Today I nearly went mad because I had to determine the encoding of some html files.
I tried various command line tools without any success until a colleague showed me that firefox can
guess the encoding: In my version (3 under Ubuntu) it is located here: “View”>”Character Encoding”.
As I didn’t find that on the web, maybe this post will save somebody out there the trouble I had. 
Within one week I reviewed two bowling game solutions having lots of interfaces, each of them with only one implementing class. What is the use of that? Being able to enhance it easily? Some leftovers from C++? Did they read it in some books or learn it in university, and if so – who teaches this? Sure, using interfaces even if they only have one implementation is a good thing if you have to provide an API to your code so that others might overwrite your implementations easily… but why do it here? Those interfaces just make it harder to find the part of your code which is actually doing something. >> more…
In today’s paper I read an editorial about how we should wisely consider where we (as a society) spend our money on education. Correctly the author made the point that smaller classes are not proven to yield better results in education. (afaik there is an American study that actually proves that smaller class sizes have no correlation with better education results). The author also rightfully pointed to making teachers better as an important part to making education better. >> more…
