Java

Gmail and the periodic spam filtering failure

Gmail is usually pretty good about spam filtering. But not at the moment. As of the last 2 or 3 days, the spam I know it caught before is now ending up in my mailbox. And I think I know why. The same thing happened over Christmas. Suddenly all the spam appeared in my inbox. I had a theory then and it seems to be confirmed now. I think Gmail team drops their filtering level around big celebrations (Valentine’s day is coming up).

The techie way of liberating the podcast URL from iTunes

Jon Udell is not happy about having to transcribe podcast URLs that iTunes displays, but does not allow to copy. While the general point about lock-in is good, here is a quick techie workaround in a meanwhile. However much iTunes may want to hide the URLs, at some point it has to actually retrieve something from it, and do it using standard network protocol. Enter Ethereal, open-source multi-platform network protocol analyser.

Re: How Hard is it to Troubleshoot IT Anyway?

Michael Baum reports on the survey of system administrators regarding their troubleshooting activities. It is an interesting summary, but something is missing. There seem to be a lot of questions regarding how the problems are handled now with the predictable answers of base power tools like grep, perl and Ethereal. What I don’t see is any questions on how to fix the problem going forward. By now we pretty much established that until the developers themselves try to support/troubleshoot their own products in production (or get loud enough feedback), they will not understand how to make their products easier to manage post-deployment.

I am presenting at JavaOne 2006

This feels good. Last time I submitted and got accepted to talk at JavaOne (2004), I was working for one of the major sponsors. With all the rumors about too many presenters from Sun and sponsors, it makes one wonder how much of the reason was the presentation quality and how much was some of the other factors. These days, I am definitely not working for a sponsor, so hopefully my presentation is due to my topic alone.

Re: I love when its in Word – you have it easy

Andrew C. Oliver muses on the need for violence when getting Java stack traces embedded in the MS Word docs. I call his bluff. A day, when your MS Word document arrives and you open it to discover an image of the DOS window where part of the stack trace is seen at 50% zoom, then you can contemplate violence. Until then…. BlogicBlogger Over and Out