a world where no one cares

There are 12 posts filed in a world where no one cares (this is page 2 of 2).

Laptop lifetime

The question was posed on the whiteboard in the CS student lounge:

Over n semesters attending Acadia full-time, how many laptops m have you used as your primary mobile computing device?

The answers were as follows:

n m
8 4
8 2
16 3
6 2
8 2
8 3
6 1
6 2
8 1
8 1
8 2
8 2
8 2
8 4
14 2
8 5

Later, a corrolary question appeared:

Over n semesters, how many laptops m have you bought for school?

It received the answers:

n m
8 0
8 3
14 2
8 3
8 1

The two takeaway points for me are yes, my laptop consumption is considerably above average (8/4 for the first question, 8/1 for the second) and hardly anyone below fourth year ever sticks their head through the door of the lounge. In fact, these numbers make me wonder if first- and second-year students are aware of its existence.

Tomcat 6 with self-installed JDK

If you’re trying to install Tomcat 6 (or anything else with a dependency on Java) under Debian with a self-installed JDK (say, the Oracle Java 7 JDK) and you want to avoid apt-get grabbing OpenJDK, then your best bet is to use equivs to create a dummy package pretending to provide default-jre and default-jre-headless (and, if you feel like it, default-jdk). If you’re feeling particularly lazy (or are future me wishing he’d kept the resulting package around to reuse later – hello, future me!), here’s one I made earlier.

Edit 2013-12-16: This method hasn’t really worked for quite some time now, but that’s OK, as java-package has been updated to support Oracle Java 7. Along with satisfying the dependencies, it does a much better job of installing the JDK than most people will.

A note on Eclipse: Instead of depending on java-compiler like it ought, Eclipse depends on default-jdk, and more weirdly, on sun-java6-jdk. Even if you install Java using the above java-package method, you’ll still have to use an equivs package to provide those two dependencies if you want to keep OpenJDK off your system. Here’s a prebuilt package that provides just those two dependencies.