chokma

> However by the author's same reasoning it is not important to be happy either. After you have died it will not matter how you felt while you were alive.

But being happy does matter in terms of how you feel now or while living. I think one point is that it does not make me happier to worry about how big my legacy is in regard to contribution to the world in financial, technological or social ways.

If I can make this world a better place, that's great, and a worthy objective. But as the goal posts are always changing, and because we are inherently limited in how much we can achieve, it is good to take time and make sure to enjoy life (as happiness not only feels good but enables greater achievements).

So, be happy and do as much as you can instead of doing as much as you can and always feel bad because it will never be enough.

In Europe, it's about 12-30 million € / km for high speed tracks (according to Wikipedia).

And Ubuntu server 12.04 seems to enable this by default without access limit -

    sudo a2dismod status

helps to disable it.

Many users like their WYSIWYG text editors (even though they are often problematic between older browser versions or with "paste-from-word" or conflicts with other JS-includes). And the expectations are rising - one customer of ours would like a WYSIWYG-editor "with Apple style interface" in the browser, with all the bell's and whistles of a full blown publishing solution including complete layout control, input validation, CMS support and so on. The old TinyMCE fields of his legacy app will no longer cut it.

Meanwhile, I write the documentation for my software in Markdown, because it is the fastest way for me to get structured text from my mind to my machine. And with the help of pandoc, it's convertible into all other text formats, from HTML to PDF and LaTeX etc. (Although the html-with-images to PDF support of wkhtmltopdf is even better, so it's Markdown => pandoc[for HTML] + wkthmltopdf [for HTML to PDF]).

And some games provide a much longer entertainment value - Torchlight / Diablo / Starcraft / Zangband ;).

Hm, and this is topped by pen'n'paper roleplaying games, where a couple of rule books can last for years.

> Grains is proven to be suboptimal, causing inflammation in the intestines and the rest of the body (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821887/).

From the study, it is refined grains that are problematic, while whole grains are recommended:

"In conclusion, whole grain consumption may be related to lower circulating plasma concentrations of PAI-1 and CRP, which in turn could lower the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These findings suggest that the protectiveness of whole grains in relation to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease may be due to an effect on plasma inflammatory protein concentrations and reinforces the public health recommendations that whole grains be consumed daily as part of a healthy diet. Refined grain intakes were positively associated with PAI-1 concentrations, indicating that refined grain intake could have proinflammatory effects."

And Certificate Patrol:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/certificate-p...

I am still looking for a Perl IDE which offers autocomplete - or at least the option to jump to where the currently selected method is defined. Something like the Groovy/Grails-support in IntelliJ - but of course, Groovy is somewhat easier to autocomplete because of the underlying Java class system.

Request Policy Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

Better than "Private Browsing" or "do not track" for 3rd-party surveillance, because it will not load other server's tracking images / javascript.

Only downside: expect some frustration when shopping online. It will break your first attempt at paying for anything via 3rd party payment services (which often use 3-4 different redirects to obscure banking providers - and each redirect / iframe will fail, of course). You can whitelist those, but it is more work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/girirajnet/3621281339/in/photos... ==> looks like this image is from 2009

re: 4. Reflect:

Reflect, but do not ruminate. Rumination (going endlessly in circles in your mind in a bad-thoughts-feedback-loop) goes with depression / mood disorders. To help with reflection, write down what weighs on your mind and analyze it.

Also, try to write about how everything would be if it went perfectly well. This way, you have something more positive to look at than your and other's(perceived) failures and shortcomings.

The Grails framework has a plugin to organize resources like JavaScript - http://grails-plugins.github.com/grails-resources (scripts will by default be added to the end of the page and even if your page consists of several template files which depend on jQuery etc, they will only be included once).

7. Small team of programmers, sharing an office with the boss and his secretary / saleswoman, several people smoking, and the office radio running music you do not really care for. And a wall mounted webcam pointed at the programmers "so the cleaning woman does not nick stuff".

But at least the billiard table was great.

I have heard from someone involved with project management of military aircraft software that the process includes verification of machine code produced by the compiler, that is: you have to prove that the code generated is exactly what you intended to get.

http://www.sandroid.org/birdsproject/4dummies.html gives a glimpse of how much fun developing software for aviation purposes is.

