madbean

While I’m in bile-laden mood (see previous entry), here are two things I think were horribly mis-designed in the Java I/O API.

A friend (fiend?) pointed out that BEA’s new Weblogic 9.0 (alias “Diablo”) has a new mascot/logo.

OMGWTF!

How can a $1B Company produce such a horrible mascot; did they outsource their marketing department to a kindergarten? And “It runs like the Devil” is the slogan!? The BEA marketing department sat down, pooled their collective wit and creativity, and came up with… It runs like the Devil?!

And what’s with the jaundiced, fat-necked imp taking a wizz? Maybe in the fiery hell-hole it calls home light diffracts according to different rules, but in this plane of existance your shadow is meant to at least resemble the projection of your silhouette onto the ground. Can anyone say “MS Paint”?

This may all sound a bit harsh, and I’m not Picasso myself, but it is quite easy to find people that know how to knock up a good logo. Hell, even a cash-poor Open Source project can come up with good logos.

BPH put me onto this gem:

firefox feature of the day: in the fisheye “file search” box, right-click and select Add keyword for this search…. Add a keyword like cvs - now you can launch a fisheye quick search by typing cvs foo.java into the address bar :-D

That is an awesome feature (just typing cvs build.xml now takes me exactly to the file I’m looking for). And putting that option in the context menu for the text input box is quite intuitive.

You’ve been coding in Java too long when you completely forget that C doesn’t have labelled breaks.

A quiet moment of project-size zen:

    [javac] Compiling 404 source files to D:workfisheyeprojectsfisheyeuildclasses

When a friend is having internet connectivity problems and this is the IM conversation you have:

I gave a Lucene presentation to the Sydney GeekNight/SyXPAC group on Monday. Apparently I was quite enthusiastic; which is not that surprising given the atmosbeer and my propensity to do a little hand-waving when presenting. And if your Lucene queries don’t execute in under 16ms, well, just blame the beer and not me. :D

I took a quick photo with my phone. It sums up the whole GeekNight thing nicely. Oh, and I’ve only just realized how SyXPAC should be pronounced… LOL.

We had a good turn out, and you gotta love the Squires. Will have to make the effort to drive down and attend more regularly.

Now I know this confirms how far removed I am from youth culture (I turn 30 next month, after all), but I was wondering what exactly was referred to in that song “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”. The boys at work didn’t know, so I decided to see how hip Google is. A search [...]

We moved into our new house this week, and my ISP said it could be up to 2 weeks before the fuck knuckles get around to plugging me into the ADSL exchange. So I’m on freaking dialup! It is quite amazing how accustomed my wife and I have become to an always-on broadband connection. I had to dialup last night to check [...]

I’ve been doing a fair whack of regex processing in Java recently. I must admit that having a regex library in the language is very useful, and Java’s java.util.regex.Pattern implements a very complete regex library (all the “Perl5″ stuff, non-greedy quantifiers, Unicode character classes, etc).

So I was completely surprised when it started throwing StackOverflowError. The following code highlights the problem (reproduced on Sun’s JDK1.5.0-b2 and JDK1.4.2_01). Any pattern like (x|y)* (an alternative wrapped in a star) is implemented recursively by Pattern. Each matched alternative uses about 5 method calls on the stack.