By Justin Silverton 

This is a little bit old, but I still find it interesting.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

1 comment

by Paul DuBois

You can write MySQL applications in a variety of languages. The languages that most people use with MySQL are PHP and Perl, but a sometimes overlooked option is the MySQL Connector/J driver, which allows you to develop Java applications that interact with your MySQL server.
MySQL Connector/J works within the framework of the Java JDBC interface, an API that allows Java programs to use database servers in a portable way. JDBC is based on an approach similar to that used in the design of Perl and Ruby DBI modules, Python’s DB-API module, and

PHP’s PEAR::DB class. This approach uses a two-tier architecture:
The top level is visible to application programs and presents an abstract interface for connecting to and using database engines. The application interface does not depend on details specific to particular engines.

The lower level consists of drivers for individual database engines. Each driver handles the details necessary to map the abstract application interface onto operations that a specific engine will understand.The JDBC interface allows developers to write applications that can be used with different databases with a minimum of porting effort. Once a driver for a given server engine is installed, JDBC applications can communicate with any server of that type. By using MySQL Connector/J, your Java programs can access MySQL databases.

Note: MySQL Connector/J is the successor to the MM.MySQL driver. If you have JDBC programs written for MM.MySQL, they should work with MySQL Connector/J as well, although you may want to update the driver class name used in your programs. Just replace instances of org.gjt.mm.mysql in your Java source files with com.mysql.jdbc and recompile.

Preliminary Requirements

To use Java applications with MySQL, you may need to install some additional software:
If you want to compile and run Java programs, you’ll need a Java compiler (such as javac or jikes) and a runtime environment. If these are not already installed on your system, you can get them by obtaining a Java Software Development Kit (SDK) from java.sun.com.

If you want only to run precompiled applications, no compiler is necessary, but you’ll still need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This too may be obtained from java.sun.com.This article assumes that you’ll write and compile your own programs, and thus that you have a Java SDK installed. Once you compile a Java program, however, you can deploy it to other machines, even ones that have only a runtime environment. This works even in heterogenous installations, because Java is platform-independent. Applications compiled on one platform can be expected to work on other platforms. For example, you can develop on a Linux box and deploy on Windows

Connecting to the MySQL Server

To connect to the MySQL server, register the JDBC driver you plan to use, then invoke its getConnection() method. The following short program, Connect.java, shows how to connect to and disconnect from a server running on the local host. It accesses a database named test, using a MySQL account with a user name and password of testuser and testpass: import java.sql.*;

public class Connect
{
public static void main (String[] args)
{
Connection conn = null;
try
{
String userName = “testuser”;
String password = “testpass”;
String url = “jdbc:mysql://localhost/test”;
Class.forName (”com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”).newInstance ();
conn = DriverManager.getConnection (url, userName, password);
System.out.println (”Database connection established”);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
System.err.println (”Cannot connect to database server”);
}
finally
{
if (conn != null)
{
try
{
conn.close ();
System.out.println (”Database connection terminated”);
}
catch (Exception e) { /* ignore close errors */ }
}
}
}
}

Compile Connect.java to produce a class file Connect.class that contains executable Java code: % javac Connect.java
Then invoke the class file as follows and it should connect to and disconnect from your MySQL server: % java Connect
Database connection established
Database connection terminated
If you have trouble compiling Connect.java, double check that you have a Java Software Development Kit installed and make sure that the MySQL Connector/J driver is listed in your CLASSPATH environment variable.

The arguments to getConnection() are the connection URL and the user name and password of
a MySQL account. As illustrated by Connect.java, JDBC URLs for MySQL consist of jdbc:mysql:// followed by the name of the MySQL server host and the database name. An alternate syntax for specifying the user and password is to add them as parameters to the end of the connection URL: jdbc:mysql://localhost/test?user=testuser&password=testpass
When you specify a URL using this second format, getConnection() requires only one argument.

For example, the code for connecting to the MySQL server in Connect.java could have been written like this: String userName = “testuser”;
String password = “testpass”;
String url = “jdbc:mysql://localhost/test?user=”
+ userName
+ “&password=”
+ password;
Class.forName (”com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”).newInstance ();
conn = DriverManager.getConnection (url);

getConnect() returns a Connection object that may be used to interact with MySQL by issuing queries and retrieving their results. (The next section describes how to do this.) When you’re done with the connection, invoke its close() method to disconnect from the MySQL server.

To increase the portability of your applications, you can store the connection parameters (host, database, user name, and password) in a Java properties file and read the properties at runtime. Then they need not be listed in the program itself. This allows you to change the server to which the program connects by editing the properties file, rather than by having to recompile the program.

Issuing Queries

To process SQL statements in a JDBC-based application, create a Statement object from your Connection object. Statement objects support an executeUpdate() method for issuing queries that modify the database and return no result set, and an executeQuery() method for queries that do return a result set. The query-processing examples in this article use the following table, animal, which contains an integer id column and two string columns, name and category: CREATE TABLE animal
(
id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
name CHAR(40),
category CHAR(40)
)
id is an AUTO_INCREMENT column, so MySQL automatically assigns successive values 1, 2, 3, … as records are added to the table.
Issuing Queries That Return No Result Set
The following example obtains a Statement object from the Connection object, then uses it to create and populate the animal table. DROP TABLE, CREATE TABLE, and INSERT all are statements that modify the database, so executeUpdate() is the appropriate method for issuing them:

Statement s = conn.createStatement ();
int count;
s.executeUpdate (”DROP TABLE IF EXISTS animal”);
s.executeUpdate (
“CREATE TABLE animal (”
+ “id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,”
+ “PRIMARY KEY (id),”
+ “name CHAR(40), category CHAR(40))”);
count = s.executeUpdate (
“INSERT INTO animal (name, category)”
+ ” VALUES”
+ “(’snake’, ‘reptile’),”
+ “(’frog’, ‘amphibian’),”
+ “(’tuna’, ‘fish’),”
+ “(’racoon’, ‘mammal’)”);
s.close ();
System.out.println (count + ” rows were inserted”);
The executeUpdate() method returns the number of rows affected by a query. As shown above, the count is used to report how many rows the INSERT statement added to the animal table.

