Because I finished reading Cryptonomicon a few days ago, I was looking for the next book I wanted to read on my Kindle. I downloaded some classics – Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Count of Monte Cristo – all of which cost me $0.00. But I wanted to read something current as well, [...]

Here’s a great (but kinda long) video.

Short story – Apple (as we already knew) was full of shit when they said that Flash couldn’t be used on mobile devices, claiming that it would destroy battery life. But then again, if things were up to Apple, we’d all be stuck using QuickTime Video. *shudder*.

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It is no stretch to say that Java.net’s Maven infrastructure (or lack thereof) is the worst I’ve encountered in a project hosting environment.

It looks like the boys from Sonatype are willing to help out on this front by offering Maven repository hosting on their own public Nexus instance for any Java.net project that [...]

I’ve received a lot of hits and discussion concerning my previous post regarding Maven 2 vs Ant+Ivy, and I’m writing a follow up post to clarify some things.

I now firmly believe that Maven 2 is a better build and project management tool than Ant+Ivy. I was wrong.

Yep, I said it. I’m man [...]

Just jotting down some recommendations from a friend:

Create an EXE4J_JAVA_HOME environment variable that points to your JDK installation (i.e. export EXE4J_JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME). Delete the <idea install dir>/jre directory Add the following JVM options to what you may already have in Idea’s JVM config (<idea install dir>/bin/idea.exe.vmoptions on Windows):

-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode

Just a quick note to self:

After looking at the JDK source code today, we found that even when setting -Djava.awt.headless=true, if a script executes with the DISPLAY environment variable set, the AWT graphics environment will still use a GraphicsEnvironment representing that DISPLAY.

A major problem with this is if the shell that launched the [...]

A friend of mine recently pointed me to this forum thread, and I’d like to add my thoughts, based on actual long-term experience in driving a 535i with the Steptronic transmission with paddle shifters for over a year.

The BMW’s paddle shifters don’t work like Ferrari or Formula 1 cars, where the right paddle [...]

Since it just makes good sense to understand a problem before we dole out the cash, let’s ask ourselves a question before we go spending (quite a bit) of our tax dollars.

Why are the U.S. auto makers in a crunch? Of course our economy isn’t great and that’s one reason, but you must still [...]