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Tag Archives: Broken

NullPointerException

Why is this such an insidious error in Java? (An opinion piece!)
A Comparison
Firstly, I’ll show a short comparison between some Java code and some code from a language that doesn’t have NullPointerExceptions, but does have something that allows you to accomplish anything you might want to do with null pointers.
This Java code:
AnObject thing = someMethod();
is [...]

Posted 25 May 2007 † Porges § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , , , , , ,

How to say nothing

Has no one told the people behind the Workflow Management Coalition that April Fool’s passed over two weeks ago?
Intrigued at what I first thought was a joke, I downloaded one of the proudly-presented documents on the front page: Understanding the BPMN-XPDL-BPEL value chain. I chose it because of the three as-yet-unknown acronyms in the title… [...]

Posted 15 April 2007 † Porges § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) ° Also tagged: ,

Easy, persistent, local DNS cache to reduce lookup times

Important Update!
Don’t use this method any more! I have a much easier way to do it in a more recent post.
But for posterity…
First install resolvconf and pdnsd: sudo apt-get install pdnsd resolvconf. Resolvconf handles the messy interaction between different programs fighting over the /etc/resolv.conf file, and pdnsd provides a persistent DNS daemon, which will cache [...]

Posted 05 October 2006 † Porges § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (2) ° Also tagged: , , ,

Unicode breaks Google search

A search for the phrase "It’s like a light of a new day," breaks in more than one way.
Not only does Google search fail to recognize that “it’s” is a word, it also ignores the quote marks, searching for the phrase as individual words.

Posted 26 June 2006 † Porges § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,