dcminter

I think this Spolsky article provides some insight into why this might be the case: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html …

Actually I believe "blinding" is for "blimey", a (rather dated) contraction of "blind me." If that seems a little odd then you have to recall that blasphemy was once stro…

If I remember rightly there's a photo of their setup - a bulky camera on a tripod with a man operating it on the roof of a car. I think that would still draw attention these days. I'll look …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente

The only explanation that ever made sense to me for that transaction was that it was to make them more attractive to their potential purchasers - MySQL was a very strange acquisition choice for Sun bu…

I disabled the promotions tab rather rapidly - it was capturing ticket bookings and other emails that are of immediate importance to me. Were it to work correctly I don't think it would be causin…

This happened at the FT a few weeks ago with "Syrian Electronic Army" posts and that was a successful phishing attack so "their lack of mastery of English" clearly isn't an is…

I can think of lots of candidates for our contemporary historic greats - but you can easily defeat this argument by assessing them as less great than your own historic heroes. You and I will never kno…

They're all reading novels, listening to the wireless, watching TV, on facebook, ... The great novelists and great artists of today are lost in the noise. When history has thrown away the chaff they'l…

I'm kind of curious as to how close we are to being able to use them for Gravitational-Wave astronomy giving LIGO[1] a run for its money. Anyone know if this is even possible? [1] http://en.wikipedia…

Are you sure you don't already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine

While we don't have a written constitution we are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights enacted under law in the UK as the Human Rights Act. That's amounts to the same thing for many …

It's a Wiki. In fact it's THE wiki. Those are multiple voices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Pattern_Repository …

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsid…

Bitcoins are divisible up to eight decimal places. So there are rather more units than that potentially available to circulate.

I looked into purchasing some bitcoins and found the barriers to entry significant. I find it hard to believe, at the moment, that bitcoins are generally acquired for non-speculative legal reasons. Il…

As an English Brit I'd love to claim him for our own but, to be honest, I think "Scottish literature" is the only appropriate description. This is awful news. I've not been a big fan of his later SF w…

Some alternative map purposing for the London Underground. http://www.steveprentice.net/tube/TfLSillyMaps/

Have you been to Britain?

It does irritate me that the Sun JVMs do not offer any flag to specify the heap size along the lines of "limited only by the environment" rather than obliging an upper limit to be specified.

What's the bureacracy like with that? Are you just keeping a low profile and doing it on the "beg forgiveness" principle or are you doing all the proper paperwork? Or is it actually less of a hassle i…

I fairly often look at Timeline - usually when I remember a posted link, associate it with a particular person, but it's no longer obvious on my own wall. Which, of course, brings me to the fact that …

Arbitrary width user content can overflow the right hand margin without disrupting layout? Hard to say without seeing it in action though. As a Timeline hater but someone who doesn't have a problem wi…

I read this as: Monetizing your movie information. Monetizing your literature information. Promoting Facebook apps. Stepping slightly away from the UX atrocity that is Timeline. I have no problem with…

Aliasing.

(1) The "Java Bean spec" is not closely followed for precisely this reason. Technically it requires setters for all attributes but in practice many libraries (certainly Spring) permit initialization…

I would expect those exceptions to implement a Throwable interface, perhaps ServiceException. If you don't care about the specifics of the error then you catch that and handle it. If you do care then …

Exceptions are often used to catch unanticipated situations but they are also, legitimately, used to simplify common case logic by moving special case logic elsewhere. "Exceptional" and "unanticipated…