-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Categories
Tags
apache beer beernutz bigbrother boston bottle buttons cartography computers conditioning css database deadlock draft economics firebug freedom gmail hexadecimal homebrewing html java javascript maps mbta mustache outlook performance podcasts politics productivity programming quality random recipe sea stackoverflow subway surveillance taxes testing tricks tv web wedding-
Category Archives: computers
Mapping site should be faster now
Over the past few weeks, I have been noticing that the site I created to allow users to plot multiple addresses on Google Maps would sometimes become very slow when a lot of people are using it. So, I started to investigate the cause. (I am going to split this post into two sections, the [...]
Prioritizing Netflix traffic with DD-WRT
Network traffic shaping is an interesting topic, that allows you to ensure that certain traffic gets priority over other traffic. When applied at the ISP level, this can get controversial, as you start getting into Network-Neutrality issues (where one company’s traffic gets priority over another company’s, which could lead to large media corporations silencing grassroots [...]
Hexadecimal arithmetic in Google
Did you know that you can do hexadecimal arithmetic in Google? I didn’t, but I knew that Google’s calculator feature would often just do ‘the right thing’, so I decided to try it out. I wanted to use the Google Chart API to create a grouped bar chart. I wanted each of the four bars [...]
a tip to prevent deadlocks on database connections (or, at least detect them early)
It seems there were a lot of points in our code base at work that are ripe for deadlocking on database connections. We are acquiring a connection, and then calling some other methods, and a few frames down the stack, we acquire another connection (before releasing the first). This, of course, can result in a [...]
Posted in computers Tagged database, deadlock, java, performance, programming, testing Leave a comment
Programming at Sea
Recently, on stackoverflow, Jeff Atwood has been concerned with 'joke' questions. One of these, which is now going to live in infamy due to all the discussion about it, is about "Programming at Sea". Now, I got curious about the questions when I heard about it, so I tried to find it. The Stack overflow moderators had already removed it, but I found it in Google's cache. I decided to exercise my rights under the Creative Commons license and repost the questions and some selected answers here, so it doesn't die forever. I, for one, think this post is both funny and interesting, though I agree that it probably isn't 'programming-related', so it doesn't really belong on SO.
So, here is the question, originally posted by Out Into Space:
I've decided to cast off from this dreadful economy and program out at sea.
I've acquired a 40ft sailboat. Should be sufficient for me and my cat (Ender).
What do I need to be a sailor/programmer? I have a basic sailing knowledge... so I'll wing that part. But the programming! THAT requires some juice which as I understand, is in short supply on long voyages.
So what do I need SO? A genset and some fuel? Would solar be enough to charge a single laptop? What about internet connection out there, got to be something?
So, my question is, what kind of setup should I create to sling code on the high seas?
Read on for some of my favorite responses...
Gmail-style buttons with no images
Earlier this week, Gmail rolled out new buttons to the site. As I understand it, these buttons are meant to make the UI more consistent across browsers, and make the experience more streamlined.
These buttons have a gradient background, making them appear rounded, and they are grouped together in "pills", to keep related actions together. The buttons on the ends of the pills have slightly rounded corners. The cool thing about these rounded corners is that they are pure HTML/CSS (they don't use any images) and they work in all browsers (unlike the firefox-specific -mox-border-radius directive). The drawback is that you can only get slight rounding; no a gradual curve. Also, the markup is far from simple.
I thought they looked pretty sweet, so I got to wondering how difficult it would be to try them myself. Douglas Bowman, from Google, wrote a post about how these new buttons evolved. He didn't come out and say how they were done int he final result, but he did invite people to reverse-engineer the new buttons. I decided to take him up on that invitation.
Accessing Erased Type Parameter Information in Scala