Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

I had lunch with Rachel Clarke and Hugh MacLeod today.

Expect a limited-edition series of blip shirts.

Conflict hypothesis of the Business Suit

Marc Cuban flames the business suit and among the hundreds of failed attempts at humor in response, I found this one amusing:

Suits make young men look like dorks. And this is important, because a young man starting out needs the approval of the older, established men. And that young man is more attractive to the young women, with non-Republican hair, tans, lowfat bods. Soo, a suit and a haircut is really a symbolic castration ritual to bring the young apes down the ladder below the older bulls. Harsh, but true. No matter how much you tell yourself you look better in a suit rather than a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, it just ain't so. Suits represent wealth, power, and integration into the business world, which is attractive to the opposite sex for reasons of status rather than sexuality, tho the two are inevitably confused.

Michelle found a Suspicious Device!

Here's how she got it.

I hate you too, jar manifest! (The sequel)

If a the last line of a jar manifest is a class path and it doesn't end with a new-line, Java will croak, complaining that the jar is corrupted. Let's see you figure that one out!

Hypothesis on the origin of graffiti

There was a time when cities looked like

before the Modernists reformatted our society with their creepy robot visions and their faceless collectivist philosophies,  cramming our urban poor into buildings that looked like

but the youth quickly responded by covering their public surfaces with designs like

perhaps exhibiting an innate human need for ornateness and complexity which more closely reflects the natural environment of our evolution. I used to hate graffiti as disgusting public urination, but what if it is an instinctive attempt at recomplexifying an unnaturally lifeless environment?

Finally, a build system for Java programmers

Justin Lee has created the Gosling project on java.net. Gosling is a build processor similar to Ant except that instead of using XML for execution, it uses a Java source file. The code looks like this:

    @Description("Builds the distribution bundles")
    public void dist() {
        clean();
        jar();
        mkdir(DIST_DIR);

        new Copy(this)
            .setDestDir(new File(DIST_DIR + "/bin"))
            .addFileSet(new FileSet(BIN_SRC_DIR))
            .execute();

        new Copy(this)
            .setDestDir(new File(DIST_DIR + "/lib"))
            .addFileSet(new FileSet(BUILD_DIR)
                .addInclude("*.jar"))
            .execute();

        new Zip(this, new File(DIST_FILE))
            .addFileSet(new FileSet(".")
                .addInclude("build.*")
                .addInclude("src/**")
                .addInclude("lib/*.jar"))
            .execute();
    }

Great work, Justin! I've been waiting years for this.  I've been using ant for five years now and I still haven't memorized the differences between file list and file set. Which one goes inside a path element?  I just mess with it until it works, or copy fragments from other projects. Does anybody really have to explain why Java is a superior programming language than XML!? But of course, they do to some folks at The Server Side, who utter such profundity as

If you thought XML build scripts were hard to read and understand, how is this better?

Poem To Kim Jong Il

Poem To The NDC Chairman: Kim Jong Il published in Pyongyang by the Rodong Sinmun Daily

It is none other than the National Defense Commission chairman,

General Kim Jong Il [Kim Cho'ng-il] [preceding name in bold as published], the unrivaled heaven-sent General of Mt. Paektu, who

Learned how to govern the world

From a table placed in the Supreme Command for mapping out a plan of operations during the war days,

While hearing the sound of guns coming from a battlefield on Mt. Paektu during the anti-Japanese [struggle] days,

With steely will and gun barrel,

Standing tall at the head of the chuch'e armed forces,

Assuming responsibility for the destiny of the fatherland and the nation,

And led the revolution as a whole,

Along the single-track road from century to century.

 

It is none other than our NDC chairman,

The powerful and fearless General Kim Jong Il who,

Since no political formula of conventional framework

Or ultramodern scientific and technological means

Could calm the fiery wind of threats and natural disasters,

And the mountains of the most arduous trials,

And because only with the invincible gun barrel could they be broken through,

Lifted up the almighty military-first banner,

Turning the treacherous road of "arduous march"

Into a march toward a paradise, a broad level way out.

 

A brilliant, invincible military-first command,

A big heart to the tens of millions of soldiers and people when they are united,

A supreme commander well acquainted with the military affairs,

And an invincible NDC chairman to the country.

As no one can casually associate with him

And as he is held at the very top of our Republic,

The mad wind of imperialism stopped struggling and keeps its head down

And my fatherland displays fireworks to celebrate successive triumphs.

 

It is none other than the NDC chairman,

Our peerlessly superb General Kim Jong Il, who,

Oh, with do-or-die resolve when fighting is inevitable,

With the pluck that he would win victory in all fights without fail,

Standing firmly on a hard bulwark in the anti-US showdown,

With lightning and thunder reverberating throughout the skies,

Overwhelmed the dissonance from the bastards' heated anti-Republic commotion,

With the scream of those being destroyed.

 

Sacred it is.

My country's sky is blue over the gun barrel

And stacks of all kinds of grain stalks harvested in a bumper crop grow high.

It is none other than our NDC chairman,

The military-first veteran of all battles General Kim Jong Il, who,

 

Giving priority to the gun barrel and national defense,

Hardened the defense position of the fatherland into a fortress

And pushed towers of great construction up through the sky,

Beating the drum for advance with the sound of national defense hammer,

Raising the height of the fatherland with the launching pad of an artificial earth satellite,

Demonstrating the lofty dignity of the nation of the sun and

The majestic appearance of the powerful state of chuch'e to the whole world.

