Zibblog

I was sad to learn today that Jim Baen died yesterday after having a serious stroke. If you’ve never heard of him, Jim Baen was a founding partner of Baen Books. Most of my Baen collection is military scifi, and many of the best (at least in my opinion) authors of that genre were discovered by Baen. I became a big fan of Jim Baen when he started promoting the idea of ebooks without DRMs because they got in the way of the reader. Baen has released a large portion of their library for free online (including March Upcountry which is still one of my favorite books) with even more available on CDs included with many of their hardcovers. They also have new releases available for paid download, but I always appreciated the idea that you might as well give away the first couple books of some of these series for free because people are less prone to walk into a bookstore and buy book ten of a series. It seems rare that someone in a position like his really gets it and has the vision to explore what ebooks could do for both the reader and the business. David Drake wrote an obituary for him that is available here that I recommend reading.

My daily RSS reading tends to involve reading blogs of friends (usually only 2 or so posts a day across all of my friends), read daily tech news from places like techcrunch and valleywag, read a little bit of comic book news, and glance through a bunch of everything else across the 167 feeds that I subscribe to (most of which are only 1 or 2 posts a week). Mostly, I use FeedDemon, which has the concept of groups of bookmarks called News Bins. Every so often, I try and clean these out and do a post, but I thought that there must be a better way. After some searching, I found a old post on the subject that contained a link to a style file to turn the display for a news bin into a plain list of links that you can then copy and paste wherever you want to. From that, comes the following links. Enjoy

• ~stevenf: More on Tech Complexity. “So, if we (again the royal “we”, people who produce computer-ba…
• NY Times: What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood
• On Writing A TV Pilot
• One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers
• The Four-Day Week Challenge
• web2.1 blink tag
• What’s New in Eclipse 3.2 – Usage Tips & Tricks
• The Myth of Keeping Up

It wasn’t until I started at Netflix that I had ever tried out any of the java 1.5 specific features. From a language syntax perspective, the main ones (at least the main ones that I can think of off the top of my head) are foreach, annotations, and generics. I’m not going write a long blog post about each of these features. The links on each are pretty good, and if you’d like more information, Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook is a pretty concise look at the changes if you’re already experienced with java. The interesting thing will all of the changes is that all the new syntactic modifications are designed to run within a pre 1.5 JVM. This isn’t incredibly exciting, but it is interesting when considering tradeoffs you have to make in order to keep that consistency. In the end, it means that almost all of the features are just to make life easier for the programmer by adding in some compile time checks and code generation.

When I was going through the listing of java 1.5 warnings that you can enable in Eclipse, I came across the feature @override. This construct’s entire purpose is to keep track of the fact that the method it is annotating is meant to override a superclass. If you change the signature of the method in the superclass so that this method is no longer overriding it, the compiler will generate an error. This is one of those features that I kind of scratch my head about. I want to believe that it is useful and will someday prevent me from refactoring issues when I change APIs or when somebody else changes some API that I am extending, but I can’t remember a time when having this feature would have saved me any time.

I saw today on TVSquad that Venture brothers is starting up again.  Venture brothers is a really funny satire on old animated shows like Johnny Quest.  Even if you’ve never seen anything that it is based on, the show is still hilarious.  (It’s kind of like watching Team America: World Police without ever having seen Thunderbirds.)  If you’re signed up for netflix (if you aren’t you should be), then here’s the page for season 1 so that you can add it to your queue.  Otherwise, there’s always cartoon network and tivo.

I decided the other day that since I finally have much of my condo cleaned up, organized, and otherwise fixed (at least until more plumbing issues rear their ugly hair), I should start getting more productive again. One thing that means is starting to get back into the swing of blog posting. If for no other reason than to organize my thoughts. This week should bring more content to the zibblog, but I won’t promise that the content will actually be good.

The other day, I felt like I’d gotten to the point on my windows pc where there was simply too much clutter. Too many old registry entries, half uninstalled applications, etc., so I figured that I’d reinstall windows. At this point, I put in the install CD, started up the machine, and watched it try and find a driver for my SATA hard drive. Alas, it was unsuccessful. I then remembered that when I first installed windows, I was installing onto an IDE drive which I’d replaced with the 10k rpm drive. After some searching, I found some drivers and a floppy disc image, so I figured I was all set.

If you’ve ever seen my shuttle pc, you’d know that it doesn’t have a floppy drive. This is why I keep around a floppy drive that I can connect to the motherboard in case I have to do this sort of thing. After connecting up the floppy drive, it found the correct drive, but windows still had some issues doing the install. A few google searches later, I found out about “slipstreaming” a windows installer (this is where all of my windows using friends think “duh, why didn’t you think of that in the first place”). It turns out that there are programs like nLite that will allow you to take an existing windows installer and modify it to include other drivers, service packs, etc. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to point nLite at the drivers I had found, create a CD with the drivers included, and do the full windows installation from CD.