Kohsuke Kawaguchi (Sun engineer working with XML) writes about what happens when you try to read XML directly from a socket stream with expectations of actually writing back to that socket. Specifically, a big nothing. The connection either hangs or dies without sending the response.
Kohsuke gives a clear step by step explanation of why that happens and how to prevent it in the future. If you work with XML, read this article just in case you will run into this in the future.
I while ago I was asking whether there are any technical support patterns out there. After all we have architectural patterns and design patterns already.
Turned out that BEA - the company I used to work for - has put together a number of the technical support patterns related to its products. But since BEA products use a great number of base technologies also used elsewhere, the patterns are useful to more than just BEA customers.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article which argues that a blog is often a bad thing to put on your resume or even to have within a google reach of your name. As a proof, they show a lot of negative things they found out about interview-ready people whose lives turn out to be more complicated than expected.
Perhaps when the person in question is an education professor with plenty of publishing opportunities and the blogs are only for personal aspect of their life, they should not have it listed (or searchable by their name).
In the latest eWEEK paper edition, there is an advertisement that starts with the following: Why disk fragmentation is poised to outpace the virus as the biggest threat to productivity.
And it tries to prove this point by saying that viruses make our computers slower and making users frustrated and that so does the disk fragmentation.
Furthermore manual defragmentation (as bundled in at least 3 versions of Windows) is not good enough because the damage is already done.
It looks like Sun is really serious about making Solaris 10 well supported. I am talking about DTrace facility that allows scripting what previously had to be done with truss/strace and a lot of strategic greps.
Better yet, DTrace can hook into Java and trace the function calls across Java and native code alike.
Adam Leventhal talks about this issue and has even presented at JavaONE 2005 with this information.