While any developer worth their salt should be able to write code in a text editor, any developer worth their salt will also know that it can easily become a slow, error-prone process when dealing with larger or more complex code bases. Using a decent IDE can dramatically speed up development and reduce the likelihood of introducing errors.

Myself, I've used a number of IDEs in the past - Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA - and I have to say that IntelliJ IDEA is really hands down (in my opinion) the best one out there.

A few reasons why:

It's fast. It's extremely customizable, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins available to extend the IDE's functionality. It supports dozens of languages and file types. It's got an excellent debugger. Git and Maven integration are fantastic. Refactoring can be done perfectly in seconds or minutes instead of potentially hours if done manually. Navigating the code base is made super easy with "Find usages" and "Go to source."

Also, because the company (JetBrains) is in the business of making money, they actually sell their products instead of just giving them away for free (although there are free, reduced-functionality versions available), they have a lot more money to pour into their products than other options out there, and it shows.

Basically, as a software developer, I want to spend my time writing code, not dealing with associated peripheral tasks, i.e. noise. Using a good IDE can help you do this.

Good luck with your decision making process!

yeah I know what you mean. I got a taste of DAF myself in speech therapy in high school for my stutter, and I couldn't tolerate it, drove me absolutely nuts.

in fact, I tried a number of different approaches in speech therapy when I was a kid, and none of it worked. eventually I said f-it to therapy and made a go of fixing it on my own. I'm pleased to say that whatever I did worked, such that today (and for the last 15-20 years, since college) I stutter so infrequently that when I do, people who don't know me often think I'm making a joke or otherwise screwing around. for all intents and purposes I'm now completely fluent, although being really tired or really agitated / anxious exacerbates it. those situations don't occur very often, thankfully.

what I found that *did* work though, was a combination of two things :

the first is something I like to call "speech buffering." simply put, this is the act of thinking about what I'm going to say just before I say it. I do this in real-time while I'm speaking, and the buffer only contains one or maybe two words, but that's enough. this is *not* composing an entire thought in my head before I say it - that level of composition isn't necessary. I think the buffering works by creating a better flow between syllables, such that I expect and mentally map the sounds before they get executed. I think I still do it, but I've been doing it for so long I'm not even particularly conscious of it at this point.

the second thing I credit with really helping to resolve my stutter involved learning how to calm myself down when I get anxious about speaking - clear the mind, regulate the breathing, slow the heart rate. I found this to be really useful because public speaking has always made me nervous, and being anxious exacerbates my disfluency.

however, between these two strategies - speech buffering and meditation / breathing exercises - I've been able to speak in front of large groups of strangers, speak before televised city council meetings, give presentations at work, etc., all with negligible disfluency.

worked really well for me, maybe it can work for someone else.

How many people clicked on the link to read about the World's Most Boring Day? How intriguing! Let me read about that!

Not so boring now, is it? I foresee the topic of April 11, 1954 becoming an overnight internet meme sensation, retroactively promoting the day to one of reverence, in a not-dissimilar fashion to the mechanism by which certain artists become famous and revered only many years after they've departed.

Any takers? Yes? No?

FWIW, I'm currently reading "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior" by Ori and Rom Brafman. It's a really excellent book, similar in topic, and well-researched, and enjoyable to read with interesting real-life anecdotes to exemplify the points they raise. It touches on many different influences that affect our decision making processes.

http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-Behavior/dp/0385530609/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256331144&sr=8-1

I can say for certain it's definitely still going on these days in West Africa, and probably all over Africa. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 2006 through 2008, and many Gambians have these sorts of primitive tattoos, in the Wolof language called "nyaas," that are created by taking a razor blade and cutting a design in the skin. After, the charred, sooty remains of ground nuts (what we know as peanuts, which are a staple crop there) are ground into the cuts. The soot stops the bleeding, and the scar heals through and around the soot. If you don't mess with it while it's healing, it comes out looking pretty good - color me nuts, but I went through this procedure while I was there, as did a fair number of other PCVs. It's pretty cool.

Nyaas has several purposes, depending on where it's located on the body.

• If it's on the face, it's usually for beautification. Women there tended to get small cuts below and to the sides of their eyes.
• If it's on the arms or chest, it may be for beautification, but it could also be a form of "juju," or protective ward. There are many kinds of jujus - most are Koranic inscriptions written by marabous (a sort of Islamic tribal "witch doctor," although I don't really like using that term), bound into a protective leather pouch and worn on the body. Some jujus are concoctions that you drink. Anyway, so some nyass are protective jujus.
• And lastly, some nyaas are used as remedies for such mental ailments as epilepsy, for example. These are usually placed on the back, above and between the shoulder blades.

So yeah, still being done, you just gotta know where to look.

huh, so the app doesn't even do any form of steganography at all - anyone looking at the image can clearly tell it's not a regular image. probably overwrites all 8 bits of each red, green, and blue color channel with the payload. if you want the app to actually hide the torrent, you have to take a regular PNG, and overwrite only the least N significant bits of each color channel with the payload. the more bits you overwrite, the more payload you can store, but eventually (overwriting around 4 or 5 bits per color channel) the image begins to get all grainy and you can pretty easily tell there's something going on with it. overwriting all 8 bits generates an image like the example linked to in parent.

so perhaps a combination of what I suggested, plus browser/user-level whitelisting of domains you want to support? ABP currently allows you to add "exception rules" to its filter to enable ads for user-specified domains which accomplishes the whitelisting part.

