In Understanding the Hardware, Jeff Atwood describes his “best bang for the buck developer x86 box,” at a cost of about $1,100. The system he describes is quite a nice development machine, although it’s probably overkill for a lot of developers. Seriously. How many developers do you know who really need a 10,000 RPM drive . . . → Read More: The Ultimate Development Machine?
|
|||||
|
I updated my Java runtime the other day, and now every time I open a new tab in Internet Explorer, I get this message box: It looks like somebody at Sun forgot to sign their update agent. At least, I think this control came from Sun. But there’s no way to be sure, is . . . → Read More: Is that code really from Sun? Every time I get to thinking that maybe Charlie’s learned not to mess with the local wildlife, he does something incredibly stupid to set me straight. Last night I let him out just before going to bed. He stood there by the door for a minute and then took off around the corner after something. . . . → Read More: Charlie versus the Wildlife. Again. About 10 days ago, MSDN’s Channel 9 site released an hour-long video entitled Meet the Design Team, that talks in very vague terms about uncoming features in C# 4.0. You’ll learn that the language will include more dynamic constructs and built-in support for multiple cores. Honestly, that’s about all you’ll learn from watching the video. . . . → Read More: C# and .NET: What’s Next? Last week I mentioned proxies and other URL filtering issues that we’ve encountered when crawling the Web. A problem that continually plagues us is repeated path components–URLs like these: http://www.example.com/mp3/mp3/mp3/mp3/mp3/song.mp3 http://www.example.com/mp3/mp3/mp3/mp3/mp3/mp3/song.mp3 I don’t know why some sites do that, but a crawler can easily get caught in a trap and will generate such URLs indefinitely. . . . → Read More: More URL Filtering Tom’s Hardware is running a review of solid state drives that compares the latest generation of SSDs against current mechanical drive technology. It’s little surprise that SSDs are in general faster than hard drives. What I found surprising is that some SSDs actually require more power than hard drives. Not the newer crop, though. . . . → Read More: Odds ‘n Ends We generate a lot of data here, some of which we want to keep around. Yesterday I noticed that I was running out of space on one of my 750 GB archive drives and figured it was time to start compressing some of the data. The data in question is reasonably compressible. A quick test . . . → Read More: Exceeding the Limits The other day I intended to close a Remote Desktop window and instead hit the Close button (the X on the right of the window’s caption bar) on the console window running our data broker. Nothing like an abnormal exit to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. So I went looking for a . . . → Read More: Going Too Far Back Three years ago I mentioned anonymous proxies as a way to “anonymize” your Internet access. At the time I neglected to mention one of their primary uses: allowing you to surf sites that might be blocked by your friendly IT department. For example, I know of at least one company that blocks access to slashdot.org. . . . → Read More: Proxy fits When you start crawling the Web on even a small scale, you quickly learn that things aren’t nearly as neat and tidy as the RFCs would have you believe. After just a few weeks of writing code to handle all the special cases and ambiguities that crop up, you’ll start to wonder how the Web . . . → Read More: Crawler versus the URLs One thing I haven’t figured out yet with my new Dell 490 system running Windows Server 2008 is how to burn a CD. I have a LITE-ON DVD RW in it–the same drive that was in my old Windows XP system–but for some reason Windows Server reports it as a DVD-ROM. This one has . . . → Read More: Computer Notes |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2013 Jim's Random Notes - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||
