I am writing code, and needed a bit of advice. I had remember reading something on one of my favorite blogs so I headed over there to find the entry that I was looking for. Unfortunately for me, I found instead one of those damn "Time Suckers". You know what they are... Flash games.
So I thought I would share with my audience the latest fun game: Squares
Someone posted a couple of weeks ago that you could hold CTRL and right click on a tab in IntelliJ IDEA and it would close the tab. That doesn't seem to work for me, but middle clicking the tab with the scroll wheel does. This also works in Mozilla and Firefox. Very cool.
My first visit to A9.com was unimpressive. It appeared to be "just another search engine". I wish I had returned sooner.
For those who don't know, A9 is a search engine created by Amazon.com. They are using Google for most of the searching duties, but hook into other engines when they fit the "mode" like IMDB when you are searching movies. They have personalized results by remembering the searches you have executed in the past (awesome!) and have a good interface for displaying search results for images, books, bookmarks, diary entries, movies and reference material with the primary web results. These will be nifty when the searches are appropriate.
When you "re-execute" a search, the results also keep track of the sites that you have visited already and give you a time frame of when you went there last. I wonder if they will treat the book marks the same way...
Of course everything hooks into Amazon's primary site in some way, so that could get annoying after a while, and all of those privacy whacko's will probably have a problem with Amazon knowing what you search for (which they use to display new sites to you in the "Discover" section). Scott McNealy has it right, there is no such thing as privacy.
For the most part, A9 looks to be a winner and for the next couple of days will be my search engine of choice. The following link will give you a full overview about A9.
Hmmmm... I am wondering how well this RSS thing works in Firefox.
I am running the PostgreSQL 8.0 beta on my Windows box for development. While I was downstairs eating dinner, my computer crashed, which even though it is Windows, that is still unusual. When I tried to start PostgreSQL after the reboot, it would not start. Windows would say, this is sometimes normal for services to just not start up and offered no assistance about what was actually going wrong. I found a .pid file in the data directory. Since the database wasn't running, I decided that it should go. I tried to start it again and BAM it started right up.
So, if you can't get your Postgre database running after a Windows crash, try deleting the .pid file in the data directory.
My wife and I have been watching more Indy films. They seem to be better than normal Hollywood films. I wonder if that is because only the good ones make it to DVD? The latest film was "Pieces of April" which was good. Indies seem to drag and there is a definite lack of action. They all make you think instead of spoon feeding the story to you.