Recently in Technology Category

My Android 2.2 OTA upgrade arrived this morning. When I got to work, I had a message on the display with the good news. The upgrade went through with only one, very minor hitch.

The upgrade gives me better battery life, more accurate signal strength meters, native Flash support, 720p video capability, and SD card app installations. There's other improvements too, but those are the highlights.

The one glitch was with my cloud-based note app SpringPad. After the upgrade, it wouldn't sync with changes I made on the web. I uninstalled it, and reinstalled it, and it's now working perfectly. I haven't noticed any other problems.

My Droid Incredible came with a 2gb microSD card, and I made an early upgrade to a 4gb cards from the stash in my junk drawer, but I needed more. Using a stale Amazon gift card, I ordered a new 16gb Class 4 card, and it came in the mail today. I duped the old card's contents onto the new card, and now I have space to burn. At least for now…

Since battery life is a constant struggle, I also picked up a new 1750mah battery.

After some not-so-subtle hinting which bordered on the obnoxious and may very well have crossed that line, my kids and Carole went in together to get me a Droid Incredible for Father's Day. Demand was high, so the phone didn't get to me until today. It was definitely worth waiting for.

Thanks, everyone!

Here's a list of Windows key-codes for some special characters I sometimes use:

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

A great article about a salvage team working to save a capsized cargo ship off the Aleutians.

I sometimes amazes me how little some programmers know about the nuts and bolts of vi. They've spent four hours or more a day, every day, for years and years using vi, and they know only the most basic features.

There's a guy at work who's always giving hallway lectures on the newest cutting edge technology - python, SCONS, blah, blah, blah - but the last time I sat with him at his terminal, his vi skills were so basic and he took so long to get things done, I wanted to scream.

From The Codist...

Writing multithreaded code is like juggling chainsaws; amazing when it works and truly sucky when it doesn't.

Right now at my job I am writing the foundation for a transaction processing cluster in Java, so I'm immersed in lots and lots of threads and interacting applications. When you are processing 8000 of something per second, any problems in your approach or in your choice of frameworks is magnified.

In job interviews, a popular question is "what is the major problem you have to solve in writing multithreaded code?" Generally, if they have read a little about it, they often say "avoiding deadlocks". If they have done a bit of thread coding, maybe in Swing, they might say "protected shared data". Only the truly experienced in complex threaded coding will say "avoiding doing nothing".

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http://keznews.com/2577_Windows_Genuine_Advantage_Validation_1_7_18_1

I stumbled on this the other day.

If you want to open up all bookmarks in a folder, middle-click on the folder icon. This is equivalent to clicking on the folder then selecting the Open All in Tabs item at the bottom of the list.

INCRA Precision T-Rules - Rockler Woodworking Tools

From here:

There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.

O'Reilly School of Technology

Slashdot | Sort Linked Lists 10X Faster Than MergeSort

Backup To EMail

The guys at work were talking about the upcoming changes to the daylight savings time rules. I looked them up in Wikipedia to avoid confusion.

Programming Designs Forums / Five Great Programmers Fonts

Book on Algorithms