We are always drawing tree structures with the root on top, sometimes with the root on the left, but almost never with the root where it belongs (according to biologists) in a tree: at the bottom.

In a comment, a kind soul suggested viewing the usual top-down trees as Christmas trees, and thus naming the root “star“. Should I ever teach data structures again, I will use this one.

And the start of a tree drawn from left to right could be … the source (of a creek, a river).

And I hadn’t heard of it until now. Looks like I’m not such a geek after all.

But it shocked me just as much as when I heard that J.D. Salinger had died – it actually made my eyes well up – so I guess I am quite a geek.

When I wrote about the departure of other Java Gods, I thought I was making a joke when I wondered how long James Gosling would remain at Sun. Now Guy Steele is the last man standing… but for how long?

Ever since the takeover by Oracle, I haven’t had a good feeling about the future of Java. IBM would have been a much better match. Oy vey…

PS1="\u `ruby -v | grep -e "[0-9]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]" -o` \w"

Works nicely.

The aim of Hoccer is to simplify the process of sharing data (currently pictures and contacts) between devices – you use certain gestures for one-to-one (tap) or one-to-many (throw/catch) to determine sender and receiver(s) and the data is transferred over the internet subsequently, so no other mechanism of pairing etc. is needed.

An iPhone version is currently under development, and there’s a web client to hoc data from a desktop computer to a mobile device, so no one’s left out.

How to optionally kill a child and capture status if not killed

How could killing a child ever be optional? It’s illegal! It’s disgusting!

We must not tolerate these criminals in our midst any longer. Now is the time to put an end to that vicious disease called Perl.

Of course, phone scams have been around for a while, but they usually involve social rather than technical engineering. The twist in this one is that the scammers must have hacked some kind of telephone switches. I don’t know what hardware and software phone providers are using these days, but I think it’s safe to assume that it’s connected to the Internet, and it’s increasingly involving VoIP. It’s also interesting to note that Alice cooperates with O₂ for its mobile services. Integrating disparate systems can get messy – maybe a door was accidentally left open somewhere on the way?

Being curious, I called that mysterious number and heard the following recording:

Thank you for calling pentowork [sic? the name was hard to understand] payment system, the most efficient internet based billing solution. To receive your unique PIN code, you are required to hold the line for thirty minutes.

So the aim seems to be the same as in many other phone scams – get people to call an expensive number, and make them stay on the line for as long as possible. The three or four calls it took to correctly write down the recording cost me about €10, but I also got to enjoy some nice background music: Comanche from the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack and Man on the Moon by REM. I wonder what they selected for the remaining half hour…

More reports and speculation can be found at this thread about the scam (in German), some of which involves the Lithuanian secret service, letters to Vladimir Putin, emails to the Bundesnetzagentur and the fact that 0037 was also the international calling code of East Germany.

then this should be the solution for you: First you install libmysqlclient15-dev, which generates a mysql_config file, and the install the gem using the config.