Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:41:03 GMT | 3 comments
It can be a little confusing to set up Eclipse to work with your Subversion repository. Once you have downloaded and installed Subclipse, follow these instructions to connect to your SVN repository:
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 05 Jul 2006 17:56:32 GMT | no comments
I didn’t know anything about the U.N., so when I saw a review of “The U.N. Exposed” by Eric Shawn, I thought it would be interesting to learn more about it. Wow, was I in for more than I realized! While I am sure that there are some good things that the U.N. is doing around the world, this book is focused on exposing their problems, and they have a lot! In specific, it makes a very compelling case that the U.N. actually ended up aiding Saddam and helping him stay in power, which ultimately resulted in the Iraq war.
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 03 Jul 2006 19:20:00 GMT | no comments
This summer, we all threw around some ideas for vacations. The kids wanted to go on a cruise (as always!) but Maxie also said he would like to go to London or Paris (which was a surprise).
Well, like most of our vacations, this one came together at the last minute. Suzanne emailed our brilliant cruise specialist and he came back with a fabulous cruise to Northern Europe. So we are going to be able to combine going on a cruise and visiting Europe.
This should be a good way to take the kids to Europe since they only have to unpack once, and when they get tired, we can just go back to the ship. However, it will be a long trip since the cruise is 2-weeks and we are going to arrive a few days early in London, so it will be interesting to see how the kids stand up.
Here is the agenda for the cruise:
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:03:00 GMT | no comments
How would you like to put an interactive Google map in your Ruby on Rails page with single or multiple markers? Here is how to do this.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT | no comments
Back in the 80s and 90s when basic PC applications like word processors were being developed, there were a lot of holes in what they could do. Even rudimentary features like numbered lists, foreign character support and tables were often missing. So users frantically upgraded to each new release to gain new features they could actually use.
However, at some point, the new features stopped becoming useful to most people. Sure there would be a few esoteric new features that a small percentage of people would use, but for most users, these new features just made the programmer bigger, slower and harder to use. This was the age of feature bloat.
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 28 Jun 2006 02:25:00 GMT | no comments
Eclipse is known to be a memory hog and slow at starting up and shutting down. Especially if yo have a lot of projects with a lot of files, it can be painfully slow to start. A friend of mine took a programming class where they had exams using Eclipse. All the students made sure they started Eclipse well before class, otherwise they joked that it would take half of the exam time just for Eclipse to start!
Today, I discovered something that helps speed up Eclipse. If you right-click on the projects that you aren’t actively working on and “close” them, Eclipse won’t try to load them into the workspace. This helps not only with the startup and shutdown times, but also when it refreshes the workspace.
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:54:00 GMT | no comments
Back in 1986 when I was working for InsMark, we set out to hire a programmer. We interviewed many candidates, several were very good, but one stood out above the rest. This candidate had a problem though—she was a girl.
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 22 Jun 2006 01:00:00 GMT | no comments
Several years ago, I stopped using credit cards on the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I still buy plenty of stuff over the Internet including almost all of my books, clothes, amusement park tickets, and more. However, I never give out my real credit card number. Instead, I give out a virtual credit card number that can be used only once. I didn’t do this because I was scared that some hacker was going to get my card number and misuse it; I did it because some of the merchants I bought stuff from misused it. Here are the tales.
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:32:00 GMT | no comments
It isn’t often that a movie about a book is very good. After all, most books are comprised of 6 to 16 hours of text, so cutting it down to a 2 hour movie often cuts out the heart of the book. It is rarer still that a movie is better than the book, but I think this is the case with The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre.
Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:50:00 GMT | no comments
Usually when we think of “faith” we associate it with religion. Faith in God, faith in life after death, those kinds of things. And while religious faith is usually a positive force, it has a dark side too. Besides religious faith, many other types of faith are intricately woven into our lives in ways we often don’t realize.
These are some of the ideas that Philip Caputo explores in his book Acts of Faith using relief efforts in the Sudan as the stage.