WASTE

WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.

WASTE is designed to enable small companies and small teams within larger companies to easily communicate and collaborate in a secure and efficient fashion, independent of physical network topology.”

WASTE also seems to have created a permanent rift between programmer Justin Frankel (one of the authors of WinAmp and his employer Nullsoft (owned by AOL Time Warner) who pulled it. Here is my mirror of WASTE

Donald E. Knuth Rules

He hasn’t had an email address since 1990 and he wrote one of the 12 most significant scientific monographs of the 20th century. He rules.
This isn’t news but in case you haven’t seen it here is the classic Knuth (Ka-NOOTH) quote:

On March 22, 1977, as I was drafting Section 7.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, I read four papers by Peter van Emde Boas that turned out to be more appropriate for Chapter 8 than Chapter 7. I wrote a five-page memo entitled “Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion,” and sent it to Peter on March 29 (with copies also to Bob Tarjan and John Hopcroft). The final sentence was this: “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

Donnie Darko

I saw Donnie Darko last night.

And as soon as I got out I wanted to know what possible explanation there could be for the story and (most importantly) for the ending. It took me a long time to come up with any satisfactory explanation so for the benefit of others here are the sites that really helped:

28:6:42:12 an MSN group that has (amongst other things) the complete text of ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’

The best explanation I could find (I’m not entirely happy with it but as the film was clearly left ‘open’ it may be the best I’m going to get it)

Its also clear to me from reading the comments of others that the director’s commentary track on the DVD goes a long way towards giving a full explanation (but doesn’t quite give you everything). I plan to get hold of the DVD and will post another story if my findings are interesting enough

Converting Month Number to Month Name In Java!

How long have I wanted to know how to do this! So long so many months! Finally:

import java.text.*;

String getMonthForInt(int m) {
    String month = "invalid";
    DateFormatSymbols dfs = new DateFormatSymbols();
    String[] months = dfs.getMonths();
    if (m >= 0 && m <= 11 ) {
        month = months[m];
    }
    return month;
}

Praise the lord! Praise the lord!