I develop software for a living. This involves quite a lot of talking, coaching, attending meetings, drinking coffee, etc. but the actual work is done during programming - when the software is created. That programming involves repeated cycles of the following: modify or type some code, compile, deploy and then run the code and perform some tests to see if it works. How cumbersome that process was ranged from:

• Hitting 'Run' and waiting a few seconds,
• to hitting 'Run and deploy' in my IDE and waiting about 20-30 seconds,
• to executing a ant script, restarting the application server and waiting 5 minutes
• to compiling a class file, uploading the class and accompanied libraries using a cumbersome webinterface and then executing a PLSQL script to run that class, wasting in total time amount 15 minutes (yes, that was a a very big and professional company)
  

In my opinion, the programmer is productive when he either codes, or when he tests his codes. Any time spent on waiting or performing some troublesome actions like accessing a web interface is pure waste. In short the above time ranging from a few seconds to 15 minutes is dead time.

Of course all that time wasted not only frustrates developers, it'll cost quite some time and thus money. Now how can you limit that dead time, that is wasted by developers? One way is your have your developers write perfect code at once. Of course that's not very realistic. Recently I found a very nice tool to limit that dead time, when you develop Java software: JRebel. What does that mean for you as java-developer:
JRebel runs as a software agent within your virtual machine, that in turn runs your application server. What JRebel does, is taking over the class-loader.
You can specify the output directories of your IDE (target/classes, /bin, etc.). Now whenever you make a change in your code, IDE's like Eclipse can compile that code into a new class file in the output directory. JRebel will automatically detect the changed class file. Thus no waste! Since JRebel plugs into the VM, it'll work with virtually any application server.

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I've been on the Internet since 1997. I was also on Fidonet since 1995, until I got high speed internet (2Mbit shared) in 2000.

I keep all my passwords in a text document on a (hopefully) secure place and I just went to a few very old accounts to see if they're still active. Not surprisingly, of many of them even the domain-name doesn't work anymore:

I browsed to the first page of my saved passwords. Here are a few services for which I had an account, but that no longer work:

• Ten - as a vaguely recall, a online gaming service. Ten.com no points to some porn site, so that's certainly not right.
• Zone - also a gaming site. Could be that site has become MSN Gaming zone, but there I can just login using my hotmail account.
• Boo - some startup, no idea what they did.
• mijn.wereld.nl - some sort of hyves, facebook, etc. in the early zero's. I knew one of the developers, I think he also worked for WorldOnline. Domain now points to something completely different.
• Big Brother - a show that got quite popular.
• filelibrary.com - Probably a site to download drivers. No longer active.
• Napster - hopefully book publishers don't make the same mistake as the music industry did.
• www.workspot.net - some sort of primitive Google Docs/ Dropbox as I recall.
• nytimes.com - of course that site still exist, but my login isn't recognized anymore. Probably pointing to my university mail account.

Well these were some accounts a browsed to, fun enough. Fortunately, not all accounts registered in that time were idle: my slashdot account is still active and Slashdot is of course very much alive. Same for Yahoo. ICQ also still works, but I don't use that anymore. Actually, Slashdot I don't read regularly anymore either.

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