 

O, the peerless general who is the general of all generals,

The matchlessly great man who is the greatest of all great men.

It is none other than our NDC chairman, the greatest man in the world,

The brilliant, ever-victorious commander General Kim Jong Il,

The military-first sun admired by the whole world,

The person whom we will forever uphold at the very top of the Republic

And for whom tens of millions of soldiers and people will become guns and bombs to defend him at the risk of their lives, who,

With his hand,

 

Has achieved immortal accomplishments

That cannot be built even in a long historical period, even in hundreds of years

On the rock-firm foundation laid for a powerful state of chuch'e.

Getting started with Chainsaw, the log4j analyzer

This documentation was written because there doesn't seem to be a five-minute introduction anywhere on their site.  I had to hit multiple web sites to compile this basic information.

Your log4j.xml must contain an appender that goes to a file and uses the XMLLayout. Here's a sample:

    <appender name="chainsaw_log" class="org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender">
        <param name="File" value="blipfoot.log.xml"/>
        <param name="Append" value="true"/>
        <param name="Threshold" value="DEBUG"/>
        <param name="MaxFileSize" value="100MB"/>
        <param name="MaxBackupIndex" value="2"/>
        <layout class="org.apache.log4j.xml.XMLLayout" />
    </appender>

You can use Chainsaw 1.2, which ships inside the log4j distribution. Run it like this:
java -classpath log4j-1.2.12.jar org.apache.log4j.chainsaw.Main
Or you can use Chainsaw 2, which is at this Java Web Start link.

Version 2 gives you pretty colors, I haven't yet figured out how to filter by logging level, which is pretty important.  Version 1.2 couldn't make it any clearer: there's a level drop down placed prominently.

I hate you too, jar manifest!

Jar manifests, the bane of all Java developers.  Why weren't regular properties files sufficient?

My jar required two additional linked library jars in its class path, so I added them into the ant build script which I use to create the jar.  Suddenly my application stopped working.  After some confusion, I opened up the jar manifest file and saw that the class path line was cut off in the middle of one of the jar names! I tried several ways to break the line between jar names, but none of them worked.

Ant's FAQ is positively rude on the issue.  It reads

Ant implements the Java Jar file specification. Please refer to the notes section where it discusses the maximum allowable length of a line and the concept of continuation characters.

That is completely unhelpful, because the Jar file specification says

No line may be longer than 72 bytes (not characters), in its UTF8-encoded form. If a value would make the initial line longer than this, it should be continued on extra lines (each starting with a single SPACE).

and the ant FAQ doesn't explain how to create such a continued line in a manifest file!

Then check this out: Bug ID: 4482804 Class-Path mangled in Manifest. It says:

If you do not want to have long lines , you could also do it like this

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Main-Class: Main
Created-By: 1.3.1 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)
Class-Path: /lib/utils.jar /lib/xmlutil.jar /lib/db.jar
Class-Path: /lib/log4j.jar /lib/referencedata.jar

Well, Java 1.5 rejects manifests with multiple class path entries!

So I decided to make my own, external manifest file, according to the specification.  I continued the line with single spaces. This failed. After more attempts, I went back to the Web and discovered this post:

Oh, and another thing. For multiple lines, use two spaces not one...because the single space is removed when concatinated.

Ning & Stealth mode

(originally posted here on 20 Jan 2006)

Last Friday, Mike and I were chatting about how no compelling applications came out of Ning. We agreed that it was because of their silly committment to stealth mode during their gestation. You don’t publicly reveal your early development because it’s “so web 2.0″. You do so to get an early reality check on whether or not your project sucks.

Knowledge is good, but better than knowledge is a good epistemology that allows the rapid and timely acquisition of knowledge! You can teach a man to fish and he can feed his family, but if you teach him how to teach himself to fish…

Anyway, TechCrunch mentioned Ning today, listing four problems why the service isn’t taking off.

But the reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality. Here’s are the problems….

And in other Stealth Mode news, Ookles just closed its Angel round in Om Malik’s bathroom. Ookles? That’s for them to know, and us to buzz, buzz, buzz, about! Let’s get all excited and see what clues we can scrape up from google searches and reverse DNS lookups! Or not.

So the other problem with stealth mode, closely related to the first, is that operations that grow organically are stronger than ones designed in one afternoon around a table. This is the insight behind Agile software development, and ultimately is the lesson of the Vietnam War as well. A few days ago I noticed that blogger’s search stinks, and I’d like a tiny tag cloud in the sidebar of my blog. I could write a scraper but where would I host it? I realized there was a need for a new type of service, where I could upload some little script somewhere, tell the service to run it nightly, and point a sidebar of my blog to its output. I should put up a J2EE app server somewhere, maybe at toys.pokkari.tv. I could write a little administration app that allows uploading and deployment of ear files. And then, to accomodate those who wanted to write in other languages, I could drop in the Bean Scripting Framework and many language libraries. And some other page parsing and manipulation libraries to make work on web pages less like DOM and more like Chickenfoot. Eventually it would grow into something very easy to use, under the guidance of real users and real usage.

Update 15:13 ET:

I’ve never written an app on Ning because PHP is not my bag. Check out I Am Alpha, and Zoho Creator.