When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · June
· · · · 09 (6 entries)

The Autobox of Death · Hmm, maybe I should have another blog for Java geeking. What happened was, I had an ArrayList<String> and for a variety of reasons I decided to turn it into a HashMap<String,String>. After I’d fixed everything up, I got the weirdest NullPointerException, and I traced it to a call that looked like (x is the HashMap)
if ((x.size() > 0) && x.get(0).equals(foo))
and somehow the compiler had decided that get(0) was a reasonable thing to do to a HashMap<String,String>. Uh, strong typing, anyone?
 
COOL BIZ · Via NoniWeblog, a pointer to the unsurprising fact that Japanese businesspeople are discovering the virtues of not wearing a tie; if you’ve ever been to work in a Tokyo summer you’ll understand why this is a good thing. But, in a uniquely Japanese way, they’re not just doing it, they’re mounting an official government-backed campaign. But mostly I wrote this so I could slip in a pointer to this picture.
 
Down & Out in Tulsa · If it seemed like ongoing wasn’t there, it wasn’t. My host has a dire tale of cascading failure, but the weird thing is, when the site was down, traceroute showed the packets cascading into Williams Communication, where they struggled from Palo Alto to Santa Clara to Denver to Dallas to dusty death in Tulsa, Oklahoma. How unfortunate.
 
Royals 8, Giants 1 · We took in the game Tuesday night; here are some notes on the occasion, a nice picture of the ballpark, and a recommendation for an online ticket seller ...
 
NetBeans Notes · Item: For those of you who migrated from Emacs, you can easily teach NetBeans control-F/B/N/P/U/D: go to Tools - Options - Editor Settings - Global Key Bindings. Huge time-saver, and this should be the default on OS X, since basically every other text control has those bindings wired in. Item: I upgraded all at once to OS X 1.4, and Java 1.5, and NB 4.1 (from a release candidate), and a lot of JXTA libraries, and things are slowing down. I don’t like this; in particular I hit control-space for autocomplete or F9 for compile and it sometimes has to think for a second first, which is nuts. [Update: Fixed it! I had stupidly put all the support libraries that JXTA needs to run into the compile-time list, so they were going on the classpath. Take ’em all out and it’s back to nearly instant.] Item: Project Coyote is coming along nicely, and it’s increasingly obvious that dynamic languages on the JVM are going to be huge. Item: NetBeans Day at Java One looks like it’ll be serious fun. Item: (This is not NB-specific.) When I go grab a new API, it’s just way too much work to tell the IDE about it and get the jars and Javadocs in place. There ought to be a standard way to package a Java API so that you can point your IDE at some URI and it All. Just. Happens. Item: Here’s a nice feature, does any IDE have it? When I say
Ziggarut z = new Ziggarut(bricks, stones);
then the IDE should figure out that that’s a com.textuality.3d.Ziggarut and insert the appropriate import statements for me, it’s a total waste of time for me to go poking around trying to remember where that was. [Oops: NetBeans has “Fix imports”, Eclipse is pro-active about suggesting it, and the IDEA cult assured me (as usual) that they have something even better.]
 
On Time · Its extent is fixed, inelastic. Some of the time you spend leaves a mark on the world, some not. Some is pleasurable, some not. Some is necessary, some not. The waste of time is the only waste that is irrecoverable, even in principle. But you gotta slack off sometimes or you’ll go nuts.
 
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