Also using RequestPolicy addon on Firefox will dramatically cut down on stuff loaded from 3rd-party websites (including: Google analytics, Facebook like button, ad- and tracking services of all kind)

Also worth a read http://stackoverflow.com/a/6163129 (Perl and Unicode and why it's really hard)

I also prefer light backgrounds - for example the KDE konsole color scheme (light colors with black letters, a different background color automatically assigned for each tab).

Websites with white-on-black cause afterimages which persist for several seconds and are really distracting / tiring.

Adblock Plus, NoScript, RequestPolicy - the latter also helps against privacy problems with Facebook-like buttons etc.

I have been working with the RC/Beta-version for some time now because I need the Grails 2 integration for a new project - and it works really well, it's a joy to work with this IDE. Also, bugs in the development versions were fixed quite fast (in my experience).

Interesting to find a study that shows how changing your thinking may reduce depression. Coming from the other side (happiness research) in a study from 2006, Sonjy Lyubomirsky et al showed, that talking or writing analytically about negative events positively affected the overall happiness of the participants even several weeks after the event.

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~sonja/papers/LSD2006.pdf http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~sonja/papers.html

To continue the plumber metaphor: some systems are like black boxes with a lot of pipes sticking out - and they will route their raw sewage into your freshwater connector depending on barely documented and sometimes non-deterministic configuration parameters.

The API of 10 year old closed source enterprise systems that have grown over time by buying this solution provider and that and where documented methods may work or not... shudders, no, that's not plumbing at all, that is more like playing Minecraft in a toxic waste dump.

Hm, you can only register as a developer if you have a Paypal account - and the Paypal page you are directed to does not work. Well, perhaps it is for the best, given Paypal's history.

A valid Java program is not always a valid Groovy program - see http://groovy.codehaus.org/Differences+from+Java

== in Java is identity, in Groovy it is .equals() Inner classes are not supported.

Hacker News: no other news on that day.

http://images.schedim.de/hacker_news_steve_jobs.png

(from Do 06 Okt 2011 09:15:01 CEST)

Another very useful addon in Firefox is the RequestPolicy plugin, which blocks requests to other sites. You have to explicitly allow a site to connect to Facebook or Google analytics.

The only downside is that it is sometimes a hassle on pages that integrate third-party payment solutions which often have a lot of redirects and off-site scripts and iframe content. But then, like in noScript, you can always allow all or some request types from a page permanently.

I agree that you should test on more limited hardware. But on the other hand, I use my high end development machine as the benchmark for how fast it will go with a production worthy machine (unless one is willing to throw really insane amounts of money around).

If the customer asks "How long does it take to import 10k documents?" I can give them two data points, the VM running on a slow DSL connection over VPN on an older server, and a VM running locally on a i7 with more RAM and an SSD.

Of course, the requirements change if you develop desktop applications vs. server applications: if you plan to deliver software to government accountants running hardware that is at least 5 years out of date, you better go and get yourself a matching setup - "It would be faster if your Boss bought you a faster machine" is not helpful.

Rob Weir has pointed out a lot of OOXML-problems over the years: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/07/formula-for-failure.html http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/fractured-yearfrac-and-d...

It will be interesting to see how they get around (anti-)gambling laws, at least here in Germany. The moment you offer real money for winning in luck-based games (as opposed to skill-based ones) like Diablo3, you may run afoul of the state monopoly for lottery and related games.

A former employer once commissioned a flash game with a western setting which included a virtual casino with several games of chance. He had to shelve the idea of offering people to cash out and the game was delayed for a long time (if I remember correctly, it was turned into a game where you could buy stuff for your character, but there was no longer a way to transfer your winnings into real money accounts)

And even if the content is available today, that does not mean it will be available tomorrow.

Recently I found a new music video posted in the official channel of a record distribution company (nuclearblast), which a couple of days later was blocked because one of the big music labels intervened. By now, they seem to have resolved their differences and the video is available again here - but for how long?

Yes, Paypal operates with a Luxembourg banking license in Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Bank_status ).

Note that banking in Europe is in part regulated by national law of the member states. To operate as a bank in Germany, you need not only 0,5-5 million € as starting capital (depending on the type of financial transactions you are getting into), but you also need two reliable* executive managers who have at least three years experience leading a bank of the intended size (or similar experience).

Thus, the barrier to entry is rather high in Europe, too. But after that, if you get big enough, the tax payers will pay all your bills, like in the US.

* no criminal record and no other facts known that would cast doubt on their trustworthiness.