For some reason I was watching my older pictures and this one struck a chord with me today. Since my last blog post a lot of things have happened. One of those things is that after nine years I will be leaving my current employer Info Support.

Also I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and I have come to some conclusions.

There is a person I care about fighting as I write this to get well again. I sure hope that person will find the strength and will to press on and fight for all the good things this person still wants to do.

Suffice to say there are many other things as well… All coming down to the line clearly readable on this picture.

Read somewhere on the internet that I should’ve rebooted my system after every installation. That’s 5 reboots for you, once after initial install, once after SP1 update, once after a point release, once after a second point release and once for an auto updater update. Jikes!

Rebooting like a mad mad did result in a working system though. Don’t know why. Tried it n two separate clean OSX installs and it went off without a glitch. Except for the insane amount of rebooting that is.

hoekbank-chaise-longue-rood

Edit:
It sold on january 29th.

Well, after losing two complete posts due to crashes and problems in the WordPress app, I gave up.

Nothing to bad for me for now, but I discovered this while loading the intranet site at my work. The welcome page contains a Silverlight applet. Removing Silverlight from my internet pluging folder resolved the issue.

I’m guessing Microsoft will have a solution for this pretty soon.

Personally I didn’t see this one coming. The IBM/Sun brush a short while ago was kind of obvious to me. Still a bit of a surprise, but yeah IBM absorbing SUN I can dig that.

Now Oracle has stepped up to the plate and dumped a load of money on the table. Oracle never has been my favourite when it came to Java related technology. Lots of cool demo’s that are hard to reproduce in real life situations if you ask me. Also Oracle doesn’t give me that welcoming feeling when getting into contact with them. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this ordeal is going to affect Java in general.

I see a lot of competition between IBM and Oracle in the future. Because let’s just face it, is there any other big Java player to speak of if this deal gets finalised? There just aren’t any other vendors that could offer a complete no holds barred JEE stack besides those two big names.

If you still need to register and are looking at a glaring empty refer a friend box… Enter this code: W1320901

If we meet on JavaOne I’ll be sure to pass you a few beers if you used my code.

My current car is a Mini Cooper D. It’s a very nice though overpriced ride even when considering the total lack of luggage space.

But the one I got, it has to be damned in some way. I got the car on August 23rd 2007. Right now it’s February 25th 2009, so that makes 18 months. In those 18 months I drove 80.000 kilometres, about 4444 a month.

In those few 18 months I had the following problems with my car.

• 3 times I got a star in my front windshield, the first one during the first drive with the brand new car, the last one earlier this evening while driving home from work on an empty street. (??)
• Hail storm damage on my roof, bonnet and sides.
• One small collision entirely my own fault denting the left side.
• 3 flat tires, two due a small screw/nail on the road, third was last week on vacation in France when some French idiot decided to stick a knife in my front tire on a parking lot. Why someone would do that is beyond me.
• Last summer when loading my MTB on my car for a trip to Switzerland a screw in the Mini branded roof carrier decided to fail by breaking in two completely on the morning of departure… So that turning into an afternoon departure.
• I got an engine warning a few times indicating some problem with the diesel injection system. Caused me three trips to the garage because it was such a bizarre problem, my local garage and BMW Netherlands were clueless about what could cause such a problem. (So they decided to replace some sensor since that might be faulty. Talk about driving home from the garage with a feeling like: “Yeah they sure fixed that problem for good.”)

Anyway, that’s 10 problems with a car of which only one was my fault in only 80.000 kilometres/18 months. That’s about once every 8888 kilometres/2 months. My local garage are staying friendly through all this, they do their best every time. But man, I dread calling the car lease company tomorrow to call in the star in my windshield I got about half an hour ago. Even when considering the fact that 9 out of 10 problems is not my fault.

But this one is just too good not to tell. About a month ago I installed a new new preference pane on my Mac OSX install called Glimmer Blocker. It’s a great add blocker. Most people know something like Adblock Plus for FireFox.

