Blogs

Find of the day yesterday: probably nothing new to others who are familiar with the spam industry, but while working on a different problem, I noticed yesterday that spammers are embedding HTML comments in the middle of almost every word in some of the spam email I receive! (At some point, why don't these people look in the mirror, and see that they're stooping so low, and doing something so wrong?)

Looking at the raw text of one message I received, sent to my "unix" email account, the raw text looked like this:

A thousand years ago -- December, 2001 to be exact -- Wired magazine had a story about Asperger's Syndrome that I thought was pretty fascinating. The story was about autism, and a specific form of it that is common in Silicon Valley. A few days ago I read a sci-fi story by Philip K. Dick titled "Null-O", and I am struck by what he saw when he wrote that story ... in 1958.

Java file directory list FAQ: How do I create a list of files in a directory using Java?

Here's a quick example of a Java class that demonstrates how to create a list of all files in a directory using just the Java File class. Specifically, this example shows how to list all the files in a directory, store those filenames in a String array, and then print the array.

I'm a ruby newbie (and not yet a fan), so forgive the obviousness of the links below. Once I get my bookmarks app over here I'll probably quit putting links in here like this:

The last few weeks I've been looking at ways of estimating software development projects using "Use Cases". I'm all over Use Cases -- I think they represent a good way to document the flow of an app, but a significant problem with them is that your use case is not the same as my use case, even for the same subset of an application. This leads into many problems estimating how much it's going to cost to develop a software app.