Parentheses

The fellows over at the newLISP fan club forums are a witty bunch. During yet another discussion in the long history of "how might all those parentheses be removed from Lisp" discussions, Elica solved this age old conundrum ever so gracefully.

There is one easy recursive solution, but I’m afraid you will not like it, although you may enjoy it. Here it goes:

To solve the problem with parentheses, we can replace them by square brackets. However, this will introduce a new problem - a problem with the square brackets. To solve it, we can replace brackets with parentheses, which will reraise the initial problem. Fortunately, we already know how to solve it.

So, everything is OK - the initial problem is reduced to a sequence of problems, each of which can be solved trivially.

Java and VNC on Windows

Sometime between JRE 1.6.0 update 3 and 1.6.0 update 15, something changed.

I use a VNC program heavily, and was surprised to see all Java Swing GUIs become almost useless because they would never refresh through VNC. Yet at the same time Netbeans still worked fine over VNC.

I sought high and low, but what kind of search string would you use for this issue?

As a work around at the time, I set the JAVA_HOME to an older JRE, and updated some of my Java program shortcuts to use "C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_3\bin\javaw.exe"

Today I finally found the issue and fix.

J2D_D3D=false

This problem might occur with any other kind of Remote Desktop program, or perhaps it is just those that use a special video driver.

Oh and Netbeans seems to run under the latest JDK installed instead of the latest JRE. Guess I should update that sometime.