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.

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Posted in Tools | 16 Comments »
April 1st, 2008
Another future exam question: Identify the intermediate programming error in the following screenshot from a major web standards organization:

What likely happened here, and how could it have been avoided?
Posted in Programming | 6 Comments »
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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Posted in XML | 3 Comments »
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.
Posted in Programming | 28 Comments »
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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Posted in Programming | 25 Comments »