Massless

To my surprise, this morning I discovered someone had placed a new image in the massless /images folder on my server on Friday. The culprit was clever, but she left some clues I could use to determine her identity. For example, the image being a picture of her. :)

Some thoughts on Java: Until now, I couldn't imagine writing a program with scalable I/O requirements in Java. But it looks like Sun will address that problem in v.1.4 of the J2SE by including a java.nio package to improve the I/O subsystem. From the proposal:

"The new filesystem interface will work more consistently across platforms, will make it easier to write programs that gracefully handle the failure of filesystem operations, will provide more efficient access to a larger set of file attributes, will allow developers of sophisticated applications to take advantage of platform-specific features when absolutely necessary, and will allow support for non-native filesystems, such as network filesystems, to be "plugged in" to the platform. "

And here's an interesting quote: "The scalable I/O API, the binary I/O API, and the new filesystem interface will rely heavily upon services provided by the underlying operating system and hardware platform. To implement these components will require writing native code to interface to such services. [Emphasis added] We hope to keep the amount of native code to a minimum. "

Furthermore, here's the official Sun documentation of the java.nio API as introduced by v.1.4, the javadoc of the java.nio package, and some examples. I especially like Grep.java.

PCWorld: Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers

Visiting an old gem: Oy, You Never Visit Your Mother's Web Site

Slippery slope be damned! Regarding McVeigh's execution...

And finally some thoughts on pledge drives: If they work for PBS, why wouldn't they work for popular-but-cash-poor sites? Particularly those sites that update very frequently, say, several times a day. I...think...I'm serious. Enough people are such creatures of habit, that I'll bet they would pledge $5 every 180 days to keep their favorites sites going instead of just switching to another site that has similar content or a similar community.