share a visual monitoring device, then you need another inexpensive way to visually monitor your build. Paul Julius sent in these two screenshots of his system tray and a note about how it works...

Active Duty Military Attending the RNC || kuro5hin.org: A recent report filed by the Associated Press contained a startling bit of information:

About 15 percent of the 4,800-plus delegates and alternates to the convention in New York are veterans, organizers said Monday. An additional 3 percent are active military personnel.

This report was displayed prominently on the Republican National Committee's website, and lauded gleefully by the fine folks at Free Republic, among others.

As it turns out though, it's actually not such a good thing to have active-duty military anywhere near a political convention - if you value your democracy. In fact, up until just a few days before the convention, it was quite illegal for active-duty military even to attend. And yet, there it was in black and white. Active duty military members were not only attending, but participating as delegates in the RNC. How could this happen?

An interesting article. One of the questions I had as I was reading it though, was how the Democrats were able to get that whole phalanx of generals up there. A lot of them were retired, but I don't think all of them were. What are the regs for retired military, and their participation in the democratic process?

Russell Beattie Notebook - Republicans Suck 2004: "Republicans disgust me. They are liars and manipulators. Dividers. Fear mongers. Smiling when they talk about war and grinning when they tell their lies and distort their record. Trying to impose their hateful morals on the rest of the world, they're nothing but the Taliban reborn. Have you seen their platform? Have you listened to their speeches? These warmongers? These liars?"

Wow. This guy is not a happy camper. And I agree with most of what he says. Don't know if I go as far as he does, but pretty close.

Why file URLs dont work on Mozilla/Firefox/etc.
At work we were using DemoShield in a Windows installation,which I thought was dumb since we were using this heavy program for something that could easily be done with simple HTML. So when we did a seperate installation for Linux, I suggested that we just use HTML. Seemed like a good idea, but we kept getting strange behavior - the page wouldn't load, etc.

I recently started using Firefox as my browser (the boys back in Redmond would be appalled - I used to nominally be part of the IE team - my name was even in the "easter Egg credits for IE 4) and I noticed that I couldn’t do things like open the “About-DecisionSpace.html” file from the filers. Very strange I thought. So I did some looking. Turns out Mozilla (which Firefox is based on) considers those a security issue, and won’t open them:
Bugzilla 122022
Bugzilla 84128

So I did a test with the ‘javascript console’ up and saw this:

Security Error: Content at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122022 may not load or link to file://///afiler1/dsbuilds/DecisionSpace/branch_2003-15-L-9/win32/daily/40903.02/About-DecisionSpace.html.


The 1st bug link above does list a workaround:

Also, I read in Bug 66194 that the way for individual users to fix this problem is to set the pref called "security.checkloaduri" to "false". This is handy for getting around this problem (but exposing yourself to the security hole).

or this suggestion for wording when this happens:
"Security violation: links to local files currently disabled. To enable this feature, you can set the variable security.checkloadURI in your prefs.js. But be aware that you open a possible security hole, esp. in connection with javascript!"

So that explains why we were having difficulties with things like the ‘demoshield html’ on Linux. There are also many duplicates of this bug.

Aha – If I close all instances of the browser completely, then double clicking on About-DecisionSpace.html from explorer works. Strange, because when I got the error it was trying to load the About… in a different browser window than the one I had open.

P.S.
on firefox, the preferences file is actually at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\greprefs\all.js