Category: General

I recently stumbled across a blog called Anonymous Lawyer that is supposed to be the fictional blog of a lawyer in a large law firm. Good reading. But one of his/her posts in particular hit very close to home. How many times have you been told by your company, or by a client, that you…

Over the past week, I’ve been working on updating the packages on my home machine. I’m running Gentoo, and have for the most part ignored emerge -u world until this week. I finally took the plunge to actually read about it, and after fixing some blocking packages (Yes, you can emerge -C mozilla-thunderbird without it…

A recent post on the Joel on Software boards asked a time-old question, “Need to cram for Java interview, what will they ask?“ The response? Perhaps one of the best quotes ever, coming from one BenjiSmith: Well, they might ask you about the Java programming language. In which case, you’ll probably be screwed. I hope…

The latest project I am working on introduced me to the wonderful world of Timberline. This is one of the few times when I truly wish the customer we’re building this for would have used Access. Really! But, Timberline (an accounting package that sits on top of Pervasive SQL which sits on top of Btrieve)…

A recent thread on Joel on Software talked about negotiating. I read a book about a year ago by a brilliant guy named Herb Cohen called /Negotiate This, By Caring But Not T-H-A-T Much/. I highly recommend it if you do any kind of negotiating – even over things like what you’ll have for dinner.

So I check into my hotel in Provo, UT after all kinds of airport fiasco stuff. I open up the window and what do I see? That’s right, I’ll be darned if I didn’t check in next to Novell headquarters. I completely forgot they were out here. It’s a *very* nice looking campus, mountains all…

Heading off to our satellite office in Provo, UT this morning. Was supposed to leave last night, but the rain in Atlanta pretty much solved that mystery, so it all got shifted around a day. Will be flying back to family arriving at the house, and as soon as they leave, I leave again for…

One of my new projects at work is to ramp up a way to get our J2ME stuff under tests with JUnit. I’ve used NUnit quite a bit now, but hadn’t had a chance to get up to speed with JUnit. I found a nice article on getting JUnit running with Eclipse. The article is…

A very interesting article came out today on the SecurityFocus web site talking about Bluetooth security. More interesting than the security portions was the discussion of privacy concerns with the devices. For example, Bluetooth signals, like GPS and other devices, can be triangulated using some fairly basic equipment. Buy using some 2.4GHz amplifiers and a…

How many times have you been in the arcade, late at night, with a fistful of quarters, a steady hand, and a hankering for a stuffed toy? Yet, with all your skill and might (and quarters), do you still walk away empty handed? Well, a handy solution has been found in Indiana. In a Wal-mart…