java.net.UnknownHostException: Invalid address: fe80::1d9:b65a:ed86:7940%11

Not being much of a networking expert I was puzzled about the ‘%11′. Once again superuser.com came to rescue:  http://superuser.com/questions/99746/why-is-there-a-in-the-ipv6-address.

“I think Java became a success despite Sun’s corporate culture. Priorities at Sun changed quite rapidly from time to time. At Oracle it takes longer to make a plan but then with stick with it” (something along the lines of that)

While Henrik Ståhl showed at least some passion and inspiration (neatly hidden underneath the Scandinavian cover) Cameron Purdy seemed to be nearly falling asleep himself flipping through his overloaded Oracle marketing slides. That he brought a colleague on stage who demonstrated the “cloud features” – gosh, how I hate this over-hyped cloud stuff – of the upcoming Glassfish 4.0 to him, instead of the audience, was seriously odd.

Tim Bray might be as high profile at Google Android as Ståhl/Purdy are at Oracle but there was pure passion pouring out of his mouth. Passion for software, passion for code, passion for improvement – and he spoke for himself and much less for Google*. He was vibrant and inspiring. Also, he was very humble and particularly respectful towards the Android competitors. Not a single rant or joke about iPhone or Windows Mobile 7 which he expects to catch up to Apple/Google pretty soon.

Tim Bray @Devoxx 2011:

1. “Information wants to be free.”
2. “The absence of women is the elephant in the living room. It must be discussed.” on the lack of women @Devoxx showing Banksy‘s famous red elephant photo
3. “If you are not working on mobile you are away from the action.”
4. “…wouldn’t you rather feed the poor, cloth the naked, cure the sick?” on why it’d be so much more important to develop apps for people in the third world rather than for us westerns who lead a lifestyle that lacks nothing (mobile Internet access dwarfs “cable-based” access particularly in underdeveloped countries)
5. “The importance of static type checking is proportional to the number of APIs your coding against, but inversely proportional to easyness of unit testing.” or so

* I’m neither an Android developer, and I don’t intend to become one, nor is it the mobile platform of my choice. I’m all Apple

Q: How do you know that a die-hard software company is off course?
A: When marketing has too much influence.

Q: How do you know that marketing has too much influence?
A: Among other things, when the pre-configured email format becomes HTML instead of plain text.

The place I work at used to be a proud Unix shop. Meeting minutes and notes were written with Emacs and other plain-text orientated text editors. Some of the founders and long-time employees use Pine and Mutt to this day to process their emails. Of course, we required that our employees send plain text email only. This sense for purism was something that set us apart from competitors. I feel we cherished this and were proud of it.

Being a long-term HTML-email hater and, therefore, supporter of the the ASCII Ribbon Campaign myself I felt really let down when it was announced recently that our new default email format would be HTML. Many of my colleagues just shook their heads in disbelieve. We feel that ungodly forces are getting a hold of the place we still feel proud working at. Let’s see for how much longer…

I started reading “Clean Coder” the same day it arrived at my desk. Contrary to “Clean Code”, Uncle Bob’s previous book, it was supposed to about coding /practices/ rather than code. As such it should be about the the /behavior/ of engineers who strive to write clean code.

Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

So, I for a few days I read chapter by chapter while commuting to and from work. It was a similar experience to reading “Clean Code”, very often I would think “Exactly! That’s it, nicely put.” because Uncle Bob’s believes and convictions are very much in line with my own. However, the longer I read the less interested I became. Finally, the book has been siting unfinished and untouched in my backpack for well over a month.

Why? Much more than in “Clean Code” Uncle Bob keeps repeating himself and if you’ve read some of his previous publications you know what to expect. Besides, there are way too many personal stories from his past that seem irrelevant (to me) for the purpose of the book.

If you have only little time, or little patience, I recommend you read at least the first chapter titled “professionalism”. In many ways it’s like a summary of the book.

Embedded error: Error performing commands for file transfer
Exit code: 0 - bash: unzip: command not found

for the longest time. I tried all kinds of funny things although I was 100% certain that I do have unzip in path. I was a bit embarresed when I finally realized that this error message was the result of the command executed over SSH on the remote host (Debian Linux) – the one the site was deployed to.

After that it was a piece of cake. Just had to install unzip on Linux using APT: apt-get install unzip

Unfortunately, the documentary doesn’t seem to be available anywhere online but for an 11-part copy in rather bad quality at YouTube:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6
7. Part 7
8. Part 8
9. Part 9
10. Part 10
11. Part 10+ aka part 11 aka the end

A report with very similar stories was published in 2009 by National Geographic. The Durihana Christian organization and its leader, pastor Chun, featured in both the documentary and the NG article, have their own Wikipedia page.