The Cave

O(1) sort.

Eric Flint’s article on why DRM causes piracy.

CSV parser for Java

A concise list of key problems in Java’s type system. Another example’s here. A weak static type system and none of the benefits of a dynamic type system. I’d rather take Python.

Two engineering students were walking across a university campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, [...]

Successor to log4j? It has an interesting pedigree though I’m not sure it will (or should) supplant log4j any time soon. But I’m not convinced it won’t either. It still uses that printf-style API which I find so repugnant (just like log4j), though it seems to have some minor refinements. Worth keeping an eye on.

I submitted my fix for 1648449 os.path.normcase broken in Windows as a proper patch as requested

The module that starts where datetime leaves off…

Hmmm.

History and evolution of data access APIs from Microsoft.

-XX options for Java 6 JVM. Very cool, if you need to delve into these details.

It’s a wordy title but it’s equally meaty.

Great Googly Moogly! A nice replacement for urllib2.

More posts about the REST JSR. ‘Twill be interesting to see what happens. One can only hope for the best.

JSR-311 Java API for RESTful Web Services Ummm, OK. Good in concept, but considering the, er, mixed quality coming out of JSRland I’m not sure I’m keen on this. Sidebar: Is ‘random quality’ a less disparaging term? I could enumerate reasons to be uneasily concerned about the outcome, but others have already done the job [...]

I see Don Box is finally embracing the goodness than is JSON.

Jython bug 1648449 Problem is javaos.py always unconditionally loads javapath Line 31: import javapath as path This despite the comment at the top Line 6: – os.path is one of the modules posixpath, ntpath, macpath, or dospath To ‘fix’ aka to make os.path act like the native underlying OS-isms, rather than ‘java-isms’, replace the unconditional [...]

Finally. Gee. Ummm, yay. Sorry, yes it’s a good thing, but I just can’t get excited about it. This is a decade later than it should have been, and should have happened in 1.5 consdering all features stolen from C# evolved from experience in Java and the industry. At least Joda-Time can be used until [...]

Another reference.

JRE update information. Even better, the DSTPatch.com website has a huge list of vendor products requiring updates.

Love the phrase.

Java 1.5 is broke. I found this one the hard way. The bug report says it occurs on W2K when called from an ActiveX bean; I saw the same problem running on W2K3 when the code is called under IIS to the JVM thru JNI, more specifically IIS 6.0 -> foo.ASP -> C++/ATL COM object [...]

What is Qore? Qore is a modular, multi-threaded, embeddable, SQL-integrated weakly-typed scripting language with procedural and object-oriented features, powerful and easy-to-use data types, structures, and operators, perl5-compatible regular expressions, and a clean and easy-to-learn/read syntax (at least for programmers already familiar with C, C++, Java, and/or perl).

C++ TR1 doesn’t call them ‘hashtables’: Austern explained changes in function libraries, built-in random number generators, and hash tables, which are now called “Unordered Associative Containers.” “That [wording] was mildly unfortunate, but it was necessary,” Austern said, heading into some detail on the new regular expression model that’s built into TR1. Probably to avoid name [...]

A little dated, but useful nonetheless. ISO wasn’t pleased with Microsoft’s hubris: In the beta version of Visual C++ 8.0, one well-known C++ expert reported, the use of a common std::copy() call generates a warning that std::copy() has been deprecated. According to Danny Kalev, doing so is a violation of the C++ standards, because the [...]