No post this week
There won’t be a blog post this week since my daughter has decided that sleeping is optional for her. I have not been able to sit and write text during the evenings. I have coded a bit though and hopefully you will see the outcome of that next week.
My experience with Adobe Air
Adobe Air is a new software platform from Adobe which mixes JavaScript and Flash technologies to enable developers to make rich Internet applications that can run on desktop computers. It is remarkable in the world of proprietary applications in the sense that it has included Linux support early on.
My review of Twitter clients
I have used multiple Twitter client since I’ve first started using the service. The reason for that is that most of them are in fact pretty bad and it took me a while to find the set of Twitter client I can use at home, at work and on my mobile device, on Windows but mostly on Linux.
Twitter privacy levels
I have been a Twitter user for nearly one year now. It has been an generally pleasant experience. Microblogging is now part of my array my information tools, which also include: RSS (through Google Reader), Email, IRC. A more complete post about own I see Twitter as useful is something I need to do eventually.
Google Wave invites
Edit: … and we are done. There is no more invites left. Thank you.
Edit: There is only 1 invite remaining. I’ve given away 5 remaining invites to my Twitter friend @balty for a contest on his blog Les 2 Geeks (french). You can participate in his contest until November 14th. There is still 1 invite up for grab right now on this blog so grab it before I give them to somebody else.
I have received 8 Google Wave invites to give away. I know this is still in demand, but it seems everyone that was interested in Google Wave in my immediate cyber-vicinity already surfing the Wave.
So, I’m opening up my invites to the whole Internet and will give away a invite to the first 8 interested people that comments on this entry. Don’t forget to write a reachable email address.
I expect nothing in return but if want to spend a few minutes considering the rests of the posts on my blog, I’ll be grateful.
On String.intern()
Where the author realizes the significance of the String.intern() method
I might have hinted about in in my previous post on the subject of strings in Java, yet I did not realize the significance of String.intern() method. The following code sample demonstrates the behavior of the String.intern() method, similar to what I demonstrated in the post.
Don’t dust off your tinfoil hat for Skype just yet…
So Skype is evil because it’s proprietary?
It’s not hard to find rumors about spyware being deployed with the Skype VOIP software. What is hard to find amongst those rumors are concrete facts. Most of the rumors seems to be unsubstantiated, and some other are based on interpretation on the EULA of Skype. I won’t bother with the later case since legalese is not a language I speak.
Bits on info on Java strings
Update: I don’t keep IRC logs and thus cited the wrong guy. Sorry Vince.
On this blog entry I will take on an assertion stated by systemfault. He declared on the #programmeur IRC channel on Freenode that:
<systemfault> String foo = new String("lol"); est pareil que String foo = "lol";
<systemfault> Quand le compilo voit: String foo = "lol";
quand il compile, il va vraiment faire String foo = new String("lol");
Which in english means that:
String s = "hello";
is syntaxic sugar for:
String s = new String("hello");
Naivety with C++
Warning, major n00bness ahead.
I’m not a big user of C++, but recently some work I have had to do with .NET has made me use C++/CLI, the .NET version of C++.
Making up memory
I find it amazing how your own brain can fool you sometimes. I did not dig this subject very much but I have been intrigues by studies about how people can suggest things to individuals and make them believe in it like it was their own and like it has always been true.
In some circumstances, you can create and believe in your own false memory. This post is about an interesting example of how that has happened to me yesterday night.
At the beginning of the year, I have bought an Asus N10E laptop. It’s a sweet little machine, like a cross between a netbook and a laptop. There is nothing exotic in the configuration of that laptop. The N10 serie of laptops have models that include fancier options. If you look on the net, you will find reviews of the fancier models (see a revew of the N10J). Most of them include a Bluetooth module.
Yesterday, I felt like linking my laptop to my N800 using Bluetooth. I thought it would be like, and that I need needed was to learn how to activate the link and that user-friendly programs would do the rest. I was mistaken. Linux did not detect the Bluetooth device at all. Since I build my own kernel, I decided to check my kernel configuration against other known good configuration for similar models but failed to find anything I would be missing. At that point, I decided to boot back in Windows, thinking I would find more information about Bluetooth there.
At this point, I began to lose patience. Windows had no information about the Bluetooth device in the laptop. I tried reinstalling a few drivers and programs. I even checked the laptop manual, something I seldom do, to see how to activate Bluetooth. It was failure. The normal documented way to activate Bluetooth failed. The Bluetooth device drive was even missing. The BIOS did not have the option to activate or deactivate it.
I began to worry why was my Bluetooth module not working. After all, I had vivid rememberance of the shiny Bluetooth icon displayed on the OSD when I pressed the WLAN hotkey on my laptop.
I first suspected that some experiment I had done in Linux went awry and disabled the Bluetooth module for good, something that could happen by extrapolating from some forums posts on similar problems…
My Occam Razor safety device finally kicked in and I began suspecting I was the source of the problem more than the computer was. After further research, I had to come to this conclusion…
There was probably no Bluetooth module in that laptop!
I write probably for correctness, because the only way to know for sure would mean opening the laptop and search its guts for the Bluetooth chip.
The memory I had of seeing the Bluetooth icon was probably manufactured by my own certitude of that laptop having the Bluetooth option combined with the screen shots of the icon in the laptop manual. The certitude was created by myself using incorrect information since the reviews you can read of this laptop usually talk about Bluetooth, but they usually don’t use of the particular model I own. Some N10E might also have a Bluetooth module pre-installed since it’s an optional feature of the model. Add the fact that the laptop has a Bluetooth led and you have all the ingredients you need to think this laptop would have the Bluetooth module. NCIX, the place from where I ordered the laptop, make no mention of Bluetooth support.
I don’t want to sound overly clever and say I’ve learned my lesson. It’s just too easy to mix up memories with other information. This is just a simple example of what can happen. I feel good about the fact that I was able to sit back and consider that my certitudes might have been fabricated by myself.
