Category: life
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Russian Politics in the Crystal Ball
Tomorrow the Russians go to the polls to vote for the Duma, the Russian parliament. Vladimir Putin is not standing for the presidency next time around as his tenure is legaly limited by the constitution to two terms, and will instead be putting himself forward as a parliamentary candidate. Here’s my prediction for the near…
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On the crapness of classical philosophy
Paul Graham has written an interesting essay where he proposes that classical philosophy has failed in its purpose because of its approach. Rather than playing mental word games hoping to come to general truths, a la Aristotle, we should start with small truths and and make them more general. Best of all anyone can do…
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Literature 2.0
You read blogs. You must do because you’re here. So if you can spend 5 minutes reading a blog post why not spend the same amount of time reading a classic piece of literature. DailyLit is a service that breaks up free books into digestible chunks and feeds them to you through RSS or email.…
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Does the world really need a beer pouring robot?
I’m so glad that someone has finally come up with a robot that does something constructive. Now if only it didn’t keep chatting away in an annoyingly chirpy Japanese voice while it did it. I can also see a few other problems with the design, but hey, who am I to begrudge genius 😉 Now…
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Blog now syntax highlighting code snippets!
I tracked down a Javascript component today that allows you to format code snippets in your blog. Syntaxhighlighter by Alex Gorbatchev. Most popular languages supported. Had to do a minor patch to run it off blogger, but it now works like a treat. Check out my last post on EJB.
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Getting up to speed on EJB3 and Spring
Another contract, another technology set. Having successfully avoided working in EJB2 after getting certified in it by Sun (only to work out just how badly it smelt 😉 ), my initial foray into its successor has been much nicer. The job in question specified Spring and EJB3 as technology requirements, so having Sprung in anger,…
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Killing the 419 through a high signal-noise ratio
Most of the spam that hits my mailbox these days is the “Contact us urgently for your $1.5 million” type rubbish. Everything else seems to get caught by my email provider. I guess that the 419 looks like something that may be legitimate, so they let it through. Sending the mails on to email providers…
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7 year old girl implements Pet Store in Java
Seems today is my day for posting links up. I blame the guys at the JUG. http://craigbbaker.com/2007/07/08/7-year-old-girl-implements-pet-store-in-java/
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Web Developer rates up 26% in UK
Driven by new interest in Web 2.0 technologies, acquisitions by the New Conglomerates (Google, Microsoft et al.) http://www.contractoruk.com/news/003339.html
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Kitesurfing is The Business.
I finally went for lessons last weekend at Dollymount Beach in Dublin. Winds were around 15-20 knots, onshore, sun was shining. Perfect conditions. It was unreal! You just don’t appreciate wind until you get out on one of these things. The kites themselves are huge. We were flying 11m ones, and the force you get…