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noevir review
noevir is a “direct marketing” company focusing on cosmetics and “* care” (skin, body, etc) type of products. After looking at their site I’m mostly neutral about them. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to join such (“direct marketing”) organizations, but that’s not specific to noevir. It also says “Ginza Tokyo” in the header, which is a…
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scentsy review
scentsy has an interesting concept for providing different scents in the room: rather than burning different materials (like candles or sticks) it uses a lightbulb to heat the wax. This provides a “smoke-free” way to enjoy your fragrances. An other advantage of the concept is that it keeps the warm glow of the candle. If…
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Processing clipboard data in Perl
The problem: lets say you have a program which generates data to the clipboard (or it is easier to get the data into the clipboard than into a file) and you want to process the data (create a summary for example). Perl to the rescue! Get the Clipboard module (if you use Linux, it is…
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Why Ubuntu 10.10 is better than Windows XP?
I want to preface this with the following: I don’t want to pull a fanboy move here. The only thing I assert is that a recent OS (ie. Ubuntu 10.10) can give a considerable performance improvement (without changing the hardware) compared to an almost 10 year old OS (Windows XP). Without further ado, compiling a…
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Java has some surprising amount of dinamism in it
Not long ago I saw some java code from Simone Tripodi. It generates synchronization wrappers around arbitrary objects at runtime in a typesafe manner with a couple of easy to understand lines of code. The heavy lifting is done by the dynamic proxy mechanism available from Java 1.5 if I recall correctly. The downside is…
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delicious/cdman83
performance tweaks and tools for linux
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Java Date objects can mutate, even when read
Ran into this problem a couple of months ago, when we saw some strange dates in production. So I dug into the Java library sources (thank you Sun for providing those!) and found that Date objects aren’t always “normalized”. Rather, sometimes a “denormalized” value is stored which is later (lazily) normalized. The normalized value isn’t…
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TigerChef review
Lately I’ve been experimenting with some simple cooking, and of course for cooking you need cooking equipment. TigerChef is one of the many sources of cooking equipment you can get, although they are oriented more at restaurants than individual needs. Anyway, I’m quite happy with the initial experiments and with the help of my dear…
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Problems (and a semi-solution) for tcpdump with DAG cards
Documenting here for posterity, since I didn’t find much information about it on the ‘net: Disclaimer: I’m not a network head, just an amateur who dabbles with it when he needs to fix a problem. Given one Ninjabox (the nickname for packet capture boxes from Endace) with a DAG card (some kind of custom packet…
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shuttledirect review
The purpose of this website is to offer prebookable Airport taxi transfers. This means that you can rent a transportation method to/from the airport before you even embark on your journey. Is it worth it? I have to admit that I’m far from being a big traveler, but until now every airport I’ve been to…