Working here is introducing me to loads of new bands, some of whom are great. Muse, Absolution - fantastic.
As I write, Guns 'n Roses are blearing out of the rather nice speakers scattered around the office. Directly opposite my desk is a large Kylie poster.
All this has at least one unforseen benefit - I'm entering test data at the moment, and thinking up band names isn't presenting a problem.
"His career with the BBC spanned 70 years. Since Letter from America began, Cooke presented 2,869 shows, making up more than 717 hours of broadcasting time." Wow.
Why Do Java Developers Like to Make Things So Hard?
"Imagine if the Perl cafe and Javahut were across the street from each other. You walk into Javahut, and ask to sit down. "I'm sorry," says the person at the door. I'm not actually the hostess, I'm a Factory class that can give you a hostess if you tell me what type of seat you want." You say you want a non-smoking seat, and the person calls over a NonSmokingSeatHostess. The hostess takes you to your seat, and asks if you'll want breakfast, lunch, or dinner. You say lunch, and she beckons a LunchWaitress. The LunchWaitress takes your order, brings over your food, but there's no plates to put it on because you forgot to get a CutleryFactory and invoke getPlates, so the Waitress throws a null pointer exception and you get thrown out of the place."
This is so true it hurts.
Still, could be worse. Working with RPGIV, there are no restaurants. Nor are there any supermarkets; you have to grow your own food. And make your own cutlery.
Via Ian Bicking.
So, here I am in the Hammersmith office of A Large Record Label.
No Wi-Fi means that I can't connect Roadwarrior (my notebook) to, well, to anything. This in turn means that I can't get to my email, nor to my company's timesheet system. So if you've emailed me, I'm not ignoring you.
I hope that I can sort something out - my in-box will be pretty impressive if I don't read it for two months!
It's a bit early to tell how it's going to go here. The work all seems easy enough, if a little unexciting. But then it usually looks easy until the unexpected starts to crop up.
The office very nice. There is constant background music, which I'm not used to, but then this is a record company.
The people seem nice enough, too. I'm in the 'legacy' team; two people I know, a few new faces. The '400 world is like that - you are constantly running into people you've woked with before.
Now you can dress your child in McDonald's branded clothing, to go with their McDonald's playsets.
The photo that they used to illustrate "Children in a McDonald's restaurant" was very appropriate, I must say. Taking a child with a weight problem like that into a McDonald's ought to be considered child abuse.
Too busy to blog - I'm laying down a bit of rubber here making sure that the still-in-progress project that I'm working on is in a fit state to hand over, and that I have everything I'll need for the next two months on client site.
Elfy-Welfies, War Bores, Decadent Vamps and Licensed Crap. Interesting read - very true too. Sturgeon's Law is, unfortunately, out of date now - far more than 90% of science fiction is crud these days.
I have to say, I think that there are other sub-genres - Hard Sci Fi (I'm a big Greg Egan fan) is one. Then you have cyberpunk, Space Opera and whatever the genre Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher are working in is called. Sci Fi Noir, perhaps? Anyway, I digress - and loads more that I can't be bothered to enumerate.
I'm getting a spot of Karmic feedback for taking the piss out of Mark for his burger flipping VB6 programming - I'm starting on a six week RPGIV project at a client site next week!
This is bad: in decreasing order of love, my used-at-work programming languages are:
As you can see, RPGIV isn't high on the list. Sigh.
Still, I'll be working with one or two people I know and like, so it isn't all bad.
Our poxy proxy server is dead, so we have no Internet access and no external email today. Sigh.
Update: I'm back.
The world's two worst variable names is a great read. I especially liked this comment.
I'm glad to see that How To Write Unmaintainable Code is having the real-world impact that it deserves.
The worst name I've seen recently in the projects I've been working on has been Skippy, the originator of which shall remain nameless.
Via The Farm.
Bill Siggelkow of Jade Cove Solutions has written a superb JSTL quick reference (PDF).
Combined with IBM developerWorks' A JSTL primer; Part 1: The expression language, Part 2: Getting down to the core, Part 3: Presentation is everything and Part 4: Accessing SQL and XML content, it's all the JSTL documentation you'll ever need.
Near-Earth Asteroid Makes Record-breaking Approach to Earth.
26,500 miles? That's closer than most of my estimates!
Via Off on a Tangent.
The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.
Via Bifurcated Rivets.
