Scott's Blog

I'm no Java fan, but I find myself using more and more Java applications: Eclipse a program for programmers which is surprisingly powerful and quite responsive. I'm using Eclipse not only for Java programming (blech) but also for Python and Web development. FreeMind is a great mind-mapping tool. I'm using it for keeping notes and todo lists, mostly. The interface and keyboard setup is very very intuitive. KisKis (Keep it Secret! Keep it Safe!). It's a password manager which I prefer to use instead of PasswordSafe . Frink is a calculating tool which I love using for unit conversion (even goes online to find the latest currency prices).

Oracle is fast (especially if you throw enough hardware at it) and has a lot of great features, but what I really hate about it is their error messages . Looking at my résumé I guess that I first encountered Oracle around 1995. At that time I was writing the connectivity to several databases like IBM's DB and Sybase's DB-Library when I got to Oracle I thought it would be a breeze. What I found was that their DLLs didn't have version information so I would have to write extra code looking at the date and size to guess the version of the DLL. And at the time, if there was an error you would just get an error number. You needed to look up a file to find out what that error meant. There was a way of pointing Oracle to the write error file so that it would look it up, but I never bothered. Obviously, some client wanted a way to get their database errors in their language and Oracle set up this system or error numbers and files to point to. The side effect of this was a l...

I'm a little embarassed that I've been looking for this clip (off and on) for a while and found it on youtube .

I think that we are probably very close to the peak oil peak or have already passed it. By that I mean that oil will only become more expensive over time. As it becomes more expensive a variety of methods will arrive to make living with expensive oil possible: Greater use of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, some of these cars can go up to a 100 MPG (0.43 l/100 km) because most nights you'll plug it in and be able to drive around just on the amount you charged at night. You'll still have a motor and gas tank for those longer trips. Still, the biggest expense and weight are the batteries, however. Smaller and closer electric power plants. Some energy is lost because transmission through wires, this is reduced if the plant is closer. Smaller electrical plants are more likely to use newer and more innovative technologies. Increased use of wind power. People claim that there could never be enough wind (or solar) power to offset our addition to coal and oil. This is not ...

By carefully manipulating the weights I can get Python to be a top language: 1.0 C gcc 196.7 1.2 D Digital Mars 157.9 1.4 Python 141.3 1.4 OCaml 140.1 1.4 Python Psyco 138.3 1.5 Ruby 132.7 2 1.6 Forth GForth 125.8 1 1.6 Lua LuaJIT 124.0 1.6 Lua 121.6 Great Language Shootout . Basically I said that Time, Memory and Program size and startup time matters. Then I put in only the programs that did well in the tests.

ACM has an interesting article about CORBA which I'm forced at times to use at work. I have always hated CORBA , but know I have a list of reasons why: CORBA's object adapter requires more than 200 lines of interface definitions, even though the same functionality can be provided in about 30 lines?the other 170 lines contribute nothing to functionality, but severely complicate program interactions with the CORBA runtime. ...some of the OMG's early object services specifications, such as the life cycle, query, concurrency control, relationship, and collection services, were not only complex, but also performed no useful function whatsoever. CORBA provides quite rich functionality, but fails to provide two core features: Security & Versioning. Design flaws in CORBA's interoperability protocol make it pretty much impossible to build a high-performance event distribution service. The on-the-wire encoding of CORBA contains a large amount of redundancy, but the proto...

Well today Renata and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary! This is using the Canadian wedding date. Happy Anniversary honey.