There is this amazing family of designs that is used successfuly at lots of major airports. It is based on arranging the gates in circles or snowflake patterns. That way when you need to change planes, you don't have to walk miles to get from one gate to another.

Please look into it.

That is all,
RevMike

Another guy on my team is having trouble with jMeter. jMeter is a open source testing program which we were using to simulate various load conditions on our software. His core skills don't include Java, so I went to help him out.

We kept getting java.lang.OutOfMemory exceptions while trying to run various test scripts. The cases that were triggering it were bigger cases, but nothing absurdly big.

"No problem," I thought, "I'll just bump up the heap size." I edited the jmeter shell script and bumped the memory devoted to jmeter to 1.75 Gig. Still no luck. Then I started playing with various settings - If you become a java developer remind me to teach you about generational garbage collecting. Still no luck.

After two days I noticed the follwoing: All these settings were defined throughout the shell script. At the very end of the script, they were all combined into a shell variable calls ARGS, and then java was invoked. It looked something like this:

ARGS="$MODE $HEAP $SURVIVORSPACE $GCMETHOD"
java -classpath $CLASSPATH -jar jmeter.jar

This simple change, two days later, made everything work:

ARGS="$MODE $HEAP $SURVIVORSPACE $GCMETHOD"
java $ARGS -classpath $CLASSPATH -jar jmeter.jar

To make it worse, the customer was looking over my shoulder when I discovered it. He had a good long laugh at my expense.

The NY Post is truly the greatest newspaper in NY, the United States, and the world. Today's front page is a good example of why.

The invention of the printing press, of writing, nay - of language itself, all led to this.

I finally purchased the little adapter so that I can use my Treo 650 as an MP3 player. I downloaded PocketTunes, which is a fantastic little app, loaded up my memory card, and now I'm listening.

Of course, the "cool" thing is to have the white iPod headphones, or even better, the black iPod headphones. What am I using? Climb in the wayback machine and go back to 1990, when the Sony walkman line was being produced in bright yellow and black. I'm using bright yellow earbud headphones! I'm probably the only one on the train or subway hip enough to pull that off.

While we're on the topic of music, let me just stte for the record that early Pink Floyd consists of a whole lot of incredible but often overlooked music. Atom Heart Mother and Meddle are two fantastic albums; Fearless and Summer '68 are great songs. So if your experience with Pink Floyd consists of Dark Side, The Wall, Animals, and Wish You Were Here give the early stuff a listen.

Wired is running this story today. The author groans about the decline of unions in the United States:

It's sad to see the anemic state of organized labor in this country today. Worse, it kills me to admit that, to a large degree, the erosion of the labor movement is the fault of the unions themselves. Their refusal or inability to change with the times, to keep the movement relevant in the face of globalization and the digital conversion -- the so-called new economy -- has been disastrous.

Then the author continues for another page and a half without offering any sort of constructive suggestion on a way that unions can once again become relevent.

Through my career, I've been the one in charge. I've made myself valuable enough that I management works hard to keep me.

My brain is the "means of production". What can a union possibly do for me?

I got a Treo 650 about a week ago, and I figured it was time to review it. I'm a consultant dealing with about 6 or 7 clients in the Northeast US on a regular basis, plus a roughly equal number of pre-sales contacts at any given time. Reliable access to my email as well as contacts, schedule, etc. is critical for me. Mobility is critical for me.

First, some background. I bought a Treo 600 about 18 months ago - the Sprint CDMA model for those keeping score at home. I found it to be an indispensible tool, but not without its problems. First, the built in applications are lousy. The built in web browser is all but useless, unable to load any but the simplest of pages. The built in email application is pathetically basic. The camera produced poor results even in perfect conditions. I frequently had to reset the phone, on some days as much as often as three or four times. It was only a good phone when measured against everything that came before it.

On the good side, the GoodLink software http://www.good.com/ provided extremely good synchronization with my company's exchange server. The killer usage here has been for my engineers to send me a patch in email, detach the patch to the SD flash card, and use a pocket USB flash card device to load the patch onto the client server. When clients are behind strict firewals, the phone paid for itself in prductivity gained from not having to leave the client site and find a hotspot every time I needed a patch

Also, PDANet by http://www.junefabrics.com/ is a very useful app tht allowed me to use the Treo as a modem, getting up to 144kb data connection on my laptop anywhere within Sprint's 1xRTT digital network.

