Stylish and Rememberthemilk

I was reading the rmilk forums and came across this post. "it would be nice if the logo could be removed". It sounded like a good idea. I assumed it was a greasemonkey script. It turns out it uses Stylish.

Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, and unlike other methods of using user styles, most styles take effect immediately.

Does anyone use Stylish for anything or is this the first time you are hearing about it?

Distro Switch

This weekend I pulled my old MythTV box out of storage, removed the TV tuner card, and installed Ubuntu on it. This I pulled the hard drives from my Gentoo machine and gave the box away.

So far so good. I am having trouble with the Wi-Fi card but I think that is a constant problem with a headless linux box. I am sure I will get this working soon, but is is not really pressing as the server has the router on top of it.


My current task is trying to zero out my hard drives so I can sell/give them away. OSX seams to have a great feature for doing this, but I am having some trouble. Either I cannot mount the drives or the formatting never finishes. Any tips?

Scheming in Java

This first session I attended at NFJS was about the new features in Java 6. This was mostly about the expanded scripting languages on the JVM. I was excited to see one of these languages is my native language, Scheme. Now I need to dig out my books from school.

Although Java 6 prompted me to look into this and I can still use this on my Mac. The required SISC download works on Java 5, but jrunscript that is part of Java 6 is not there. It is not clear to me what the difference is, other than not being able access the ScriptingEngine in java code.

I see your name now and then in the code

I spent this weekend at No Fluff Just Stuff Chicago. I attended a variety of sessions and plan to blog about them over the next few weeks. (The conference also inspired me to blog here more. So, my first New Year's Resolution.)

There were 10 of us from Orbtz there but I also saw some people from other jobs or just around town. One of them was from a client when I was a consultant.

Yesterday, I reintroduced myself to him. I could not remember his name and was happy his giant conference name tag was pointing out. However before I could say my name, he said "Jacob right?, I see you name now and then in the code."

I don't think this is good. I doubt my name is only preceded by @auther JavaDoc directives. I am guessing they see it often enough to remember my name 4 years later because I have added comments in the middle of JSPs, bean descriptors, and actions just before commented out code. We used CVS on this project, but I must not have learned to trust and use it like I do now with my SCM systems.

Today, I never add comments to code that would better be kept in source control. I also write code that is more self-documenting. Most of the comments I add now are JavaDocs. From time to time I have 'if (something really complicated ) { //This is what that does in English', but more and more that is refactored to a method that can be tested alone.

Tests, I think this might be the strongest type of comments I write now. Long English test method names grouped together to describe how a methods works and then proves to you it does (every time some one commits code!)

I wasn't completely surprised this guy remembered my name though. I have a way of infecting Tomaw into projects. When I started my first job at the company where a year earlier I had taken my last internship, many of my new coworkers were surprised to know that jtomaw was a real person. My user name had become the default user name that everyone logged in using. Perhaps after writing the log in mechanism but before providing instructions to log in, I should have written how to create a new user.