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The sandy loams of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey are a porous filter for the water that trickles through purifying layers to feed one of the largest aquifers on the East Coast. Hours after the rain has fallen the ground is for the most part dry again, and undisturbed. Into this same ground [...]

I don’t read the consumer technology press much (at all), so I hadn’t heard of this excellent term for all the little pieces of junk software one finds on a new computer until my Dad brought it up. This happened while I was in the middle of trying to remove a bunch of them from [...]

How much is a proprietary business advantage worth? In 1907 Milton Hershey began selling ‘Kisses’, the now-familiar teardrop-shaped milk chocolate confection. His new treat would become a world-wide phenomenon that continues to generate increasing sales today more than one hundred years after the product launch. The initial introduction of Hershey’s Kisses required the development of [...]

After reading another report on how the junta in Myanmar is stealing everything that isn’t nailed down and has the letters “U. N.” stenciled on it, I got to thinking: what makes a junta, as opposed to, say, a regime, or a dictatorship, or a despotism? According to Wikipedia “junta” is a Spanish word meaning [...]

If you use NoMachine’s very cool NX server to access a linux system remotely, and you installed the open-ssh update for the broken random number generator problem this morning, then you may have run into a situation where the update breaks NX server. The problem is that the local host’s RSA key is stored in [...]

My feet wandered back into the area of old Millbrook this weekend, and I expect they will tread that way again soon, and hopefully for years to come. This region, like the Pine Barrens in the Southern part of the state, completely fascinates me, and for the same reason. For such a small state New [...]

I headed back into the hills of Pahaquarry this past weekend in search of an old road, and some old farms, and found quite a bit more of the former, and less of the latter, than I had hoped. The steep hillsides of Pahaquarry Township were once part of New Jersey’s rural agricultural heritage, and [...]

This is the part of the show where experienced Java developers laugh as the C# guy tries to tread water. I’ve been developing a Java console application to import some data files into a MySQL database. The development work has all been done in Eclipse on Debian, testing against a local DB. When the time [...]

Sometimes it’s those little things that drive you nuts, like expecting that when Eclipse displays the Project Properties dialog and you click the Build Path and then click “Add Jars” the resulting list will contain whatever .jar files you happen to have placed in the project folders. Apparently this is not so. Today I needed [...]

I recently took a Sunday afternoon off and followed the track of the Central Railroad of New Jersey’s Chester Branch along its century-old route from Long Valley to Chester and the site of the old Taylor blast furnace on the Lamington River. Along the way I saw some surprising things, and some that were not [...]