1. Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999
2. Great Lakes Beach Association
   
3. Gay/Lesbian Business Association

javax.servlet.ServletException
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processException(RequestProcessor.java:526)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processException(HipRequestProcessor.java:134)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:467)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processActionPerform(HipRequestProcessor.java:116)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:274)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.process(HipRequestProcessor.java:55)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1422)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doPost(ActionServlet.java:523)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.doForward(RequestProcessor.java:1033)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.doForward(HipRequestProcessor.java:217)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processForwardConfig(RequestProcessor.java:436)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processForwardConfig(HipRequestProcessor.java:94)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionForward(RequestProcessor.java:401)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processActionForward(HipRequestProcessor.java:83)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:279)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.process(HipRequestProcessor.java:55)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1422)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doPost(ActionServlet.java:523)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:75)

java.lang.NullPointerException
   com.dynix.common.util.Log.printStackTrace(Log.java:87)
   com.dynix.common.util.Log.printStackTrace(Log.java:64)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.requests.HoldRequestAction.execute(HoldRequestAction.java:200)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:465)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processActionPerform(HipRequestProcessor.java:116)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:274)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.process(HipRequestProcessor.java:55)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1422)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doPost(ActionServlet.java:523)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.doForward(RequestProcessor.java:1033)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.doForward(HipRequestProcessor.java:217)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processForwardConfig(RequestProcessor.java:436)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processForwardConfig(HipRequestProcessor.java:94)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionForward(RequestProcessor.java:401)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.processActionForward(HipRequestProcessor.java:83)
   org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:279)
   com.dynix.hip.struts.processor.HipRequestProcessor.process(HipRequestProcessor.java:55)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1422)
   org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doPost(ActionServlet.java:523)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:75)

• stir up trouble at meetings
• write scathing email

In 1989 the American musicologist Alan W. Pollack started to analyze the songs of the Beatles. He published his first results on internet. In 1991 — after he had finished the work on 28 songs — he bravely decided to do the whole lot of them. About ten years later, in 2000 he completed the analysis of the official Beatles' canon, consisting of 187 songs and 25 covers.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service announced a change in the "Single Minimum Internal Temperature Established for Cooked Poultry". The new cooking recommendation is as follows:

"A whole turkey (and turkey parts) is safe when cooked to a minimum internal temperature of 165°F as measured with a food thermometer. Check the internal temperature in the innermost part of the thigh and wing and the thickest part of the breast. For reasons of personal preference, consumers may choose to cook turkey to higher temperatures."

This new cooking temperature is a change from previous 180°F for a whole turkey and 170°F for turkey breast. The single minimum internal temperature change to 165°F was recommended by the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) in a press release earlier this year. All turkey cooking recommendations for this website have been changed to reflect this update (11/06).

Hello Kitty Sandwich Bags, originally uploaded by kbo.

For your travel liquids. Give those TSA screeners a smile the next time you travel. (Yes, I actually did this when I went to Chicago a couple of weeks ago.. wait, I never blogged anything about Chicago? That needs a post of its own)

Another lesson is about security by obscurity. Some fetchmail users asked me to change the software to store passwords encrypted in the rc file, so snoopers wouldn't be able to casually see them.

I didn't do it, because this doesn't actually add protection. Anyone who's acquired permissions to read your rc file will be able to run fetchmail as you anyway—and if it's your password they're after, they'd be able to rip the necessary decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it.

All .fetchmailrc password encryption would have done is give a false sense of security to people who don't think very hard.

Patterns are signs of weakness in programming languages.

When we identify and document one, that should not be the end of the story. Rather, we should have the long-term goal of trying to understand how to improve the language so that the pattern becomes invisible or unnecessary.

I was cautioned by several folks at Sun that the Browser Edition would simply never happen.

Look at just about any successful open source Java project, look at Tomcat or JBoss, at ant, JEdit or even Eclipse, and there is one thing they all have in common. They all work right out of the box. Download any of these masterpieces and a few minutes later you will have something running.

IF you pine for the day when you could decorate your mom's basement with black-light posters over your waterbed and still be considered hip, then prepare to rejoice: '70s riff rock is back!