I had looked briefly at the Treo 700w. I didn't like the fact that Windows Mobile is not quite as usable as the Palm OS on a Treo. 700w need to pull out the stylus and use two hands a lot more often that users of the Palm based Treos. I also didn't like the fact that the screen resolution was reduced compared to that of the Treo 650. The 700w did offer EvDO service, however, for data speeds rated at 400-600kb with bursts up to 2Mb. I was already using an EvDO PCMCIA card at this point, though, and so that was interesting but not compelling.

My plan, then, was to wait for the Treo 700p, rumored for a late May release. The 700p is basically an updated 650, fixing the one glaring flaw with the 650 - its small memory - and adding EvDO support. A friend, however, offered me a sightly used Sprint branded Treo 650 for free, however. I jumped at the chance. I called Sprint and activated the new phone, then immediately started putting it through its paces.

Before doing anything else, I upgraded the firmware to the latest and greatest - rev. 1.13. Then I got the newest version of GoodLink installed. At this point my new Treo was functional for work, and I could look at other features at my liesure.

Even before adding additional software, the base unit represents a major upgrade. The mail application supports POP and IMAP and comes with built in profiles for major mail providers. I was able to configure it immediately for access to my AIM mail and the mail account associated with my cable modem. The built-in browser is pretty darn good. I'm able to use it to get to GMail and Yahoo! Mail. In fact I've found it works well on all but very few of the sites I visit on a regular basis. The phone application has a nice shortcuts function that can be used both for speed dial and to launch most other aplications quickly and easily. The launcher has been upgraded to handle applications installed on an SD flash card as well as the internal memory, so I no longer need a special application for that.

On the hardware side, there are several nice upgrades as well. First the screen is a bright 320x320, which supports QVGA apps with room above and below for menus and such. The camera is not great, but greatly improved. It is usable now, rather than a waste of space. The battery is removable, and I've taken to carrying a spare rather than pulling out the charger on particularly heavy days.

I only have one complaint. The keyboard functions are slightly different than the Treo 600. I'm accustomed to pressing the far right power key in order to turn the screen back on during a call. Now that button also ends a call, so I've accidentally hung up on some people before I broke the habit.

All the palm products benefit from a large library of free and low cost software. I had been running a mobile content application called AvantGo but the web browser is good enough that I may drop it. I'm looking into various MP3 and video players as well, but will go down that road once I get headphones. The coolest application I've found so far is Kmaps, which delivers Google Maps directly to my phone. I also enjoy card games, and have purchased about a dozen from Seahorse Software, including Euchre.

There are several IM choices at several price points. VeriChat is the standard full featured choice, but costs $25 up front then $20 per year. I don't use IM very much, so I instead installed Agile Messenger 2.0 Beta. VeriChat can run in the background while using other applications, but Agile is a foreground only application. Agile has the advantage of being free (as in beer), however, which is the right price for the occassional user.

BlueTooth is functional, but not perfect. Others have complained that the Treo 650 is prone to static with many headsets. I can't disagree. My wife recently got the Motorola RAZR V3c with matching H500 headset and that combination outperforms the Treo 650 and Treo headset. It is still better than the wired headset, though, and I won't go back. I chose the Treo headset because it uses the Treo charger and I didn't want to carry around yet another wall wart in my bag, but I might have had better performance if I had studied all the reviews and chose a different headset. Voice dialing is not available built in, but there are some 3rd party apps that provide this.

Dial-up networking is available natively via BlueTooth as well - reducing the need to use PDANet. PDANet, however, still has the advantage of being able to connect the phone and PC via the sync cable for better speed and battery life. The Treo 650 is still a 1xRTT device, so it isn't any faster than the 600. The 700p should support EvDO.

A note about chargers: Sprint made a decision to sell a universal charger that charges most off the phones sold by Sprint. They provide a small adapter that connects the universal charger to the Treo 650 power port. It was easier to find a Sprint universal car charger and an iGo power tip for Sprint at my local Radio Shack than get the "native" Treo versions of both.

