Furious as we were, we managed to keep our manners and reached out (tried to at least) to the author of of jbrute.info and their hosting provider. Sadly, the only response we ever had other than SMTP MAIL CANNOT BE DELIVERED is a canned email instructing us how to write a formal DMCA takedown notice.

We then turned to starting a blog post and asking your help on what you would do in our shoes. As Karl Marx would put it, “the power of the people is strong”, and before long the community came up with a few nothing-less-than-brilliant ideas. (We are not Communists and are not related to the Tsars in anyway, I promise, even though our operational base in Central Estonia might lead you to think otherwise :P)

In particular, Joe Walnes pointed out that since jbrute.info hotlinks .php files and JavaScript from our website, by “check[ing] the HTTP_REFERER, [we] can conditionally change the contents, and with JavaScript [we] can make the page look however [we] want.”

Sadly, life got busy and almost three months suddenly went by, and this little incident was nearly forgotten. Last week, we stumbled upon JBrute once again… Finally we got around to acting on Joe’s advice and, in the most hackish fashion, decided to take it upon ourselves to deliver a truly custom “DMCA Takedown notice” over two glasses of beer. Here is a screenshot of the finished work :) We encourage you to check out jbrute.info (this time I linked :( ) for yourself.

Just to prove our point, we bring you the pseudo xkcd comic.

I hope you enjoyed our little mischief. We’ll keep you posted on the status of jbrute over the coming days following this post and we’ll follow up next week with the technical details – How to un-hack a website! Keep tuned :)

This is a story of a start-up built around the nerdiest glasses on earth. If you wonder why and how we’re doing it, how exactly will we make millions of dollars off of it then you’re in luck. We’re planning to document and publish everything on our website and we have just released the first in the series, Converting a pair of glasses into fame and fortune.

A spin-off is a new organization or entity formed by a split from a larger one, such as television series based on a pre-existing one, or a new company formed from a university research group or business incubator.

Moving is work, getting stuff into boxes, moving the boxes and getting the stuff out of the boxes. We were able to add a fun factor to the process. The evening before the move our team was having beers at a local bar and one thing lead to another and the next moment we were at the old office with a knife, pillow and 3 eggs and it was 1AM.

So in the middle of the night, at the office, 3 guys with the mentioned equipment and a plan! The plan was simple. Webmedia CEO’s name is Eagle (at least in the Estonian language) and what if we prep his office for a proper leaving. Stage it as birdies leaving the nest, feathers, egg-shells. Awesome plan from just 4 beers!

Pictures follow.

• The sign says ZeroTurnaround guys have left the nest. Thanks!
• Yeah, all the feathers come from a single pillow
• Yes, I’m missing a pillow
• Yes, we had to clean it up (well, just me, because everybody else supposedly had more important tasks at hand).

This year’s dow.ngra.de hoax, Microsoft acquires ZeroTurnaround for undisclosed amount has amused us even months later. Couple of weeks ago we spotted a Chinese article that listed all the acquisitions of Microsoft during the past year. And we made the list!

Today we found the news from a business systems news & analysis page, FSN.

FSN provides finance professionals around the globe with independent news, vital analysis and deep insight about key developments in the world of business and accounting systems. We debunk the technical jargon of the IT world and present leading-edge issues in a way that is accessible and relevant to business decision makers.

We’re in the article Shifting Sands (EDIT: link is dead now) with players like Salesforce, Digita, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and HP :)

A fact taken from a blog post on 1st of April, not confirmed from either parties and presented in an article with vital analysis and deep insight.

Of course there is an easy fix. Either Microsoft acquires the Java productivity tooling company ZeroTurnaround or FSN notices a referrer from this blog and makes changes. I’ll keep you posted on who wins the race.

PHB: Here we have the lines of code in the repository and the total size of the repository shown through time in gigabytes.

HR lady had a puzzled look at the graphs and the numbers.

HR: How much more of those can we fit in the repository?

Two years later when a new developer was about to join our ranks it got me thinking. On the morning of his arrival we placed a video camera in one of the laptop bags opened towards him. We inserted an OpenSolaris Live-CD (was not able to get Plan 9 to boot :( ) to his new PC.

The OS was booted in text mode and a user with his name added so that it would feel warm at ~ home. He was placed in a javarebel folder and a VIM sessions had just ended (in text mode you very often see the old contents of the session). The first 5 minutes at the new office follows.

Until now we’ve got away with most of the jokes we’ve pulled but we have matured over the period and we’re not the same young naive happy hackers anymore (right!). We still do like to throw a joke in every now and then.

We released a XML configuration file schema with our last product release and we had to pick a schema location for that. Remembering the Mozilla Ghostbusters reference we also had to reference something. And so we did.

But last week we got an email from our pointy haired boss. He had made a memo with 5 points about the documentation we have. The last point read: Why is there an alderaan in the namespace? It should be our product name!

I guess this marks a landmark in our small team, we’re not small anymore and we’ll have to figure out a way to keep the pointy haired occupied with something (Google Analytics usually does the trick). Luckily for us, we could still play the founder card, but later we may not be so lucky. What jokes have you managed to sneak by your boss and how did you hide them?

PS. We did not have to change our schema but it came quite close.

The other day I was playing around with a tool for memory analysis and wrote a small snippet using which I would be able to test the new tool. Quickly (Editor: yeah right quickly) created the following and executed it:

import java.util.*;   
class Leak {  
  static List<Integer> list = new ArrayList<Integer>();  
  public static void main(String[] args) {  
    for (int i = 0; i >= 0 ;) {  
      list.add(i++);  
    }  
    System.out.println("I will either reach here or die trying (with OOM)");  
  }  
}

And what do you think I was displayed by my command prompt (editor: CDOs don’t have a command prompt):

Option A:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
        at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2760)
        at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2734)
        at java.util.ArrayList.ensureCapacity(ArrayList.java:167)
        at java.util.ArrayList.add(ArrayList.java:351)
        at Leak.main(Leak.java:6)

Option B:

I will either reach here or die trying (with OOM)

Well, as I found out, it doesn’t print out anything. As this is now two years from my last real Java development experience (got demoted to C-level), I went to my hardcore Java hackers. For 10 minutes we all stood with bedazzled faces, before it struck – the memory will be allocated in a way that there is no room for new OutOfMemoryError() to be created.

If you execute the above with 64MB heapsize (which is the default heapsize):

C:\work\snippets\leak java -Xmx64m Leak
C:\work\snippets\leak

But if you increase (well actually modify) the heap size a bit:

C:\work\snippets\leak java -Xmx65m Leak
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
        at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2760)
        at java.util.Arrays.copyOf(Arrays.java:2734)
        at java.util.ArrayList.ensureCapacity(ArrayList.java:167)
        at java.util.ArrayList.add(ArrayList.java:351)
        at Leak.main(Leak.java:6)
C:\work\snippets\leak

Moral of the story? I definitely would not want to be fixing a production system dying like this (Editor: lucky you, you don’t have to) – most likely I would be mad way before I could have grasped anything about the reasons …