Freaky sf.net project

The Reloader

A Java based project to capture and review critical ammunition reloading information for rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Also supports printing of barcoded labels offering critical load data at a glance while sorting through your boxes of ammo.

Information management for the 2nd amendment aficionado. Maybe we need a new Tove topic: “Other/Gun Nut”.

"My Beef With Big Media" by Ted Turner

My Beef With Big Media by Ted Turner

The FCC says that we have more media choices than ever before. But only a few corporations decide what we can choose. That is not choice. That’s like a dictator deciding what candidates are allowed to stand for parliamentary elections, and then claiming that the people choose their leaders.

Go vote on this bug

Firefox (and all other browsers I know) are missing a feature that I would find really useful when I upload stuff via a HTML form: How much longer will it take? There is no progress bar with an ETA. There is a bug about this on bugzilla, and I’d like you to go vote for it. Maybe if you are a c++ god and have some time you could make a patch.

Me? C++ would explode my brain (I know I’ve tried).

Java is stupid

Aside from typing 10x as much and haven’t to struggle to get basic concepts to work (iterating over a map for example), there are other irritating things:

java.lang.ClassCastException does not provide a error string, of like, I don’t know, MAYBE THE NAME OF THE TWO CLASSTYPES. This is where open source shines. A mistake like that that adds hours of time to your debugging session would last maybe a week before some said, “I’ll fix the jvm itself so that it helps me the programmer”.

JDBC apparently has no method to communicate what columns an SQL error occurs in, so if you insert a row that causes an error you have to get the schema file and the SQL statement (not easy to do if you use prepared statements) and go over it column by column.

People save your time, use python. There is NO reason to use Java. It’s old dead and gone. By being closed source all other languages are rapidly speeding past it as far as ease of use to the programmer.

Ad-hoc network

Yesterday while sitting in a talk about getting into embedded systems by monitoring the output buses, the wifi flaked out. It has been coming and going all the time.

Fortunately, we had a 3G cdma phone w/ 1xRTT. A 15 minutes of putting stuff together, dnsmasq, the iptables config from my home server, and some tinkering with iwconfig, we had a ad-hoc network with Internet access.

At the high point we had 4 people connected via my computer. 1xRTT is not good for sharing, as no one really had good performance. But it was fun. Fun is good.