I have some XSLT stylesheets that I use to integrate information from Amazon with my reading list on my website. This weekend I decided to create another list using Amazon’s “People Who Bought this Book also Bought” feature. After a couple generations of downloading books that were related to books I read, I […]
The other day when doing some particularly large xslt conversions I kept running out of memory in the JVM. After doing a bit of research I found two command line arguments that help solve the problem. -mx allows you to set the maximum size of the memory allocation pool while -ms allows you to […]
When we started looking at finishing the basement at our house, I really wanted to put in a home theater. Eventually we ended up with a 6 seat theater with a 12 foot screen and surround sound. The total cost was less than you might pay for a large screen television […]
The cut command in unix lets you specify which part of a line you want to echo. For example if
cat file.txt
produces something like:
12345678
23456789
34567890
then you could pipe the file into the cut command to show only the 3rd character like this:
cat file.txt | cut -c 3
3
4
5
You can also specify ranges like this:
cat file.txt | cut […]
Blog with Video file
This is a video showing how to open up a Mac Mini. I doubt that it is quite as easy as it looks in the video, but it looks very doable.
Over the past 5 years I have ordered the following items from Amazon.com and received them for free:
Nikon Coolpix 4500
Dyson DC07 Vacuum
InFocus X1 Video Projector
Apple 20 GB iPod
My wife and use a credit card for most of our purchases. The credit card earns points that can be redeemed for merchandise at amazon.com, so […]
I guess it seems a little odd to be reviewing a vacuum cleaner here, but this is a very special vacuum cleaner. I first heard of the Dyson vacuum when talking to some graphic designers. They used it as an example of the design process. I looked into it because I was […]
Kathy Sierra has an interesting article about the impact of audio on people’s perception of video quality.
I don’t have a link handy, but there’s a study that showed that the quality of the audio causes people to change their evaluation of the quality of the visuals, but that it doesn’t work in reverse.
Creating Passionate Users: […]
In my experience the people who are most successful always take time to learn and read. Modern society makes this very difficult. According to the 2003 US Census, the average amount of time spent driving one way to work is 24 minutes each day. That means the average person spends 48 minutes […]
If you stare at the block long enough you should eventually be able to make out a giraffe. This is because of the special optical properties of files known as animated GIFs. :)
I sent this to my mom and somehow it got converted from an animated GIF to a static TIFF. She claims […]
While looking through the score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto’s I ran across an instrument I had never seen before. It was called the violino piccolo and appeared to be written in a key other than C like the rest of the stringed instruments.
Evidently the violins were not very easy to play in […]
In the past I’ve been stuck using Nextel for mobile internet access. Nextel service seems to work ok, but it is very slow, has limited coverage, costs $79 per month, doesn’t support Bluetooth, requires third-party software to work with OS X. So when I had an opportunity to switch to a different […]
The new certification test for Java 1.5 (or Java 5 or Tiger) is going to be coming out as a beta soon. According to Kathy Sierra’s weblog the new test is going to avoid the complicated “puzzle” type problems and concentrate more on your ability to accomplish specific objectives with Java code. It […]
I took a train from Grand Rapids to Chicago to pickup a car. This is an actual conversation that took place two seats in front of me on the ride down:
Lady: …. this is my first train experience …
Ticket Man: Well then we will make sure it is a miserable one. Can I […]
One of the questions I ran into when preparing for the Java Certification exam dealt with how Java handles nested comments. Since this isn’t something I usually do in my code I wasn’t sure how it worked. It turns out the results were different than I expected.
First lets look at the double slash […]
After using Java for about four years, I started wondering how well I really understood the language, so I started looking into Sun’s certification. Sun offers the following certifications:
Sun Certified Programmer
Sun Certified Developer
Sun Certified Web Component Developer
Sun Certified Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services
Sun Certified Enterprise Architech
Sun Certified Mobile Application Developer
The […]