As a final note, the stability of the Treo 650 is a step up from the 600 and, from my observations of the Windows Mobile users I know, better than that as well. I've experienced a few hangs or resets while installing and removing various combination of software, but hangs or resets in normal use have been rare. Most of them have been related to using the web browser to open a page that downloaded too much content, causing an out-of-memory condition. The phone always recovers just fine. Unlike the 600, the Treo 650 is smart enough to automatically reactivate the phone if the phone was turned on before a self-triggered reboot. The 600 woud sometimes reboot leaving the phone turned off - and one got to enjoy a quiet day until realizing that all the incoming calls were going straight to voicemail.

A note about service... I'm using Sprint and I've been happy with it. In the US, the CDMA service providers tend to have better coverage and better data plans than the GSM providers, and that certainly won't change until WCDMA/UMTS replaces GSM. The two national CDMA providers are Sprint and Verizon. Verizon has a better coverage area but Sprint has a generally better rate structure. Verizon also has a reputation among the smartphone community for modifying their phones, disabling certain features. My usage varies greatly month to month, from a few hundred minutes to a few thousand. Under the Sprint "Fair and Flexible" plan, I only pay a small increment for blocks of minutes over my base amount. I never get stuck with a several hundred dollar bill because I went 500 minute over my plan. Also, with unlimited roaming I get voice service on the more extensive Verizon network.

In summary, the Treo 650 is an excellent smartphone. It is very functional, has broad software support, and does everything I need it do. It suffers primarily from an undersized memory, which can be somewhat mitigated by using a large flash card. Voice dialing is also a feature that my wife's RAZR does so well and makes me jealous. A better BlueTooth capability would also be nice. I wish I had upgraded a year ago. I'm extremely satisifed, though I will probably upgrade to Treo 700p once it has been out for 6 months or so. The larger memory and EvDO support are too tempting, but I'll wait for the price to come down a little and the initial bugs to be worked out.

I held back, wanting someone else to be the first to publish details of our little get-together Sol finnally did so, and now I feel a little more comfortable telling the story.

I was a bit reluctant to be first. I still blown away by how close I feel to Sol, Blinder, and btlzu2. I'm honestly a little afraid of betraying a secret, that speaking of it too loudly would somehow cause it to disintigrate like a very old piece of lace found in an old trunk in the attic.

But that isn't all; I also have a sense of particular inadequacy. Of the four of us, I am the only one who is not an artist. I am not a musician, nor a poet. I can not illustrate, nor can I write prose. It simply isn't in me.

(Don't get me wrong: I'm not lacking for self esteem. I'm a damn good engineer. My talents are simply different.)

Regardless, I do have this sense of particular inadequacy. Why would I attempt to provide a narrative of the evening, when I am likely the least capable of capturing the textures? Better to let someone else. Now that the ice has been broken, however, let me comment from the peanut gallery...

Originally, these two invited blinder and i out to dinner, but i managed to coax them into coming by instead, so i'd have more spoons to offer, being at home.

This actually caught me a little off guard. My interaction with the rest of zoo.pl has always been a little more distant. Btlzu2 was actually the first with whom I shared telephone conversation, and that was a job interview. I like you all, but until now I never took significant steps to move my relationship with any of you beyond the realm of slashdot.

I was surprised that you would invite a couple of "strangers" into your home. There are lots of weirdos on the internet, you know. :) Had I known ahead of time that you had a much deeper relationship with btlzu2, I would not have been so surprised.

The RevMike is a charming- and i mean VERY charming- guy, who alternates between quiet and loud. I'll get to that. For now, just know that he doesn't show up without charm and grace. You immediately get the sense that he's the grownup in the room, which must be weird for him but is a profound relief for everybody else. We blinked, smiled, and thought, "At least there's a grown-up along."

But not the stuffy kind of grownup. This is the kind who can get you into trouble you NEVER could have thought of on your own!!!

If I had been drinking when I read that, it would have come through my nose. ME! A GROWN-UP? I can't dispute the trouble part.

Anyway, we sat around the table and ate and talked for the first half of the night. First we had cheese, chips, and pesto. Sol made a delicious dinner. We talked much about others in the zoo. Blinder showed us a picture he has of ellem playing guitar wearing the wild expression of a mass murderer. He left his laptop open across the room and I could feel ellem watching me from the corner of his eye. Sol and Blinder assured me he was a very nice guy, and that the police never found enough evidence, but I still needed them to close the laptop.