ABP is currently exclusive by default (that is, it blocks all items unless specified otherwise). if you combined what I suggested in my last post about dynamic filtering based on content and aesthetics and applied that to only the whitelisted domains the user specifies (via the exception rules), you could view only the kinds of ads you like on only your whitelisted domains. this way if you don't want to view any ads on 99% of all sites out there - great! easy, just go about business as usual. if you want to support a site by allowing ads, you'd have the flexibility to do that.

I'll agree though, that if ABP doesn't allow the user the ability to fully tweak out their ad-viewing preferences, most users of the software will rebel as they - myself included - feel similarly to you. I expect a code fork would likely come about in such an event.

so, what if AdBlock Plus had in their preferences a way to specify the types of things that annoy you in ads, and then filter all ads that meet any of those criteria? Such a system would require users who encounter new ads to specify what each ad contains so ABP would know how to block it (other than obvious technical stuff you can search for like JS or Flash), but with as many ABP users there are out there, this seems like a trivial task and would make the system smart.

Set up in ABP Preferences a list like this:

Block any ads that contain:

• JavaScript
• Flash animations
• Epileptic blinking crap
• Anything having to do with Viagra, Cialis, etc.
• Anything that resembles a Windows dialog
• Anything telling me I've won something
• Anything pornographic in nature

this way, only ads that meet various content and aesthetic criteria are displayed. Maybe it'll encourage companies that make annoying ads to refine their ways?

I got rid of my debit card and replaced it with an ATM card (for getting cash directly from my bank) and credit cards (for everything else) for reasons related to this, but more generally referred to as rational paranoia.

it goes something like this:

1. I don't like entering my bank account's PIN in the local Try-N-Save. it just feels like a bad idea. now, according to the very brief amount I've read on this here, it is;

2. debit cards are linked directly to your bank account. someone uses it even as a Visa card (no PIN necessary!), not even as a debit card, and that money comes straight from your bank account, not from a credit card buffer (which you can contest, and for which you aren't necessarily liable). and I don't know about you, but I'd rather contest a charge on my credit card than get a call from my bank telling me that my mortgage payment failed due to insufficient funds;

3. I prefer using credit cards instead of debit cards anyway as it helps improve my credit rating, and I get perks like discount airline tickets (AMEX's Blue Sky card is pretty sweet). all you gotta do is remember to pay your bill every month and you're good to go.

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia from 06-08 as an ICT (Information Communication Technology) Specialist / Education Volunteer. I had two primary projects - one was to teach software programming to students at the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) in Kanifing (which was a whole boatload of problems, let me tell you - just try teaching programming in a computer lab - WITHOUT WORKING COMPUTERS! hah! yeah, that's what I had to deal with for an entire semester, to say nothing of the intermittent electricity, crummy virus-ridden workstations, and students who classified as "advanced" by knowing how to use Microsoft Office applications.

anyway.

my second project was to create population statistics collection software for the Gambian government's Office of the National Population Secretariat. I decided to write the software using Java with RMI over SSL using a PostgreSQL back end, with a Swing front end. problem was, I didn't have a computer - last thing I thought I'd do in a rural West African country was to write software, so I didn't bring my laptop.

so I built one from spare parts at GTTI and brought that back to my place. it wasn't much, but it's what I used to start development on the software for the first 4-5 months until I could coerce another Volunteer who was visiting America to courier my laptop back with her, which she graciously did.

so then I had my laptop. but working conditions still weren't very good, in particular the heat (got upwards of 120 Fahrenheit in the hot seasons), all the fine particulate sand that blows everywhere and gets into everything electrical (especially with fans sucking it in the way it does), the intermittent electricity (thank you laptop battery and voltage regulator, surge protector, and hackneyed grounding setup!), NO internet anywhere near my place (I had to walk a couple miles to get to the nearest net connection, where I'd do my research, download files and whatever to a USB flash drive at a whopping 6-10k per second, and then walk home, clean the viruses off my flash drive that it had picked up at the internet shop (all running cracked copies of Windows without virus scanners, of course), and continue my development. Until I hit my next roadblock, at which point I'd do it all over again.

on the plus side, I didn't have anyone looking over my shoulder telling me how to write the software, which was really nice 'cause I got to try my hand as a software architect - think I did a pretty good job with it all.

by the end of my service, I had gotten the software to work, and work well - of course, the government office I was working for had neglected to follow my instructions to procure a server for the software to run on until the last week of my service (and even then it only happened because my APCD pulled strings with the Vice President, to whom she was related, to get the computer purchased). still, it was only enough time for me to install the software and then fly back home to the US. we never did pilot launch the client applications, sadly....

A Volunteer replace me there as I understand it, but he's not a software engineer and although I've offered to assist from here how I can, I'm fairly certain the project fell apart.

Oh well, c'est la vie.

if you wanna check out the software I wrote, search for "Population Tracker" on Sourceforge. or rather, here's a link: http://poptracker.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/poptracker/

And I, for one, welcome our new super-intelligent computer overlords...