On Mac OSX there haven’t been to many good add block solutions. There are the brwoser specific blockers here an there. And especially the ones for Safari are nasty ones, input manager hacked ugliness.

With Glimmer Blocker, no more! It’s a system wide http proxy with no detectable latency overhead. It work for all your systems browsers. And you can subscribe to a blocker definition feed. It has more nice features too.

Only downside, you need to run Mac OSX 10.5.

I was planning doing a presentation there. But at the moment, I haven’t got a clue what to talk about. I could do a follow-up of my ANTLR presentation of last year. People really liked that talk and I would like to address the few complaints I did get. (Mainly about getting a more real life example) But I doubt that’ll make it past the selection committee. Maven is something I’m not that fond of nowadays. I could do a session about neural networks in Java. But it would be nice if I actually had done some work on those in the last few months.

Perhaps my colleagues at work have some nice ideas. We’re getting together again next Wednesday evening to discuss the directions for 2009 of our Rich Client group at InfoSupport.

Oh well… I still got a month. The call for papers is due februari 28th, send your proposals to papers@nljug.org. J-Spring 2009 will be at April 15th.

It’s 23:31:30 Friday February 13, 2009 in UTC. Now that’s an interesting moment.

At that time, how many seconds since 00:00:00 Januari 1, 1970 is it again? Well, not exactly 1234567890 seconds ago anyway.

But it so happens to be that unix systems keep time by counting the seconds from 00:00:00 Januari 1, 1970. And unix time does not count the leap seconds, so guess what… When it is 23:31:30 Friday February 13, 2009 in UTC or 00:31:30 Saturday February 14, 2009 in Europe/Amsterdam on your system’s clock, the internal unix time counter will indeed contain the value 1234567890.

I reconfigured my Time Capsule to use no wireless security. I then connected her Vista laptop, it could get a DHCP lease. I re-enabled all security. Adjusted the network settings on her laptop to use WPA2. And it works flawlessly, I can even do ipconfig /renew from a command prompt.

Vista: The dumbest operating system ever if you ask me.

package net.leenarts.algorithms.quicksort;

import java.util.Arrays;

public class QuickSort {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		int[] A = {3,8,5,9,2,7,4,6,2,9,1,4,2,7,5,4};
		System.out.println(Arrays.toString(A));
		doQuickSort(A, 0, A.length -1);
	}
	public static void doQuickSort(int[] A, int p, int r) {
		if (p<r) {
			int q = partition(A, p, r);
			doQuickSort(A, p, q-1);
			doQuickSort(A, q+1, r);
		}
	}

	private static int partition (int[] A, int p, int r) {
		System.out.println("p=" + p +" r=" + r +" A = " + Arrays.toString(A));
		System.out.println();
		int x = A[r];
		int i = p -1;

		for (int j = p; j <= r -1; j++) {
			if (A[j] <= x) {
				i++;
				exchange(A, i, j);
			}
		}
		exchange(A, i +1, r);

		return i + 1;
	}

	private static void exchange(int[] A, int i, int j) {
		int temp = A[i];
		A[i] = A[j];
		A[j] = temp;
		System.out.println(Arrays.toString(A));
	}
}

Too bad I missed the sender and recipient address on an e-mail message. I f-ed up and clicked a link leading me to a PayPal phishing site. I logged in and the site asked for my credit card details straight up. WTF!?! PayPal wouldn’t do that.

I immediately changed my password for PayPal. They didn’t have time to harvest my account. But they sure tried, because PayPal has blocked my account and has me jumping through the usual hoops to let me prove I’m still in control of my PayPal account.

Sigh! Just when I was about to purchase MarsEdit. I never thought I would fall for one of those phising e-mails. But finally I almost missed one, I never thought I would be so stupid.

Moral of this story:

Always double check the links you click in e-mails.