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Adobe Reader v9 is to be avoided

You don't have to believe me.

Faster page loads

June 16, 2008

For faster loading pages, use hyperlinks with a trailing slash

Technical Pages

May 27, 2008

Public access to the technical pages of the site has been secured. There were just too many copyright issues to deal with, and I don't have the time to sort them all out. My apologies to those of you who were relying on those pages. Note that 99% of the information is available at other locations.

Software bugs redux

Moody's awarded incorrect AAA ratings to billions of dollars worth of a complex debt product due to a bug in its computer models.

NY Times hand codes their HTML

Pleasantly surprised to learn that the NY Times hand codes the HTML in their web site...

"It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results."

HTML pages on this site are also hand coded. I find auto-generated HTML is much too messy.

My wife, who also hand codes HTML pages, once took a web design class where her grade was marked down because she refused to use the crappy wysiwyg editor the instructor was pushing. Too bad this article was not around then for her to use as evidence to bolster her argument.

Coachella

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival looks like fun

Literate Programming

Literate programming seeks to elevate documentation to a level of importance equal to that of the code...

"In literate programming the emphasis is reversed. Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. No longer does the English commentary injected into a program have to be hidden in comment delimiters at the top of the file, or under procedure headings, or at the end of lines. Instead, it is wrenched into the daylight and made the main focus. The "program" then becomes primarily a document directed at humans, with the code being herded between "code delimiters" from where it can be extracted and shuffled out sideways to the language system by literate programming tools."

Culture

The 2008 Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival is in full swing, curated by the inestimable Al Milgrom.

El Meson

Good eats if you are in southwest Minneapolis, El Meson.

Follow along

From Metafilter, for those wanting to follow along here's a list of some finance/econ (we)blogs, in no particular order :

Unconscious Commands

Commands lodged in muscle memory:

Execute script file; keep executing even if I log off; write both stdout and stderr to the same log file...
nohup sh ./linklist.sh > linklist.log 2>&1 &
Find files matching criteria and view time stamps of those files...
find . -name Minnes\*.log -print -exec ls -l {} \;

WCM Fixes

Here are some IWWCM fixes that apparently, you are ill-advised to ignore.

Augustus Ceaser

Someone I know reading The Lives of the Twelve Caesers. Augustus Caeser had some good project management mantras...

Hasten slowly

...and...

That is done fast enough, which is done well enough.

Web page testing tool

You can use the WBox HTTP testing tool to stress test servers and apps...

% wbox http://localhost clients 4
WBOX localhost (127.0.0.1) port 80
0. 200 OK    9939 bytes    14 ms
0. 200 OK    9939 bytes    22 ms
...

...or obtain splitted timing information...

% wbox digg.com timesplit 1
WBOX digg.com (64.191.203.30) port 80
0. 200 OK    44134 bytes    1326 ms 
       [0] 0-4095 -> 728 ms
       [1] 4096-8191 -> 254 ms
       [2] 8192-12287 -> 16 ms
       [3] 12288-16383 -> 17 ms

Signal vs. Noise

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we are peering through a straw.

Here is an example...

This site believes in a lot of white space and blockquotes too. Might have to expand formatting even more...

Mainsoft

Using Mainsoft's Visual MainWin, .NET developers can deploy ASP.NET applications as pure JSR 168 portlets.

SOA - Integrating disparate systems

Judith Myerson with a long and useful series on working with Web services in enterprise-wide SOAS. SOA is an antidote to your enterprise application integration woes.

IBM Cloudscape vs. Apache Derby

IBM contributed the IBM Cloudscape database technology to the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Derby while at the same time announcing the IBM Cloudscape Version 10 database. Derby can be downloaded from the Apache Incubator page.

The IBM Cloudscape database is still available, in binary format from IBM developerWorks.

Differences between IBM Cloudscape and Apache Derby are that IBM Cloudscape has:

A graphical installation wizard that lets you optionally select add-on IBM Cloudscape functional components like the ones detailed in this list. It is very well suited for developer workstation deployments.
The DB2 Universal JDBC driver, commonly referred to as the Java Common Client (JCC). This JCC driver is available for download from the IBM Cloudscape Web site.
The IBM DB2 Plug-In for Eclipse (available as a free download from the IBM developerWorks Web site).

Must to have

IBM Toolbar

Misc

More programming snafus, this time an attempt to reproduce spreadsheets using Web 2.0 becomes a death march...

...Francis Wheen with a concise and excellent summary of the top 10 modern delusions...

...Turns out phone and other type chargers are not the energy drains that some would have us believe...

lsof

A paen to lsof.