March 29, 2011
When you have IBM Lotus Domino in your organization, sooner or later you come up with a requirement to move data between Domino and some other system–often a relational database. There are many ways to do this, and not much guidance is offered as to which to pursue, so here’s a summary of my own [...]
Filed under: Domino, Java, Linux, LotusScript, Programming | Comments (0)
March 23, 2011
Back in 1978, when the TeX project began, there were no scalable fonts. If your printer supported 10 point and 12 point text, those were the two sizes you could use in your documents. Even when the Macintosh came along, you still had a fixed set of text sizes, unless you were rich enough to [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)
March 15, 2011
When I posted that I was going back to using TeX, I mentioned that TeX had changed a lot in 20 years, but didn’t really go into too many details. Time to remedy that. TeX is two layers of software. Underneath is the core of TeX, written in a variant of Pascal. These days it [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)
March 10, 2011
Last week I had a bad experience with several pieces of office software. It started with a simple enough task: I had some existing documentation, and I needed to extend the “How to perform common tasks” section. There were two sub-headings to add, each of which needed a few bulleted paragraphs of instructions. I fired [...]
Filed under: TeX | Comments (0)
January 18, 2011
My attention was drawn to a trainwreck of a discussion on Reddit, which was triggered by another trainwreck of a discussion on an enterprise Java community web site. The vexed question: Is Java pass by value, or pass by reference? My short answer, carefully phrased: Java passes both object references and primitive types by value. [...]
Filed under: Java, Programming, Uncategorized | Comments (0)
January 18, 2011
Every year, IBM has all its employees read through its Business Conduct Guidelines, certify that they have read them and will live by them, and take a quick quiz. It sometimes feels like an unnecessary chore, but there are usually a couple of sections that I find cheer me up when I read them. The [...]
Filed under: Business, Career | Comments (0)
December 31, 2010
Recently on the ruby-core mailing list, someone asked why Ruby doesn’t have multi-line comments. I did a few searches, and didn’t find much discussion of the evils of multi-line comments. I thought it was common knowledge that they were a bad thing and a historical mistake made by Kernighan and Ritchie, but apparently not. So, [...]
Filed under: Annoyances, Java, Programming, Ruby | Comments (2)
November 30, 2010
Here’s how to get non-broken syslog output on RHEL: yum install rsyslog Modify the appropriate line of /etc/sysconfig/rsyslog to say SYSLOGD_OPTIONS=”-c3″ Insert the following two lines at the top of /etc/rsyslog.conf: $template RFC5424fmt,”<%PRI%>1 %TIMESTAMP:::date-rfc3339% %HOSTNAME% %syslogtag%%msg%\n” $ActionFileDefaultTemplate RFC5424fmt It’s probably then a good idea to disable the old syslog. You can also use rsyslog to [...]
Filed under: Linux, System administration | Comments (0)
October 22, 2010
To get a list of all the software installed on your system, in descending order of bloatedness, with descriptions: rpm -qa –queryformat=”%10{size} %{NAME} – %{SUMMARY}\n” | sort -k1,1nr
Filed under: Linux, System administration | Comments (0)
October 17, 2010
Like many other people, I first saw the Mandelbrot Set in an issue of Scientific American in 1985. Before long I had written a program in BBC BASIC to perform the computation, and set my BBC Micro’s 2MHz 6502 churning away. Because it took so long to render an image–even at the Beeb’s meager 256×160 [...]
Filed under: Programming | Comments (1)