Via SlashDot, I discover that there are plans to film Ursula K.LeGuin's Earthsea books.
Prior to Peter Jackson's superb Lord of the Rings, this would have horrified me. It's difficult to turn a book into a film, and the Earthsea trilogy is special to me. (Yes, Yes, I know that there are five books now; but I've known it as the Earthsea trilogy for so long know that it's difficult to change.) Jackson has demonstrated that it's possible to get it right, though, so perhaps there is some chance that they won't butcher Earthsea too badly. Let's cross our fingers.
Though the new film version of I, Robot starring Will Smith (no, really) doesn't bode well...
I'm just off for a traditional St. Patrick's day curry. ;-)
Kevin points out EarthClock. Makes a nice companion to Sun Clock, my current favorite screen saver.
Steve and I will be meeting at The Stage Door on Thursday evening. The more the merrier.
Alternatively, I'll be in The Halal tomorrow lunchtime...
All is forgiven.
You can try and take the piss out of Blunkett, but the man is beyond satire: Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims ‘food and lodgings’.
Via Gordon.
Joel on Python: "I'm sure most programmers consider this [semantically meaningful indentation] to be frighteningly annoying, but most programmers are wrong. Giving indentation semantic meaning is a stroke of genius. In one fell swoop, it forces code to be indented neatly and correctly, while avoiding an entire class of bugs caused by code that looks like it's doing X when it's really doing Y and averting a whole class of worthless flamewars."
Python is full of strokes of genius; this is merely one of the most obvious, in-your-face examples.
Joel also says that he doesn't have the time to learn Python. But then, elsewhere, he says that he uses VB for scripting!
Joel - really, you can't afford not to learn Python!
Jez had a nice little thingamajig to show off last night - megg, sorry, megg. "megg is a tool for lazy developers" - that's me!
Basically, it builds Java projects for you, including ant build files, template tests, and so on. It's similar in intent to AppFuse, but much simpler.
Last night's London Java Meetup was great fun. Robocode is a blast, and StaggerLee.java will definitely be making an appearance at the next event. I've already got a few ideas for strategy...
One of the high points of the evening for me was the code for Jez's robot, LNE - and specifically the fact that the member variable for his robot was called i. I Am Robot - geddit?
How nerdy am I? Sigh...
BTW, RoboWiki looks like a very interesting site to pick up some advanced Robocode ideas - but I'll put StaggerLee.java version 1.0 together on my own first.
This creeping sickness. Whatever happened to The Land of the Free?
Windows 'fatal trap for UK birds'. Insert your own Microsoft joke here.
I hate buying new shoes.
I had, generally, a nice weekend. Pottered around the V&A on Saturday, vegged around the flat reading and listening to music on Sunday. But on Saturday (dum-dum-dum) I bought new shoes. Or boots really. Whatever.
Worse, I wasn't on my own. Usually, I'm pretty much a bungee-shopper; dive into the shop, grab something which isn't actually offensive, buy it, and out. If I try them on to make sure that they fit, that's dawdling. But this time, I had Michael and Caroline with me, and they wanted me to browse. Shudder.
Now, Michael's my oldest friend. Though he's the quintessential metrosexual, he knows me better than anybody. He accepts me for the retrosexual (AKA slob) that I am, and keeps his contempt for my fashion sense to himself. Caroline, his sister, wasn't quite able to hide her disgust, though.
All this, and my new shoes hurt like hell. Sigh.
On one sense, the argument as to whether global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism in the coming century is a sterile one. Both are huge problems, and the steps we should be taking to resolve them are orthogonal.
Or, rather, they should be orthogonal. And here's the rub. The UK government seems to believe that in order to fight terrorism, it needs to stand foursquare behind the American government. Criticism of the US's environmental policies would, according to this viewpoint, dilute the vital anti-terrorist alliance, and must be suppressed.
This would be dangerous even if the US was actually succeeding in damping down terrorism. Given that Guantanamo Bay, the Iraqi invasion, blind support for Israel's illegal activities and so on seem to be exacerbating terrorism, this is doubly mad. So far as my children are concerned, I'm far more concerned that they won't have a working ecosystem to keep them alive than I am that they'll suffer at the hands of terrorosts.
By the way, an excellent summary of the American government's current environmental policies can be found in Crimes Against Nature (via Rebecca Blood).
I've had a bit of a play with orkut now, and it's quite interesting. I'm still far from sure where it's all going to go, but there is a lot of potential here.
