Up to now, I’ve always declined to set up security questions on my Yahoo Mail account, simply because I have no fears of forgetting my password. I’ve never really thought much about the whole thing. But to my annoyance, today I was forced to select two security questions and answers, before I could even log into my account. Through pure annoyance I nearly lapsed into parody (Question: “Do I really give a F—?

I was greeted this morning with a big error page when I checked this site was running. Good morning to you too Apache! So I checked the logs, expecting something I’ve seen before, like MySQL shutting itself down spontaneously, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anything helpful in the logs. Server down, no errors in the usual logs - this is obviously a new experience! Also a very confusing experience.

I’ve wanted to do this for a while … After tracking where people are finding links to this site for for several months, I’ve included a page with a live update with these figures. What’s this useful for? Absolutely nothing. Except, I now have the makings of a homegrown stats package, written in Java, so I can reuse it for other things. One idea is to also track the browsers people are using.

IBM are promoting their Cloudscape relational database with a Java Challenge … download the product and the tables and find the hidden word using your coding skills! It seems only US/Canadian citizens can enter, no good for me but I’ll have a go at it anyway. Deadline is January 31st so better get going …

OK so it’s a rather grandiose title, but this site describes one of those brainteasers that is tricky to get your head around logically, but pretty simple empirically. Here is a ‘quick and dirty’ program I wrote to demonstrate that indeed, your chances are doubled if you change from your first choice! Output: Without swapping doors: After 1000000 runs, the prize was won 333686 times. With swapping doors: After 1000000 runs, the prize was won 666606 times.

For those with broadband, you can enable pipelining to increase the speed of page loading as follows.

BBC News have an article suggesting that this year will be memorable for mobile technology, namely 3G. I have to admit, I feel like a Luddite in that I have no interest in 3G. How many people really need to make video calls? OK it’s great technology, but if you strip out all the marketing, I think very few people would really improve their quality of life with one of these handsets.

Well I’ve spent the last couple of days learning Struts, and I found the best way to solidify my understanding: re-write this site using it! So we’re up and running again, with an even better MVC framework. What are my thoughts so far on Struts? Pros It’s much more pleasing to have page-flows that are all connected somehow, to be tied up into an action. I also like the idea that I can re-use actions.

How do you compare two images for similarity? One way is by hashing them using something like JImageHash. Libraries such as this reduce an image to a much smaller binary hash. The idea is that when hashing two images which look similar (but aren’t identical), the two hashes will be very similar. It’s possible then to get a ‘similarity score’ by finding how many bits in the two binary hashes are different.

The XHTML 1.0 specification is basically an attempt by W3C to provide a new standard of http markup, with much greater compatibility over various ‘user agents’, without breaking anything. The Web Developers' Virtual Library says it well: Portability: By the year 2002 as much as 75% of Internet access could be carried out on non-PC platforms such as palm computers, televisions, fridges, automobiles, telephones, etc. In most cases these devices will not have the computing power of a desktop computer, and will not be designed to accommodate ill-formed HTML as do current browsers (bloated with code to handle sloppy or proprietary HTML).