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Books clear out – please claim!

Click on picture to get a close-up.

Java puzzle 2: Extra long Unicode literals

Another simple Java puzzle. Does the following code compile? If so, what does it do when you run it? public class Unicode { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println(“\uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu0055″); } } Answer: Show ▼ It prints “U”. Unicode literals in Java are usually of the form \uxxxx, where xxxx is the hexadecimal form of […]

Why Windows 7 wasn’t accepting any passwords on our new laptop

We bought a new Samsung NP-X120 laptop the other day, which I’ve christened Sirius (previous laptops were called Hagrid and Lupin). I spent a couple of hours on Easter Monday installing software (Eclipse, emacs, iTunes, the usual stuff) and running Windows Easy Transfer to copy stuff from XP to Windows 7. “Hi, could you tell […]

“Operation currently prohibited by disk” considered harmful

Our DVD player will frequently show a little banner on the TV screen when you press a button. The banner reads: Operation currently prohibited by disk Prohibited. By a disk. What business is it for a DVD to say that I can’t fast forward through their idiotic and patronising piracy warnings and disclaimers? The worst […]

The Internet is for cat pictures

Because the Internet is primarily for distributing pictures of cats (lol- or otherwise), here are Cleo (who sadly died last year) and Henry.

Is a random set of bytes a UTF-8 string?

UTF-8 is an encoding for Unicode text with several nice properties: Any Unicode string can be encoded For pure ASCII text (characters under 128), the UTF-8 encoded form is the same as the ASCII form It’s pretty well universally recognised as a text-interchange format on the Internet Random byte streams are unlikely to be misinterpreted […]