TIL #1:

Somebody linked to this question on Stack Overflow about some unexpected results when doing math on dates in Java. The problem, according to Jon Skeet, is that the date being used in the calculation is near midnight on December 31, 1927 in the Shanghai time zone -- when Shanghai moved its clocks by 5 minutes and 52 seconds. So the time ( Read more... )

It used to be that if you put out a software product, and particularly as you produced new versions of it, people might complain about things that were hard or different (change bad!) or broke their workflow, and you'd decide whether to add some configuration parameters or redesign it again or just tell them to suck it up. There wasn't much they ( Read more... )

Dear LJ Brain Trust ( Read more... )

Coming to the world of SQL databases from the world of object-oriented programming is...different. I'm starting to realize why some idioms are different, and I'm sure there are tons more that I haven't noticed yet and am probably getting wrong. But that's what learning experiences are for ( Read more... )

I've been building and documenting application programming interfaces (APIs) for years, using tools like Javadoc to generate the reference documentation from the code and special comments in the code. I've got a pretty good handle on this in general -- but so far I've always worked in languages with stronger typing, like Java and C++, ones where ( Read more... )

Today I attended a day-long class on web-service technologies. (Yeah, late to the party.) Being a programmer was not a prerequisite (though it helped), and most people there weren't. This wasn't so much about programming and software design as about getting from WSDLs (web-service specifications) to code and vice-versa, and about understanding ( Read more... )

Part of this meme:
LISP
The most valuable part of my education as a technical writer was my ( Read more... )

Since about 30 seconds after LJ announced the tagging feature I have been wanting boolean search for tags, so that I could find entries tagged A and (B or C) or the like. This has never been possible.

Today in news they announced that you can search for entries with two tags (specifically two) using the following syntax ( Read more... )

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy ( Read more... )

Dani pointed me to Fantasy In Miniature. here are three that caught my fancy. I have just doubled the subscriptions to fantasyinmin. (I wonder who the other one is.)

From siderea: The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft.

Toleration versus diversity (David Friedman) was an interesting read for me.

Chat-based ask-the-rabbi service, for when ( Read more... )