Revmike is... loud, and quiet. THat is to say, he's a wiseass who can fit in around here, but he is also observant, well-balanced, and thinks a lot more than he says. There's a sophistication about him that isn't about trying to be clever, it's about thought. And i like that. He's the sweet kind of person who also seems to get things done- and he does it in a discreet way so that no one realises who's really guiding the events of the evening.

He was the first to take pictures. The first to share pictures, the first to share contact info, the first to introduce audio and recording, and he did it so smoothly you wouldn't have realised that the ideas were all coming from him. It's very remarkable. Good leaders are hardly noticed for it at all- i like this guy.

After dinner, Sol served us dark chocolate and cherry vodka. Btlzu2 and gluttonously finished the bottle. :)

Then, however, we prevailed on Sol and Blinder to share their talents. Sol read her story "Harold and the Dragon" for us, and Blinder showed us some samples of sketches that Sol had made of teacup dragons. They played some music they had written and recorded together, including a song called "Accelerant". Sol also sang a acapela rendition of their song "Tokyo Flat" I attempted to record all this using my mobile phone's camcorder capability, and failed at every turn. When my phone locked up and needed to be rebooted, I even lost the six minute interview which should have become the foundation of "SolemnDragon: Behind the Music". :(

You still need to send me that recording of Tokyo Flat.

I don't think of myself as a leader. I'm pretty sure I am not. I encouraged everyone to do things they wanted to do anyway. We took pictures using our camera phones then beamed them to each other's palm pilots. It doesn't take lots of persuassion to get a bunch of geeks playing with their gadgets.:)

And the performance stuff - you yourself admit that you love an audience. When someone is passionate about something - like you are with your art - it doesn't take much to get them to share it.

It is more accurate to turn it around. Sol, that nickname is so very appropriate for you, because other naturally make you the center. Your warmth, enthusiasm, passion make you the sun in any solar system you occupy. Btlzu2 and I encourage you to take that center place because we enjoy your warmth and glow. A king may tell the sun to rise, but if he gives the order just before dawn, he really isn't showing much leadership.

One last thing: OMG!!111!!! PONYS!!!11!1!1!

My eldest son is a genius. This has become obvious less than a month after his third birthday.

Sunday was a beautiful spring day here in Metro NYC. It was sunny and almost 70 degrees. I was cleaning the yard and my son was playing. In the late afternoon he noticed that the moon was out.

I have this crazy habit that I inherited from my own father where I frequently break out into song, inspired by some observation or event around me. My wife says that she always though musicals were silly - who breaks into song like that - until she met my family.

Anyway, I started singing Cat Steven's Moon Shadow for my son. For those that don't recall the song, the verse goes something like...

If I ever lose my leg
I won't groan and I won't beg
If I ever lose my leg
I won't have to walk no more

... the song continues through various verses where Cat Stevens describes what kind of things he won't have to do if he loses certain body parts.

So now here comes the genius part...

My son starts singing his own original verse:

If I ever lose my finger
I won't have to carry my spoon at dinner.

Now the rhyme and meter isn't perfect, but an ordinary three-year-old should not be able to understand why the lyrics are clever and funny, and be able to passably imitate them!

A high level WoW character died in real life. The other members of the guild activated the character in order to hold a memorial service, which apparently was also attended by a rival guild. Meanwhile, a third guild used the memorial service as an opportunity for a surprise attack on the funeral, wiping out everyone there. They also released a video of the attack.

Is this horribly insensitive or hysterically funny? Should the attacking guild be criticized for their actions, or are their characters simply doing what is appropriate for those characters? Certainly, these types of attacks are not unheard of. For instance, one such attack took place in Iraq on Dec 19, 2004.

I submitted an "Ask Slashdot" a few minutes ago and it got rejected. Here it is...

I am the senior field engineer for a small but rapidly growing software vendor. Our product appears as a database to clients, but actually generates sql and performs federated queries against underlying data sources. The data sources are most commonly one or more of the 4 major SQL products, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, and Oracle.

