TCP traceroute

Peteris Krumins posts on TCP Traceroute, a nifty trick to "see" through firewalls. His pudding:

# traceroute -T -p 80 www.microsoft.com
traceroute to www.microsoft.com (65.55.57.27), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  50.57.125.2 (50.57.125.2)  0.540 ms  0.629 ms  0.709 ms
 2  core1-aggr701a-3.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.50)  0.486 ms  0.604 ms  0.691 ms
 3  corea.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.128)  0.511 ms corea.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.124)  0.564 ms  0.810 ms
 4  bbr1.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.147)  1.339 ms  1.310 ms bbr1.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.145)  1.307 ms
 5  chi-8075.msn.net (206.223.119.27)  3.619 ms  2.560 ms  2.528 ms
 6  * 204.152.140.35 (204.152.140.35)  3.640 ms *
 7  ge-7-0-0-0.co1-64c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.40.94)  52.523 ms xe-0-2-0-0.ch1-96c-2b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.49)  3.825 ms xe-1-2-0-0.ch1-96c-2b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.53)  3.355 ms
 8  xe-0-1-0-0.co1-96c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.33.177)  61.042 ms  61.032 ms  60.457 ms
 9  * * xe-5-2-0-0.co1-96c-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.40.165)  100.069 ms
10  65.55.57.27 (65.55.57.27)  53.868 ms  53.038 ms  52.097 ms

Eliminating sales commissions

Brilliant.

On being the bearer of bad news

Elena Yatzeck writes 6 Steps To Success With Your Executive Boss, or "On being the bearer of bad news" (my title), another good post on the timeless theme, Do The Right Thing.

The Java enum factory

This comes up in interviews with intermediate programmers (and some seniors), the "enum factory" in Java:

public final class Money {
    // Infrequent that new currencies created,
    // old currencies never vanish, just fade away
    public enum Currency {
        USD, PHP; // And many more

        // Additional fields as needed, e.g., locale

        public Money print(final BigDecimal amount) {
            return new Money(this, amount);
        }
    }

    private final Currency currency;
    private final BigDecimal amount;

    private Money(final Currency currency, final BigDecimal amount) {
        this.currency = currency;
        this.amount = amount;
    }

    // Appropriate methods
}

And elsewhere with static imports:

Money pocket = asList(USD.print(ONE), PHP.print(TEN));

The key observations:

• Amounts of money are intimately attached to a particular currency
• Currency has few qualities not attached to money
• Ok to add more currencies through code
• Code reads better with factory than without

Mana on leadership

Mana of Geek Diva posts on leadership. Key point (emphasis mine):

When I see people who I consider good leaders, be they of any age, gender, height or ethnicity, I see one thing that they do very well. They make decisions quickly. Quickly does not mean recklessly. It just means that they make a decision knowing that if it isn't right then they can correct at a later time.

Java 8 lambdas and all that

Lovely post from Anton Arhipov at JRebel, Java 8: The First Taste of Lambdas. Kudos for javap decompilation for an "under the hood" explanation. His conclusion:

We can definitely say that lambdas and the accompanied features (defender methods, collections library improvements) will have a great impact on Java very soon. The syntax is quite nice and once developers realize that these features provide value to their productivity, we will see a lot of code that leverages these features.

It was quite interesting for me to see what lambdas are compiled to and I was very happy when I saw the total utilization of the invokedynamic instruction in action without any anonymous inner classes involved at all.

Prolegomena to programming

UCB's Brian Harvey explains why Berkeley teaches Scheme, not Python.