Technical Details

I'm posting this for my on edification: Link

This may come in handy for testing, but I still don't think you can use windows genuine advantage without activating your license.

The title says it all:

http://www.flightstats.com/ 

I know eclipse is free, but come on, I don't know how people actually use this piece of shit to build software. I like open source as much as the next guy, I just like "high quality open source" which may be an oxymoron.

Here are a bunch of my pet peeves so far:

• When debugging your warped to a new tab with the screen in a completely brain dead configuration. So I'm forced to reorganize the screen so it looks somewhat simple. Listen this isn't mission control I don't need to see everything at once.
• When debugging the first message you see in the console is "The application will continue after a brief delay" all I can say is WTF, I want to debug now, not after the intermission you tools As it turns out this isn't Eclipses fault, but copy protection in one of the libraries I'm using so mea culpa on this one.
• When debugging the only way to see the "step over, step into" buttons is to switch to the debug tab, your kidding me right? So far I haven't found a way to get those buttons to appear in the top tool/button bar.
• Maybe I have a buggy eclipse, but it took me three or four tries before eclipse would stop at my break point, the previous runs just stopped running, didn't high light my break point line nothing, thanks for coming out.
• Why is it when eclipse pops up the bubble for the arguments of a function your using it insists of calling the arguments "Type arg0, …" I mean come on, your killing me here, this also happens in the debugger as well when looking at the variables of the functions, totally lame.
• When you high light a secion of code and click the right mouse button you get a big list of options and where are the "copy and paste" items, down in the middle, I'm not sure about this but I bet "copy and paste" are to of the most common options when you have selected text, yet you make me scroll down the menu to the middle, tools. Yeah I know there are keystroke short cuts.
• When I'm editing and hit save, eclipse feels compelled to warp me to somewhere else in my code i.e. where the program has stopped in debug mode. Dudes I'm not in the debug view don't warp me to the program counter, maybe I want to continue editing, I just like to save a lot 'cause I don't trust eclipse.
• The default keystroke for search again is ctrl-k give me a break if my hands were that big I'd be a much better basketball player, maybe I should get a smaller keyboard.

Indeed it's not surprising that I'm going to shell out a few dollars to upgrade to the latest Intellij because frankly eclipse sucks, and that is also why I shelled out the dollars for Komodo, since I want to get work done and not fight the tool no matter how free it is. Penny wise pound foolish.

Is Yahoo Pipes what Scott McNealy meant by Sun's motto "The Network is the Computer" or at least in the pipes metaphor the 'Network is the database'?

Something to ponder…

Where I happen to be working right now blocks port 110 namely pop, (they also block ftp) but that's an entirely different story. Needless to say this is a little frustrating, since I want to read my email and not force other people to start using a new email address to get hold of me (I typically don't use IM either.)

Plan A, was to use email filters in Thunderbird to forward the messages to a GMail account that I created yesterday, the day before Google opened up GMail for general access, btw the SMS registration doesn't work in Canada what a pity, instead I had to get David to invite me. I left thunderbird running and went to work, and low and behold it worked, until I got home where thunderbird started to hang and act all funny, i.e. I had to kill it forcefully several times, so much for plan A.

Plan B, since I have total control over my email server, I've forwarded all my email to GMail and now I access GMail from home via pop which is nice and at work I can see everything via the web. This all works nicely and so far all systems seem quite happy (no crashing). Plus the email isn't mangled due to being forwarded.

Cheers to Google.

Postscript:

A couple of other benefits of this arrangement that occurred to me later:

You get all the power of GMails spam filters, although 85-90% of our email is already pre-screened and flagged as SPAM, GMail catches even more

Because we haven't forked out the money to buy a certificate for our pop server, I now get the benefit of GMails secure POP server, very nice

Of course you now have a GMail address, which doesn't seem as cool after Google's recent announcement.

You have access to their SMTP relay for outbound email, no more fumbling on my laptop to pick a working outbound SMTP server