We need to grow our field force. The skill sets we need boil down to a good working knowledge of Java and a very strong SQL background especially data design and query tuning. I usually refer to these skills as "Development DBA" skills, jobs that are often done by DBAs but distinct from the "Operational DBA" skills of tuning the database software and environment, handling backups, monitoring, etc. I don't care too much about any specific platform, because for the type of work we do knowledge of one platform can be applied to the others through judicious use of Google.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to find the combination of skills that we need. Lots of developers either specialize in the SQL end, and have very little knowledge of Java or .Net, while those that have decent knowledge of Java and/or .Net treat the database as almost a black box, relying on a DBA to tune the SQL, or just using whatever they get from a framework like Hibernate.

I've been tasked with creating a study plan that will bring those developers up to speed on SQL very quickly. But that isn't an easy task. What resources would you recommend?

So tell me what was so important to all the nerds in nerdville that a potentially useful and interesting discussion gets skipped? An article about the compensation system at Microsoft!

And can anyone tell me why I excellent Karma, don't post excessively, but haven't seen mod points in about a year?

Every day I have /. a little more.

Down here in <heavyaccent>Long Island</heavyaccent> we are just getting the heaviest band of snow now. I have about 10 inches on the ground, with drifts of 20 inches. I expect to have about 16-18 inches by the time it is done.

The city is recording a solid 2 feet, the 2nd heaviest snowfall on record, and with a few hours of light snow left to go the storm may make it to number 1.

The talking heads have been discussing how odd this winter has been, having the warmest January on record followed by a record snowfall in early Feb. I was shouting at the TV that they are idiots. The two are tightly connected. Warm January = high surface temperatures in the surround ocean. Any moderately sized coastal storm is going to have tons of moisture feeding it, and therefore large snowfall amounts. Very cold seasons have less snow, beceause there is less moisture in the air.

I need advice...

My company is starting to get clients into Europe, and over the course of this year I may have a few chances to go to Europe, particularly London. What is the best thing to do for Mobile Phone service.

Here in the US, I use Sprint, a non-GSM carrier. Sprint will provide me a SIM card that will allow me to get service from my phone number while in Europe. I'll need to get a GSM phone to go with it. The service will cost $1.50 per minute.

How much does it cost to sign up for a pre-paid plan in London, for instance. How much should I expect to pay for calls back to the United States via that pre-paid plan? Does this make sense for someone who only visits for a week here and there?

Are there any other options?

Thanks.

Hello, all.

I think I'm finally going to take the plunge...

I've been using Uniz/Linux off and on for about 15 years now. I know my way around enough to troubleshoot the software that I implement professionally and do all sorts of odd things, but I've never made it my primary box. I've always fallen back on a Windows box for my general purpose web browsing and email.

Well, all that is changing right now. I have some relatives coming to live with me for several months - they've sold their house and are in the process of buying a new one, but will be living with us until the new sale is complete. Their PC is way past its prime - still running Windows ME and not suitable for futher upgrade.

Meanwhile, I have an adequate desktop for basic purposes. It is a 900MHz Athlon currently running WinXP. No, it isn't a speed demon but for email, web browsing, and the like it is perfectly fine. I'm going to rebuild this for my guests.

I also had an old 300MHx Pentium that has been gathering dust. This is a Win95 vintage machine with a no-name GPU and 192 MB of Ram. What the heck, I decided, and downloaded the lastest Debian. It wasn't the smoothest install because the cdrom wasn't supported, but I was able to install from floppy/network and get a basic text-only Debian system running.

A little work with apt-get got me X, and then I needed to iterate by hand a few times to get a reasonable config for X. IceWM seems to be a nice window manager thatr is preety lightweight.

Next I got Firefox and Thunderbird running. The neat thing was I was able to bring over all the profile info from windows and it came up just fine.

My current challenge is getting YahooPops! running. Then I need to get OpenOffice. Finally, getting some typical browser plugins like flash and acrobat should complete my box.

Hi Everybody!

I have a Canon PowerShot S20. It is a nice 3+ megapixel camera. It has served me well. My Uncle recently upgraded, however, and gave me his Canon PowerShot S45, a much improved camera.

Here is the deal. I'd like to swap my S20 for a smaller form factor camera, something that I can carry in my pocket virtually all the time. I'm willing to sacrifice resolution.

Anyone interested?

Thanks,
Mike