Process Explorer - me likee

Installed this Process Explorer a while back and it replaces the windows classic Task management stuff which is hopeless!

I love it. The best features are:

1. it shows a lot of information about what's running
2. you can search for a process just by typing the name
3. when you say "kill" it actually kills them asap rather than think and wait and ask for confirmation about 10 times...

Whoa! Goodie! Me likee.

Your own newspaper

Here's the culmination of the freedom from the mainstream: you can create your own newspaper, from the feeds you want: http://feedjournal.com/index.html

Not only are we using feed readers, we can now print our own newspapers - that's so cool...interestingly enough, this is just another of the Sovereign Individual predictions...

And...to complete the picture, for the retarded sites that don't support content feeds, here's a free service that does it: ChangeDetection. It is simple to use and no catches that I could find...

If you're looking, there's actually more of these page2rss services, including http://page2rss.com - really simple! The http://www.watchthatpage.com/ seems more complicated, while http://www.followthatpage.com/ can do only email...


Happy newsprinting!

Optional arguments in Scala

I couldn't find much on the web with this search and it took me maybe 15 min to figure it out, so here's the low down on using optional arguments in Scala. There's a description in section 8.8 in the Programming in Scala book - they call them "repeated parameters".

Using this notation you can overload Java methods with optional parms as well as pass them over to a "super." method (which was what I needed to do):

def takesOptionalArgs (x:String*) = {
   println ("Scala println: ", x.mkString(" "))
   java.lang.System.out.printf ("Java printf: %s %s %s", x:_*)
}

This special syntax instructs the compiler to pass the x array elements individually, not as an array!

Cheers.

[later edit] P.S. Note that there's an outstanding defect for overloading java vararg methods - it currently doesn't work: https://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/ticket/1459