Dr_Harm - Slashdot User

Comment Blocked? You're not interested in the code... (Score 4, Insightful) 601

by Dr_Harm on Thursday June 25, 2009 @07:22PM (#28474401) Attached to: How To Get Out of Developer's Block?

Writer's block occurs when the stuff you're trying to write is SO BORING or otherwise uninteresting and unengaging that you, yourself don't even care about it. I've heard at least one writer say that writers block is a good thing, as it tells him when he needs to go in another direction. I would take the same approach to this situation. You've got this piece of code to write, but it's so uninteresting that you don't even care about it. The question then becomes, "Why?" Is it a feature that isn't really needed? Is it an ugly brute-force approach to a problem? Maybe it's just a piece of backend code that you don't really consider "sexy". Once you figure out why you're not interested, you can then address that problem and the coders block will fix itself.

Submission + - Vista Sales Numbers Don't Add Up

Submitted by Overly Critical Guy on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @04:53PM

Overly Critical Guy writes: Vista's sales numbers don't add up according to Joe Wilcox of Microsoft-Watch. Going through the numbers and citing NPD, Gartner, and IDC, Wilcox describes the difference between licenses sold to manufacturers and actual consumer purchases, noting that there haven't been 20 million PCs sold since Jan. 30, contrary to Microsoft's numbers. In fact, only 3 million PCs have been sold since the start of the year.

Submission + - Bed sharing 'drains men's brains'

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @04:49PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power — at least if you are a man — Austrian scientists suggest. When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day.
Tinfoil condoms anyone? Bed sharing 'drains men's brains'"

Submission + - McCain's MySpace Misuses IP, Pays Consequences

Submitted by Nakanai_de on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @03:56PM

Nakanai_de writes: We all know how the 2008 Presidential candidates are looking to integrate their campaigns with the internet as much as possible. It should therefore come as no surprise that Clinton, McCain, Edwards, and Obama all have MySpace pages. Well, as TechCrunch and Newsvine are reporting, John McCain's page used a template made by Mike Davidson without proper attribution, and even used images on his server without permission. As payback, Mr. Davidson changed one of the links so that instead of listing contact info, McCain now proclaims his support for gay marriage!

Submission + - Global Gmail Outage

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @03:47PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Based on reports from the unofficial Gmail Down and official Gmail Updates and Alerts groups there appears to be a very widespread outage of the Gmail service."

Submission + - Open Source Highly Available Storage Solutions?

Submitted by Gunfighter on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @03:46PM

Gunfighter writes: I run a small datacenter for one of my customers, but they're constantly filling up different hard drives on different servers and then shuffling the data back and forth. At their current level of business, they can't afford to invest in a Storage Area Network of any sort, so they want to spread the load of their data storage needs across their existing servers like Google does. The only software packages I've found that do this seamlessly are Lustre and NFS. The problem with Lustre is that it has a single metadata server unless you configure failover, and NFS isn't redundant at all and can be a nightmare to manage. The only thing I've found that even comes close is Starfish. While it looks promising, I'm wondering if anyone else has found a reliable solution that is as easy to set up and manage? Eventually, they would like to be able to scale from their current storage usage levels (~2TB) to several hundred terabytes once the operation goes into full production.

Submission + - Vista activation circumvented with BIOS emulation

Submitted by

Steve Kerrison

on Sunday March 04, 2007 @05:55PM

Steve Kerrison writes: "If a brute force Vista product key-gen won't work, then a tool to exploit the volume licensing used by OEMs might. HEXUS.net reports that a toolkit has been produced that emulates an OEM BIOS to make the system appear as a pre-activated machine. Combined with the correct certificate and OEM key, Vista won't perform any further activation."

Submission + - New Java research obfuscator with examples

Submitted by on Sunday March 04, 2007 @05:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: JBCO is a new Java Obfuscator developed by a graduate student at McGill University. What's most interesting is the examples of decompiled source showing the results of these obfuscations. The results of the duplicate bytecode sequence reuse transformation is particularly interesting. The research paper is availablehere.

Journal Journal: Office 2007 Wrecks Outlook Express Spell Check.

Journal by Erris on Sunday March 04, 2007 @05:32PM

Ai-Eeee! ca c'est bon, no?:

Much to the delight of Francophiles everywhere, Microsoft's Office 2007 switches Outlook Express spell-checkers to work only in French. Those disposed to communicate in other languages are being advised to use third-party programs.

No, that's not good. Microsoft French is probably worse than mine. I'm glad to be a Kontact user.

Submission + - BulletProof pendrive video test

Submitted by

justelite

on Sunday March 04, 2007 @04:53PM

justelite writes: "PRETEC tell us that i-Disk BulletProof is constructed with double layers of metal protection, capable of sealing water or fire from damaging the circuit, and even shield of the heavy impact of a bullet. But this BulletProof is for real? A video test show us that i-Disk BulletProof "survive" to 44 gun but not to a 500 Magnum."

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