August 29, 2000

Making Better Use of Garbage Collector

Imagine you have an enormous object serialized on disk that you are using in memory, or that object is loaded in memory. You want to allow the garbage collector (GC)

Implementing Callback Routines

One of the easier ways of implementing an event-driven programming model is through passing function pointers which are invoked when an event occurs. But because Java doesn’t support the notion

Controlling Debugging Information

Debugging is a core part of application development in Java. Programmers tend to use System.out.println & System.err.println in the code everywhere, which becomes uncontrolled as the program evolves. This becomes

Getting Around a Bug in Testing Your Applets

If you’ve tried using the Java Plugin to test your Applets and got a mysterious “Security Exception,” then you’ve run into a known, but unadvertised bug. For a complete description

Checking for Value “NaN”

Question: Why does my if statement if (final == “NaN”) { window.alert(“You…are…a…dunce. Hit reload to try again.”);} fail to detect when final is “NaN”? It always goes straight on to

Date Conversion from Seconds to Normal

Question: Is there some way to write a function that converts a date that is in seconds since December 31, 1969, into a normal date format? Like this: date from

WAP Security Issue

Question: When encrypted information is being interchanged between a client and a “secure” server through WAP, does the information ever lie decrypted on the WAP gateway or does the client

SQL with Unix Arguments

Question: How do I pass arguments from a Unix shell onto SQL for various SQL statements (e.g., select * from $tablename, create table $TABS, etc.)? Also, how do I get