I think that Sam's right in that orkut is better at providing a framework for existing communities than it is at creating new ones. Similarly, it's not really a way of making new friends; it's just a way of linking to friends you already have.
One thing it would be good for, though, is enabling people to make contact with friends of friends. If I wanted, say, to get in touch with that interesting friend of Steve's that I met in the pub the other night, then orkut could provide a path.
The community forums don't really seem to have taken off. What would you discuss at the Python community forum, for example, that wouldn't be better discussed at c.l.py?
A few gripes:
Why do I have to be someone's friend before I can be their fan? I've put myself down as a friend of Alex Martelli and Steve Holden, for example, though I've met the former once and the latter never at all. I had to do this in order to register myself as a fan.
Also, there aren't enough categories. "Haven't met", "acquaintance", "friend", "good friend" and "best friend" are all very well, but where do I put my mother in there? (Well, out of those options, obviously it's got to be "best friend" - especially since she reads this blog. ;-)
There's a London Java Meetup this evening. Be there, or be square. Or quite possibly, both.
Could be a fun one tonight - it's Robot Wars night!
Stem cell tricks hint at baldness cures.
Cure baldness? Why would you want to cure baldness? Women find it very attractive.
And if I repeat that often enough, someone might actually start to believe it.
Jokes aside, this is important research. Curing baldness is utterly unimportant, but this might lead the way towards skin regeneration treatments for, for example, the badly burned.
Every now and again, even I'm amazed by how cool Python is.
Hey, how about combining this with Hans' Windows Explorer integration? Right click on a folder, "Serve from here"? I'll give this a bash at lunchtime...
As men of discernment agree, Spinal Tap is one of the two funniest films ever made (with the other being Life of Brian). So it was with considerable trepidation that I went to see A Mighty Wind at the weekend.
I needn't have worried. It was brilliant. As with Tap, the humour came from going just that 1% over the top.
Recommended.
I just got this photo from El Presidente - thanks, Paul! This was taken at Tulna's wedding late last year.
It was quite a bash, as you can see:
OK, so, I'm still far from sure what orkut is actually for, but I'm interested enough to give it a bash. I've filled in my profile, added some friends, and joined some communities. Now let's see what happens.
If you'd like an invite, BTW, give me a shout.
I was really pleased when Kevan got in touch yesterday. There are very few people from school that I'd really like to get in touch with again, and he's one of them.
But there's at least two other people I'd really like to get in touch with: Tom Doran and Alex Bernard.
Hmm, well, I can't find any trace of Tom, but Alex has a website. Time for an email, I think...
Michael Starke I've kept in touch with throughout.
Building good unit tests is a lot harder than it sounds. Designing Developer Tests is a very nice introduction to the art.
Got a good quotation in it, too: The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. - Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Ohhh, nice! The USB Swiss Army Knife.
Via Erik's Linkblog.
It'll stay quiet for a while, too; I'm very busy.
Via Rogue Semiotics, I find a nice addition to my already pretty extensive set of cool Underground maps: subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.
I would have expected London to be bigger...
When I was at High School, rather more years ago than I'd care to remember, I did an A Level in Computer Science. Proto-nerd that I was, I also used to hang around the computer room a fair amount in my free time, coding up simple text adventure games. My major co-conspiritor in this was one Kevan Thurstans, and he's just got in touch with me via Friends Reunited.
Hi, Kev!
One day, I'd like to be able to present an idea as well as Charles does here. One day.
How To Spot A Fake Programmer.
One more: Doesn't (or can't) use Google as their first stop when they have a problem.
The weekend before last:
Dramatis persona:
Mark: my brother-in-law.
Me: Errrr, me.
Laura: My niece, Mark's daughter.
Dad: My Father.
Daniel: My brother.
Neil: A friend.
Rachel B: My sister.
Ellen: Neil's youngest.
Freja: My oldest.
Lucy: My niece, Rachel & Mark's youngest.
Ella: My youngest.
Rachel C: Neil's oldest.
Isobel: My niece, Rachel & Mark's oldest.
One for the family, there. ;-)
Sigh. As if commuting by tube isn't hellish enough already.
I use VSS at work, and it seems I'm not alone.
But Microsoft don't use it: For example, at Microsoft two of our critical LOB applications are our defect tracking system and our source control system. It seems to me that VSS's quality is an indication of what happens when you don't eat your own dog food.