December 2006 - Posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 11:27 PM

Done with Final

Finished the final of game theory today.
Firefox was updated to 1.5.0.9, BTW.
posted by wenyang with 0 Comments
Monday, December 11, 2006 10:35 PM

Bjarne Stroustrup Talked About the Problem with Programming

MIT's Technology Review posted the recent interview of Bjarne Stroustrup at The Problem with Programming and More Trouble with Programming.

One thing I like about C++ is that "you don't need to pay for what you don't need". For programs with high value on efficiency, such design philosophy is often necessary.  IMHO, C++ is not responsible for many criticism people claim.  So often have I seen people misuse C++ and cause lots of trouble in the software, but I would rather believe that this is because the programmers who write those code are undertrained.  Some might say that it's because C++ is too difficult to learn, yet I have not found any other language that is as powerful as C++ while much easier to learn.  Everything comes with a price, anyway.   I once read about something, by an experienced C++ programmer, in which he said C++ is "difficult to learn but easy to use".  I have started to feel the same way.

There is one sentence I would like to quote from Bjarne's interview: "Expressing dislike of something you don't know is usually known as prejudice."
posted by wenyang with 0 Comments
Friday, December 01, 2006 11:38 AM

Fix FreeMind start-up failure

FreeMind is free mind-mapping software written in Java.  I installed version 0.80 sometime ago and used it for making notes about DynaMIT supply. 

There's one annoying problem after the installation:  when I tried to start it by FreeMind.exe, nothing happened; however, I could run it with FreeMind.bat (or double-clicking freemind.jar).   I did some research on the web, and noticed that this could be a path problem (the FAQ says that it could be some earlier version of Java was used.   But in my case,  although C:\WINDOWS\system32\java.exe indeed comes before C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_06\bin\java.exe,  both of them are of the same version -- this can be verified by running "java -version", where the output is

java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode, sharing)

I opened a command prompt (cmd.exe) and tried to add the path of "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_06\bin" before all others, then it worked.  So I tried to add this permanently in the Environment Variables (Win+Pause to bring up System Properties -> Advanced -> System Variables).   But initially it didn't work, even if I put the java path before "%SystemRoot%\System32".  It seems to me the reason is that, in the Path variable, some entries have quotation marks. If the java's path appears after any of these, then FreeMind.exe cannot start.  Once I move it ahead of the first double quotation mark, then it works fine.
posted by wenyang with 0 Comments