Setting Up My Home Office

May 18th, 2008

I’m realizing that my productivity since I moved has been severely reduced by the setup of my loft here in Irvine compared to the office I had back in Brooklyn. Herewith are some resolutions and plans for fixing that. Suggestions are appreciated.

Loft office with shag carpet and Aeron chair, quite messy
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Spot the Bug Part 2

April 1st, 2008

Another future exam question: Identify the intermediate programming error in the following screenshot from a major web standards organization:

28 March 2008: Basic XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Version 1.0 - Last Call Ends NaN

What likely happened here, and how could it have been avoided?

What Version of Xerces are you Using?

March 31st, 2008

XML developers often find themselves struggling with multiple versions of the Xerces parser for Java which support different, slightly incompatible versions of SAX, DOM, Schemas, and even XML itself. Xerces can be hiding in a number of different places including the classpath, the jre/lib/endorsed directory, and even the JDK itself. Here’s how you can find out which version you actually have.
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The Ten Commandments of Unicode

March 7th, 2008

1. I am Unicode, thy character set. Thou shalt have no other character sets before me.

2. Thou shalt carefully specify the character encoding and the character set whenever reading a text file.

3. Thou shalt not refer to any 8-bit character set as “ASCII”.

4. Thou shalt ensure that all string handling functions fully support characters from beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane. Thou shalt not refer to Unicode as a two-byte character set.

5. Thou shalt plan for additions of future characters to Unicode.

6. Thou shalt count and index Unicode characters, not UTF-16 code points.

7. Thou shalt use UTF-8 as the preferred encoding wherever possible.

8. Thou shalt generate all text in Normalization Form C whenever possible.

9. Thou shalt avoid deprecated characters.

10. Thou shalt not enter the private use area.

Spot the Bug

February 10th, 2008

A future exam question: Identify the elementary programming error in the following actual output from a real web store.

Bonus credit: describe both the quick emergency fix for the problem, and the longterm fix for the problem.

Greetings from CellularFactory.com.

We thought you'd like to know that we shipped your items, and that this completes 
your order. Your order number is ###### Please keep this number for any future 
requests

You can track the status of this order, and all your orders, online by visiting our 
page at http://www.CellularFactory.com/help/shipping.jsp

The following items have been shipped to you by CellularFactory.com:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Qty      Item                   Price       Shipped      Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
1      Travel Charger                   5.89      2008-02-09      5.89
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Shipped via USPS (estimated arrival date: about 4-6 days after)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Item Subtotal
5.89
Shipping & Handling:
3.99
Total:
9.879999999999999
--------------------------------------------------------------------

This shipment was sent to:

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