A Quantum Immortal

Well, aren’t we all? Go get your banner now.

Heh, I still remember the days when I only programmed in C++, and Tomer told me how great C# is (one of the major benefits he listed was Resharper 2.0).

I didn’t believe him then, but now, I don’t understand how anyone can program in C++ (except realtime/embedded programmers).

Well, everyone that’s told me in the recent week how good the new Batman movie couldn’t prepare me – it is really that good, and better.

I rate it 5 on movielens (must see).

Gmail recently added a nice feature: Down the page (near the space usage stats) there is the text “Last account activity”. If you click on details, you get the recent gmail sessions you’ve had, and can even disconnect them. Useful for checking that nobody’s using your credentials from anywhere…

Embedding the above image link doesn’t work, and I have no idea why 🙁
Here is a link to the image.

P.S.
Thanks to Eran for the tip.

After having used it for a few weeks, I have this to say following my last post:

1. Great Support! We’ve had a couple of issues with Teamcity, some because our owns unit tests "maliciously" killed all java processes as a form of cleanup, and this killed the TeamCity Build Agents, and some other problems related to which version of the JVM was to be used. The TeamCity support staff and developers were extremely helpful and responsive, and aided us to get a stable Continuous Integration system up and running.
2. Enjoyable UI – the AJAX UI is usually very responsive, and rather feature-complete. It gives easy access to builds, projects, a sane way to manage settings and source control bindings, and a quick way to access the full log for every individual build (can be quite a few megs!) What I am missing is the one specific feature – I want the UI to clearly spell out the name of the person who broke the build (and speak it very loudly using text-to-speech, but that could be considered too esoteric to be included in the main build but rather implemented as a plugin).
3. Impressive code duplication finder – buggy at first, it now semi-stabilized. While we haven’t had the time yet to actually work with it and remove duplications from our code base, it’s just a matter of internal priorities at Delver. The power this gives a developer that wishes to improve his code base is huge.
4. VC integration – a bit less smooth than the other features. It’s mostly worked for me, but sometimes it didn’t. The Personal Build feature is very attractive, but I found one major problem using it: I ran a personal build that succeeded, but then it failed to automatically merge the code. I don’t know if anything can be done about this – I can GetLatest before running the build, but the content of the branch may still change, and unless the merge is automatic human will be needed to solve it. However, I think it’s a powerful tool that should work most of the time.

That’s it for now. All in all, great product – keep it up JetBrains.

Rarely do we appreciate enough the little things in life. I believe this sentence is true on many levels, and today I want to focus on one of our basest assumptions. We live in this physical universe, and are gifted with the unique ability to influence it. Firstly, this universe has a dimension of time to it, our lives are not static, boring, never changing. Instead they are dynamic, changing for good and bad, giving us a steady flow of new experiences. This is a basic requirement for the very definition of good and bad, because in a constant universe there is no differentiation, and everything is just plain zero. Living in a dynamic universe, we give meaning to each experience in relation to the previous ones and to the experiences that follow, and are thus able to observe and appreciate these changes, and enjoy at some of our moments in time, in contrast with other, worse moments.

Secondly, we are not simply watching our lives go by as if it were a movie playing in a theater. We are conscious, living beings, who can act of our own intent and purpose, and bring change to the physical world surrounding us. I’m not talking about grand plans and designs, I think we should be grateful about our simple ability to pick up an object, move our hands and feet, throw a ball and marvel at the effects we cause. The simple Newtonian rules of cause and effects govern our day to day lives and give us the simple pleasure of mobility. Furthermore, we wield tools to our every whim, and can rule over other physical objects. Of course this causes problems sometimes as some people forget that other people are not merely objects but willful beings of their own, and their will conflicts … but I digress.

Before thanking God, chance or math, whichever you believe is responsible for creating this universe (I believe that physics is a subset of math) for gifts like wealth, happiness and health, remember to first appreciate the more basic qualities of our existence, without which there would be no questions of health, illness, happiness or sadness.

I had wondered of we all use Google because it is objectively better or because we are used to it being better all this time. Maybe Yahoo and MSN had improved since we decided to switch to Google?

Here, try this search on MetaCrawler. Only Google finds this page. Google has the benefit that it owns Blogger and can possibly get easier access to its database, but still that hardly justifies as an excuse for the other search engines – the post being searched is over a month old!

A cool feature I wanted for some time – I started typing in my Google search box in Firefox, but it was in the wrong language. Google knows my mistake:

BTW, the thing I was looking for for “gmail attachment problem”. For some time now whenever I click on an attachment in Gmail I get the attachment, but the current tab goes blank. If you have the same issue here is the solution – just disable/uninstall TabMix.