How does a website hosting a search for used cars already know my postcode?

I was a little confused about this, but the answer is obvious – yes I had used this search service before. In fact the basic search criteria could be easily pre-populated from data already persisted to my machine. The website in question utilizes Adobe Flash Player technology and a quick trip to their Settings Manager helped me understand what was going on. In my case the feature was quite convenient, but certainly behaviuor to be aware of if you are using a shared machine.

A few days ago, the network interface on my system ground to a halt. The arp and netstat commands suggested something strange might be going on, but I really needed to correlate the network connections with the system processes. I then discovered the -b flag for netstat (on Windows XP) which does exactly this, and helped me to isolate the problem.

More information on netstat and the -b flag is available here > http://commandwindows.com/netstat.htm

Just been involved with the beta testing of the new Feature Pack for OSGi Applications and JPA 2.0 for IBM WebSphere Application Server V7:

OSGi and JPA 2.0 FeP

We’ve been using a much more agile development process than in the past, continually tweaking our approach and trying out new development and test tooling. I’m really pleased to say that this investment has paid off: even as a hardened test cynic, I’m genuinely impressed by the quality.

I was on a conference call today and someone mentioned that C has regained its place as the industry’s most popular programming language. I couldn’t believe it, after all Java has ruled the #1 spot for the last four years.

A quick check on the TIOBE index showed this to be true:

The explanation they give is not that C is growing but that Java is declining. So what does this mean for the industry? Is Java dying? Is there another contender for the top spot gradually working its way up the ladder?

The one thing that stands out is that C is a good language to know. It’s been around a while and it’s not going anywhere in a hurry. I wonder if they’re still teaching it at college and university