The last few days I’ve been reading BAD Astronomy, a book by astronomer Philip Plait that describes common misconceptions, misuses and scientific abuses of astronomy. Partly written to be funny and partly to debunk the nonsense that arises from people
Upgrade woes and frustrations
This Monday my corporate laptop was upgraded. Last week I was in proud possession of an HP/Compaq NC6400, this week I have an IBM Lenovo R400 Thinkpad (an absolute Boer of a laptop, compared with the sleek and polished Compaq).
Just a moment of your time….
Like Jettro in his perspective on content management, I would like to draw your attention to another blog which was published on the Daily WTF and mentioned on The ServerSide. It’s hilarious and a good lesson as well: Java is
Dutch Direct: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dijkstra’s Shortest Path algorithm
This year, 2009, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of a landmark moment for (Dutch) computing science: it is 50 years ago this year that Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, The Netherlands’ most famous computing scientist, published his Shortest Path Algorithm in Numerische
On the Origin of Technologies
This year, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin‘s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of On the Origin of Species. In this famous publication Darwin launched his notion of how species’ survival is dictated by
It’s not about the language, people….
Following a trackback to your own blog entry can be interesting from time to time. Today, for instance, I was led to an interesting blog from quite some years ago on the sys-con site by Michael Yuan entitled “Is Ruby
The parable of the lightbulb
The other day I noticed that a bulb had burned out in my room. Which meant that I had to get a new bulb and replace the one that had failed. The act of replacing the bulb, perhaps surprisingly, led
Using JVM instrumentation to create a Spring Context Loader Agent for standalone apps
Within the JEE platform a rather common and well-understood system of configuration is based on the Chain of Responsibility and the Event Delivery patterns: the life cycle of enterprise components starts with achieving a general configuration goal. However, on top