Most import rescue tool around: knoppix. (System recovery with Knoppix).
If you haven’t come across it before, Knoppix is a full linux system on a bootable CD; it’s enormously helpful if a disk has become unbootable but still has data readable. I’ve used it when I needed to rebuild a trashed reiserfs partition under Linux and to rescue some data from a trashed XP install. It’s even got partition resizing tools available.
Burn a copy today - if you wait until you need it, it’ll be too late!
I have to say, I find this kind of error a bad indication when it comes to high profile websites. (Screenshot here if they fix it.)
Grab it before the bits decay: Eclipse 3.0 Milestone 5. Most notable changes would appear to be addition of Javadoc validation and quick fixes.
For those losers that, you know, actually document their code.
Cool discovery of the day: sometime between the previous time I installed cygwin (maybe a year ago) and today (the latest time I installed it), something very cool got added to the default xfree support: a windows-based window manager. Basically, this means you can run X11 apps and manage them just like other windows app instead of a separate X11 window running all the X apps.
Very cool.
So a while back we noticed a weird issue on our production servers - whenever a server was rebooted, when it came back up certain applications would have problems with SQL queries involving dates. The only way to fix the problem was to restart Tomcat. As server restarts are fairly rare, it took a while for us to gather the information via dumps of SQL queries when errors occurred.
The problem? When the default date format is used (e.g., with DateFormat.getDateInstance().format(date)), the string being returned was dd-mm-yyyy, instead of the expected MMM, dd yyyy. This caused Oracle’s to_date to fail.
The fix: explicitly set language and country in our startup scripts with -Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US.
Unfortunately, why the default locale is different on startup is still unclear; the same startup scripts are used for both init script startup and command-line restarts.
When I upgraded my home computer earlier this year, I decided to try a different Linux distribution; I ended up migrating from Debian to Gentoo. The only thing I really missed was the Debian package database, which provided a pretty decent way to search and browse packages. The new packages.gentoo.org site comes close to closing this gap.
I enjoy some informed Microsoft bashing as much as the next guy, but I have to quibble with a couple things:
Surely WinFS is going to make applications better? I mean, XML metadata for every file. Common data shared transparently between applications. Automatic searching and grouping. What could be better than that? Well, it won’t work. WinFS is going to be glacial. Whatever benefits WinFS holds for applications will be overwhelmed by performance so poor as to make them unusable.
Now, BFS was not a speed demon, and it wasn’t centered around XML, but it was a perfectly usable filesystem. It’s certainly not ridiculous on its face to have this kind of capability built in to the file system.
Of the 140,000 files, there is one file I care about more than any other, my Outlook .PST file. This one file is a repository of all my emails, sent and received, all my calendar items, and all my contacts. Know why it is one file? For performance. Try storing every email, appointment, or contact in a separate file, and you’ll have the slowest PIM known to man.
Is this really true? The system I use for email storage (Maildir) is the complete opposite of this approach: one email for every message. Now, there are positive and negatives to this scheme, but performance wise, there is certainly nothing to complain about, and I’ve got some big mailboxes. As an aside, Outlook’s one-big-file approach has only actual benefit from a user perspective: dead-simple backup. What it doesn’t allow for is the use of any tools outside of Outlook for accessing, sorting or search your email. But anyway.
