Via LtU, JPie:
JPie is an interactive programming environment designed to make the power of Java software development accessible to a wider audience
In JPie, all aspects of a program's behavior can be modified while the program runs, without the edit-compile-test cycle that routinely bogs down software development. When a class is modified in JPie, even existing objects are affected by the change.
In JPie, you don't describe programs in "code," but instead you directly manipulate their functional components.
JPie maintains detailed information about the software being developed and uses this to provide a more fluid software development process. For example, JPie's integrated thread-oriented integrated debugger supports fine-grain inspection of the execution, run-time code modification, and on-the-fly exception handling.
All sounds interesting... 
Not that I expected it to be, but it's good to hear good things. Let's hope that Return of the King doesn't disappoint. Man, I wish I was going to one of those extended edition marathons.
Slashdot: Dell Moves Call Center Back to US. Great news. Tech jobs moving to India has been a major concern... hopefully this is the beginning of a counter-trend.
Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post: Big News or No News (via IP)
Reporters love leaks. Can't get enough of 'em. The juicier the leak, the more sensitive the disclosure, the more likely you are to see it splashed on the front page.
But lately there have been a series of leaks that haven't gotten all that much attention outside of the conservative corner of the profession.
Which raises the following possibilities:
1) Mainstream reporters are sulking about having been beat.
2) The stories aren't all that great.
3) The establishment press reacts differently when conservatives break stories, assume it's part of the vast right-wing conspiracy and try to knock down the allegations.
I'm not an intelligence expert, and divining the finer points of the weight of evidence from spy reports about Iraq is obviously difficult, as the yearlong debate over WMD has shown. But I can't help but think that if some of these stories had been obtained by one of our mainstream media muckety-mucks, as opposed to Sean Hannity or the Weekly Standard, it would be treated as a much bigger deal.
The social welfare states in France and Germany are not working. I don't know why people fight for similar situations here.
FILExt.com - "FILExt is a detailed database of file extensions and programs that use them."
I always try to keep any neat tools I find around in the back of my head in case I may have a use for them some day. I finally have a use for KiXtart[1], a scripting language for Windows somewhere between batch files and VBScript, with a lot more useful stuff thrown in, and without a lot of the anguish of either.
Previously I'd been using a Windows Script Host script in JScript to script (jeez) backups, but a few factors combined to make me switch. 7-Zip (which I'm using to do the backups) has a weird convention for command-line arguments that requires paths to be relative. So, I have to do a cd to c:\ and then specify the path names without the "c:\" on them. I found out that the way to combine two commands in one line on the command shell was to stick an ampersand between them. So, my command line was essentially "cd c:\ & {path to 7-zip}7z.exe {args, etc.}". While that worked fine from the command shell, for whatever reason WshShell.Run() choked on it. So I thought, screw this, the script was simple enough that I was just going to switch it back to using a batch file, which I'd been using in the past but switched from because I wanted to do some extra things such as pop up dialogs.
We back-up to CD-RW, and as I was about to put together the batch file, I thought it'd be nice to be able to check the size of backup.zip against the amount of free space on the CD, so I could find out before I tried copying the file that there wasn't enough room for it. I have no clue how to find out the remaining free space on a drive from batch files (besides "dir", but that doesn't give me something I can use programmatically). So, I went to see if KiXtart was what I wanted, and it totally is. It happens to have some handy functions called GetDiskSpace and GetFileSize that do what I want. No more fiddling with weird Windows Script Host objects to try to make them do what I want.
KiXtart really does a lot... it allows you to easily write to the registry, do stuff with Windows system stuff like manipulating users, it allows you to script applications using COM automation or plain old SetFocus and SendKeys functions, has good integration with the shell, and it even has an RPC service you can run to allow remote administration. KiXtart is really geared towards network administrators writing logon scripts. And of course KiXtart has the requisite set of BASIC functions.
However, I was very surprised when I found that there's an extension to KiXtart called KiXforms that allows you to write GUI apps using KiXtart.
So I'm psyched that I have a new tool in my disposal for scripting windows. I hope to never have to mess with Windows Script Host (huge pain in the ass) or try to hack up complicated batch files again. For more info, check out:
Footnotes:
[1]: which I discovered over two years ago... boy was the world different on that day
Goal: Don't obsessively check e-mail.
Goal corollary: Only check your SPAM folder once a week (maybe twice). If you don't bother deleting your SPAM when you get it, you won't be tempted to obsessively check your e-mail.
By the way, I use K9 for SPAM fighting. Recommended.
It's like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain!!
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
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new⇒I hate Norton Antivirus
Long long live AVG I love you!...
kevin sands: Sep 6, 7:31pm