Wow! Newspaper Articles From a Parallel Universe!

The August 31, 2011 Idaho Statesman talks about how high demand is here for software engineers:

The tech job market nationwide hasn’t been this overheated since the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. In the Treasure Valley, startups such as Clearwater, Balihoo and Cradlepoint are competing with the giants — Micron and Hewlett-Packard — for increasingly rare talent: senior software engineers, data analysts, Web designers and application developers.

“There’s a feeding frenzy for those guys,” said Dave Boren, founder of Clearwater Analytics.

...
“Many software engineers and developers can have two to three offers on the table, especially in Boise,” said Steven Guadagno, area director of Adecco Engineering and Technical, which has placed about 500 high-tech workers in Valley companies. “It’s similar to bigger-city markets, just on a smaller scale.”

Sure fooled me.

The Green Jobs Of The Future

They keep evaporating, the more the left spends public money on them. From the August 15, 2011 Boston Herald:

Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.
Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.

From the August 31, 2011 NBC channel 4 in San Francisco:

Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.
"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website.
...
Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs. The President visited the facility in May of last year and said  "it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. And you guys all represent that. "

The federal government offered $535 million in low cost loan guarantees from the Department of Energy.

 I've said it before, but it bears restating.  Government subsidies to basic research sometimes pays off in spectacular ways.  Government subsidies to operating businesses produce hothouse roses that can't stand the marketplace.  When those subsidies are driven by a mixture of corruption and religious worship, the result is a disaster for the taxpayers.

The loan guarantee, the administration's first for a clean energy project, benefited a company whose prime financial backers include Oklahoma oil billionaire George Kaiser, a "bundler" of campaign donations. Kaiser raised at least $50,000 for the president's 2008 election effort.

Several political allies of the president have ties to companies receiving Energy Department loans, grants or loan guarantees. For instance, the venture firm of another top Obama bundler, Steve Westly, has financially supported companies that won more than half a billion dollars in energy grants and loans during President Obama's time in office, iWatch News and ABC News reported in March. Relatively few applicants succeed in winning such benefits. The Energy Department said every one of those awards was won on merit.

Gruesome News Story

A reminder that you don't need a gun to commit suicide. From August 30, 2011 WTKR in Virginia:

A man is dead after decapitating himself following a domestic dispute in Yorktown. ...

A Fire Dept. officer noticed a cable attached to a nearby tree and wrapped around the neck of the driver. When deputies tried to get the man to leave the Explorer, he rapidly accelerated the SUV and was pulled from the vehicle and decapitated.  

I never in a million years would have thought of ending it all in such a gruesome way.

Obscure JDBC Behavior

I am approaching the final stage of a truly majorly ugly project, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, it was failing, with very strange, apparently quite random errors, including such bloodcurdling SQL Exceptions as "System or internal error: NullPointerException" when trying to process rows coming back from Informix.  Worse, there seemed no rhyme or reason--and the errors appeared scattered across half a dozen classes under one very exceptional set of circumstances.

It turned out that this steaming pile of Java was forking--and this was the problem.  The process that refreshed the screen display was sharing its database session with the forked process that was producing a report in a popup window.   The report process apparently, at its completion, was closing the shared session.  Depending on how much data was in the report, how heavily loaded the database server was, moon phase, etc., it would inexplicably start throwing these weird exceptions, apparently because that shared session was no longer valid--and the other process, of course, did not know about this.

The solution was relatively simple: synchronize the processes by keeping track of when the report process started and completed, and preventing the screen refresh from moving forward until that report process was done.  Yes, this is the result of gerbils writing Java, and I get to clean up the mess.

I Ordered Dragon Naturally Speaking Home 11.5

My hands aren't going to get better unless I stop using them so much.  It's a shame that there is nothing that works with the software that I use at work.

How Bad Is Irene?

See this description of conditions in the Philly area from Snowflakes in Hell.  Really bad weather!

Temperature Sensitive?

Since I was successful at turning this 8-port wired Linksys router into a bridge, I thought that I would see if perhaps I could beat the Belkin that failed on me a couple of days ago back into submission.  Sure enough, it is currently working.  It claims that the firmware dated 2002 is the latest version for this router!  I have it configured identically to the current year Belkin router I borrowed from my daughter, since I expect whatever caused it to fail two days to cause it to fail again.  But I confess that it is better to have a backup, maybe even an unreliable backup, than to not have anything at all sitting around.