Crazy-man drums, uber-distorted guitar solos, frenzied bass riffs, howling vocals, raw production and even Frank Frazetta's mystical album covers are flying out of the dustbin and onto your iPod.

The cartoon snake charming song -- (AKA "There's a place in France") was originally "written" for the Chicago World Fair.

The band that was hired to play for the belly dancers had no idea what sort of music would make for an appropriate accompaniment. So, Sol Bloom, the music promoter who developed the midway for the fair, improvised this tune on the spot as an approximation of middle eastern music.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Osment ... was driving a 1995 Saturn about 1 a.m. when the car collided with a brick pillar and flipped

This describes the Apache JServ Protocol version 1.3 (hereafter ajp13). There is, apparently, no current documentation of how the protocol works.

Many testers would advise the programmer to test the product himself, first. I have a different answer. My answer is: send me the product the moment it exists.

It's written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive

The contractor was no longer just trying to solve the customer's problem, they were trying to solve all problems that looked like it. So for that reason alone the project would have required 10x the original time and money.

The young chemist Humphry Davy discovered the properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after inhaling it with friends, including the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge.

A website created as a memorial to the people, history, technology and the "Spirit of Service" of what was known as the "Bell System" prior to 1984.

One of the oldest trekkie arguments is that electrical sparks from damaged bridge and control-system components indicate that Imperial technology is based on 20th century Earth electrical technology. Therefore, the argument goes, since Federation technology has "graduated" to plasma conduits, it is more advanced.

In reality, this only demonstrates the weaknesses of Federation starship design. Electrical power systems are far safer for low-powered systems (like bridge and control-system components) than plasma conduits, because electrical power always arcs to ground in the event of an open circuit. Plasma conduits, on the other hand, undergo explosive decompression in the event of a conduit rupture, resulting in the infamous "exploding console" problem on Federation starships. A control panel is not a high-powered system- it does not require exotic power supplies, and if its power supply system is known to be a potentially lethal safety hazard, then it is quite clear that the basic design philosophy should be reviewed immediately.

every good software company ships products with known bugs

Every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another one.

Every code change is a risk. A development cycle that doesn't recognize this will churn indefinitely and never create a shippable product. At some point, if the product is ever going to converge toward a release, you have to start deciding which bugs aren't going to get fixed.

The game involves a physical battle on the streets, between two teams of "Townsmen" and "Countrymen", with the shops in the town barricading their windows and doors to protect from accidental damage, which sometimes occurs.

NetBeans IDE 5.5 will totally redefine the word "productivity". I mean, forget wimpy little bits of code, pretty little samples, and obsequious hints and suggestions. Think big. How big? Well, how big can you think? That's how big, plus a little bit of extra bigness added on top.

After failing to win several arguments on this point, the engineers became exasperated and decided to hold an intervention with the CEO. They each bought a copy of Brooks' book, brought the CEO into a conference room, and stacked up the copies of the book, telling him, It is extremely urgent that you read this book. We've bought you many copies so that you might read it faster. They made their point.

Data that is not validated or poorly validated is the root cause of a number of serious security vulnerabilities affecting applications, such as Cross Site Scripting and SQL Injection

A couple of weeks ago I was embroiled in a rather passionate argument about the relevance of continuation-based web servers at an academic retreat at Dagstuhl, Germany. This is an opportunity for me to write down my thoughts on that topic, as the two are closely linked.

Example password/phrases of this kind include "dontstopwriting", "keepstudying", "doittoheronemoretime" and "donteatchocolate".

Here's my question to my fellow Java programmers: why do we tolerate a compiler that forces us to type some things as BigDecimals and some things as Integers, but we don't insist that the compiler catch places where we aren't checking for nulls?

This is not just marketing text (though it’s that, too). It’s interface. This is text that can’t come from the PR department—it comes from us, the designers who are responsible for the user experience. The text is as much a part of the UI as the colors, the pixels, the stuff that designers are usually concerned with. Perhaps more.

Using strings to refer to instances and methods is "fragile" eg. not refactoring-safe" (or "exception-safe") and is not readily "toolable" in the sense that it does not enjoy auto-completion and error-highlighting in IDE's.

