Online Businesses in Greek and Stool Samples

According to this article, Greece is a particularly difficult place to start an online business:

Antonopoulos and his partners spent hours collecting papers from tax offices, the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the municipal service where the company is based, the health inspector’s office, the fire department and banks. At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples.

For the sake of all that is decent, I really hope this is an error in translation or understanding, or a plain exaggeration. Thank goodness I didn't start Poker Copilot in Greece.

What I'm Cooking for Dinner Tonight

PETER SINGER'S DAL RECIPE

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic (crushed/chopped)
• 1 medium onion (diced)
• 1- 2 tablespoons curry powder, to taste
• Salt, to taste
• 1 cup small red lentils
• 3 cups water
• 2-3 bay leaves, to taste
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 tin tomatoes, (chopped)
• 1/4 cup coconut milk
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

METHOD:

1. In a large saucepan, saute garlic til fragrant.
2. Add onions and cook until they begin to soften.
3. Add curry powder and salt, to taste, and cook over medium heat til mixture begins to brown.
4. Add lentils and stir for a minute or so before adding water, the bay leaves and cinnamon stick. Bring to boil, then turn heat down very low and simmer for 20minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. Add chopped tomatoes, and simmer a further 10minutes, until thick. The lentils should be soft and the consistency just liquid enough to pour.
6. Add coconut milk and lemon juice. Stir through, and remove from heat.

Serve over rice with lime pickle and mango chutney.

Expensive creation of a Java instance

Execute this code in your Java program:

SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat();

Here are the consequences:

• 55 distinct methods are called a total of 123 times
• 44 new instances of objects are created

That is one badly-designed class. And that's before considering the non-thread-safety of SimpleDateFormat that leads it to be probably the #1 cause of concurrency issues in Java programs. And which prevents reusing one instance across an entire application.

I sourced this here.

 

Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, fraudulent life of Megaupload's Kim Dotcom

There is a fascinating article on Kim Dotcom on ars technica:

Flush with at least some cash, Schmitz was quick to burn some of it by waving his own particular brand of freak flag. He hired a German centerfold, a collection of other actors, a film crew, and fast car aficionados for a self-produced film called Kimble Goes Monaco—a road movie about a lavish trip to Monaco, including a cruise on a rented yacht. The movie was punctuated with Schmitz playing with expensive toys, and featured a bizarre Bill-Gates-is-spying-on-me subplot.

Although it sounds like guy has a serious deficiency in the morals department, he can't be accused of half-living his life.

 

Pink Monopoly…or Marketers get Creative

When I heard of Pink Monopoly I thought it was a joke or a euphemism. But no, it really exists, and the major marketing ploy seems to be…that it is pink:

Product Features

• Special girl's edition
• Packaged in keepsake storage box with removable tray and non-glass mirrored insert
• Pink gameboard and dice with unique properties to buy such as spas and jewellery stores
• Boutiques and malls instead of houses and hotels
• Instant Message and Text Message cards instead of Chance and Community Chest

 

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Read it here.

In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"

 

Learning to Program for the iPhone: Hello World

There are a lot of new concepts and terminology to learn when programming for the iPhone for the first time. I've worked my way a little through Apple's "Hello World" tutorial, and I achieved simply that: a program that displays "Hello World" and runs in the iPhone simulator:

Nothing to set the world on fire yet.