A Statement object may be used to issue several queries. When you’re done with it, invoke its close() method to dispose of the object and free any resources associated with it

Issuing Queries That Return a Result Set

For statements such as SELECT queries that retrieve information from the database, use executeQuery(). After calling this method, create a ResultSet object and use it to iterate through the rows returned by your query. The following example shows one way to retrieve the contents of the animal table:

Statement s = conn.createStatement ();
s.executeQuery (”SELECT id, name, category FROM animal”);
ResultSet rs = s.getResultSet ();

int count = 0;
while (rs.next ())
{
int idVal = rs.getInt (”id”);
String nameVal = rs.getString (”name”);
String catVal = rs.getString (”category”);
System.out.println (
“id = ” + idVal
+ “, name = ” + nameVal
+ “, category = ” + catVal);
++count;
}
rs.close ();
s.close ();

System.out.println (count + ” rows were retrieved”);

executeQuery() does not return a row count, so if you want to know how many rows a result set contains, you should count them yourself as you fetch them.
To obtain the column values from each row, invoke getXXX() methods that match the column data types. The getInt() and getString() methods used in the preceding example return integer and string values. As the example shows, these methods may be called using the name of a result set column. You can also fetch values by position. For the result set retrieved by the SELECT query in the example, id, name, and category are at column positions 1, 2 and 3 and thus could have been obtained like this:

int idVal = rs.getInt (1);
String nameVal = rs.getString (2);
String catVal = rs.getString (3);

ResultSet objects, like Statement objects, should be closed when you’re done with them.

To check whether or not a column value is NULL, invoke the result set object’s wasNull() method after fetching the value. For example, you could check for a NULL value in the name column like this: String nameVal = rs.getString (”name”);

if (rs.wasNull ())
nameVal = “(no name available)”;

Using Placeholders

Sometimes it’s necessary to construct queries from values containing characters that require special treatment. For example, in queries, string values are written enclosed within quotes, but any quote characters in the string itself should be doubled or escaped with a backslash to avoid creating malformed SQL. In this case, it’s much easier to let JDBC handle the escaping for you, rather than fooling around trying to do so yourself. To use this approach, create a different kind of statement (a PreparedStatement), and refer to the data values in the query string by means of placeholder characters. Then tell JDBC to bind the data values to the placeholders and it will handle any special characters automatically.

Suppose you have two variables nameVal and catVal from which you want to create a new record in the animal table. To do so without regard to whether or not the values contain special characters, issue the query like this:

PreparedStatement s;
s = conn.prepareStatement (
“INSERT INTO animal (name, category) VALUES(?,?)”);
s.setString (1, nameVal);
s.setString (2, catVal);
int count = s.executeUpdate ();
s.close ();

System.out.println (count + ” rows were inserted”);
The ‘?’ characters in the query string act as placeholders–special markers indicating where data values should be placed. The setString() method takes a placeholder position and a string value and binds the value to the appropriate placeholder, performing any special-character escaping that may be necessary. The method you use to bind a value depends on the data type. For example, setString() binds string values and setInt() binds integer values.

Error Handling

If you want to trap errors, execute your JDBC operations within a try block and use an exception handler to display information about the cause of any problems that occur. JDBC provides getMessage() and getErrorCode() methods that may be invoked when an exception occurs to obtain the error message and the numeric error code. The following example deliberately issues a malformed query. When it runs, the executeQuery() method fails and raises an exception that is handled in the catch block: try
{
Statement s = conn.createStatement ();
s.executeQuery (”XYZ”); // issue invalid query
s.close ();
}
catch (SQLException e)
{
System.err.println (”Error message: ” + e.getMessage ());
System.err.println (”Error number: ” + e.getErrorCode ());
}

1 comment

what is smiletag?

smiletag is a free (GPL License) shoutbox written in PHP.Available as general purpose version, WordPress plugin, Joomla / Mambo module and Drupal module version, smiletag is an interactive, easy to use, mini-message board with powerful template system.
Powerful template system, easy-to-modify templates using only simple tags, no programming skills required. Lot of themes available.

features

Smart auto-refresh, automagically refreshes whenever a new message is posted, this is done using Ajax technology.

Message Moderation, if enabled you can take control for every submitted message before they appear in the shoutbox.

Admin Panel, easily edit/delete messages, moderate, ban, add smilies, configure and more. Try the admin panel demo.

No database is needed, uses flat file (XML) for storage.

Profanity filters, easily add your own custom words to filter as well.

Flood guard, stop spammer from flooding your board.

Valid XHTML, outputs Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional code.

IP Address/Nick banning, support for both manual and automatic banning.

Customizable smilies, you can add your own images as many as you want.

Time Zone Control, sets the time zone to any GMT offset.

Multi-language support.

Email/URL recognition, automatically convert any email or url into link.

Custom CSS File, you have complete control for your board look and feel.

Alternate custom text, more than just alternating background color, you can alternate any text to switch for each row.

Filters HTML tags and blank messages.

Message formatting, allow bold, italic and underline.

Custom Header and Footer, put any text at the top and bottom of your board.

Timestamp, easily change the format using simple rule.

Logs visitor IP Address.

Auto rotate each message, in order to avoid a large file from staying on your server.

Configurable number of messages to display.

Configurable message length.

It’s free and comes with complete source code.

smiletag can be downloaded Here

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2 comments