Left Unfinished

A long time ago, in a land far, far, away, I wrote a data binding system for Java and XML. Sadly now, the demo programs fail on recent JVMs and Java Webstart, but that would seem an inherent risk of (ab)using the ability to access the javac compiler via private APIs to compile java source code. Incidentally, compiling java and then using the reflection API in java on the output classes, generating more java code, to compile, load and use, seemed like a nice demonstration of the power of programs that write (efficient) programs or (boring / error prone) parts of programs.

This program is apparently valued highly; The methodology behind this generated figure of $226,531 and 4 man years of effort for code alone is dubious in the extreme, since it was written by me, and not for that long nor that much.



This also leads to the question of how long will the project be hosted? Given its inactive status and lack of activity over 5 years, I guess it is not costing more than a few cents? per year to host, so it may well survive indefinitely.

While I am linking to old, abandoned, and semi-abandoned stuff I have written, here is another little toy N-body visualiser.

Its the age old story - if I had used the hosting services for my MacOS X screensavers, I would still have the source code for them after someone stole my computers...

On a side note, the JQuery JS library is quite interesting.

Creeping Death

The cyberduck program seems to transfer files faster via scp than sftp... This can be selected in the preferences.

The Disc Inventory X program can be used to report on the space usage of types of file, down to the level of individual files.

O'Reilly have a guide for writing books for them.

Securitron (Police State 2000)

Who knew that some sort of inscrutable blacklist of forbidden websites is maintained, and used, to restrict internet access in the UK? And that it'd be used to ban the image of a heavy metal album cover?

And that there is a news spin off of Wikipedia?

Dirty Magic

Move .c files into .cpp files, with the same name prefix

for i in *.c; do mv $i ${i%".c"}".cpp"; done

Who would have known bash can manipulate strings?

Double buffering; A nice article.

Zero Signal

The wireless network is now working on Fedora 10 on Cell Linux. Lets start with the PS3 Wireless howto - now out of date, but sufficient to configure wpa_supplicant. Once connected, fire up dhclient, and we are online. This is glossing over the faff to get the connection brought up on boot, see the forums and random other pages for that.

I also had to remove the -u option in the /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant file in order to get the service to start on boot. Hmm.

I should write a decent guide on setup, but its late, I'm tired, and quite sure it would be obsolete in a little time anyway.

The elinks browser is sufficient to read the BBC, albeit in a horrendous default colour scheme.