GUI is plumbing

Sometimes NOT knowing about a "problem" weakens (or eliminates) it.

Perception is a powerful tool. Believing there's a limitation can sometimes create that limitation. And for the clueless who don't know about the limitation, well, it's as if it doesn't exist.

Sometimes NOT knowing about a "problem" weakens (or eliminates) it.

Perception is a powerful tool. Believing there's a limitation can sometimes create that limitation. And for the clueless who don't know about the limitation, well, it's as if it doesn't exist.

Most operating systems and many application programs currently maintain their own repositories of locale data to support these conventions. But such data are often incomplete, idiosyncratic, or gratuitously different from program to program. In the age of the internet, software components must work together seamlessly, without the problems caused by these discrepancies.

(Full article text is primarily available beginning with Issue 20.)

n many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.

Not only will it protect Hollywood from the downside of the bill, it will also create new barriers to entry, making it harder for amateurs to create and distribute video content — and just at the moment when technology seems to be enabling high-quality amateur video distribution.

Who is a professional is a horrendous problem for reasons that nobody has mentioned yet: what about independent low budget filmakers? Will it be illegal to sell professional equipment to them because they “aren’t really professionals” or will they be chained down by rediculous DRM schemes?

import junit.framework.*;
import java.lang.reflect.*;
import java.util.Arrays;
/*
 * DoNothingTest.java
 * JUnit based test
 *
 * Created on January 12, 2006, 10:35 PM
 */

public class DoNothingTest extends TestCase {
    
    public DoNothingTest(String testName) {
        super(testName);
    }

    protected void setUp() throws Exception {
    }

    protected void tearDown() throws Exception {
    }
    
    public static interface BunchaMethods {
        void doVoid();
        int getInt();
        String getString();
        Integer getInteger();
        Object getObject();
        int[] getIntArray();
    }

    public void testNewInstance() {

        BunchaMethods b = (BunchaMethods) DoNothing.newInstance(BunchaMethods.class);
        
        b.doVoid(); // nothing happens!
        
        assertEquals( 0, b.getInt());
        
        assertEquals( null, b.getString());
        assertEquals( null, b.getInteger());
        assertEquals( null, b.getObject());
        assertEquals( null, b.getIntArray());
    
    }
    
}

/*
 * DoNothing.java
 *
 */

import java.lang.reflect.*;
import java.util.Arrays;

/**
 * Creates a dynamic proxy that simply does nothing and returns null
 * or "0", when any of its methods are called.
 */
public class DoNothing implements InvocationHandler {
    
    /**
     * Creates a do-nothing proxy that implements all the interfaces.
     */
    public static Object newInstance(Class[] interfaces) {
        return Proxy.newProxyInstance(DoNothing.class.getClassLoader(), interfaces, new DoNothing());
    }
    
    /**
     * Creates a do-nothing proxy that implements one interface.
     */
    public static Object newInstance(Class iface ) {
        return newInstance( new Class[]{iface});
    }


    public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) throws Throwable {
        Class returnType = method.getReturnType();
        
        // if the method isn't supposed to return anything,
        // return null
        if(returnType == void.class) {
            return null;
        }
        
        // if we have a return value, return whatever it is
        // that new arrays of our return type are filled with.
        // this is a convenient way to get "0" as the right
        // kind of primitive, or null for objects, in one
        // line of code.
        return Array.get( Array.newInstance(returnType,1), 0);
    }
    
    
}

Uniform is a java class library supporting runtime supertyping. In practice, that makes it somewhat like Latent Typing or Duck Typing.

Both Java and C# share the same model of pure interface types. You declare a pure interface by going interface Mailable, then you can declare you implement it with class Customer implements Mailable (in Java). A class may implement any number of pure interfaces.

One of the things this model ignores is that you have implicit interfaces whenever you have a class. The implicit interface Customer is all the public members declared on Customer. One thing that neither Java nor C# allow you to do is to implement an implicit interface - you cannot write class ValuedCustomer implements Customer.

PIC_0198, originally uploaded by jeff_robertson.

Most unfortunate sign ever?