Sunday, August 27, 2006

Finally!

I walked into Newbury Comics today, and was shocked to see a DVD of Kicking and Screaming sitting in the new releases section. I've been waiting for this movie to come out on DVD for years, ever since I abandoned my VHS copy of it back at my fraternity house (along with my VCR for that matter) when I graduated from college.

For the curious, this isn't the totally worthless Will Ferrell movie from 2005 that stole the same title, it's the brilliant Noah Baumbach movie from 1995 about a group of friends that just graduated from college and has no idea what to do next. It's a fantastic movie, and if you haven't seen it you should definately pick up a copy now that it's finally available on DVD.

Personally, I'm just glad that I'll be able to subject Rob to it again, since it was so much fun making him watch it back in college ;-)

Friday, August 25, 2006

A Place to Work

In my morning bloglines reading I ran across a mention of Workspace, an interesting option for those of us who for one reason or another don't have a regular office. Sounds like a pretty good deal, I'd totally consider working afternoons from a place like that. Too bad I don't live in Vancouver...

Anyone know of a similar type place in the Boston area?

Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Mobile Typepad

Typepad has a mobile client for Series 60 phones like my nokia. I can't see myself typing any serious entries on a t9 keypad though, it's already driving me nuts on this one...

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Thoughts on Java Development

I've been doing some Java development lately, mostly just for fun, but from time to time for work, and I've come to a few conclusions.

First, IDEA rocks. I really tried to give Eclipse a shot, and I really want to like it, but in the end it's just too slow for me. Heck, IDEA's faster and it's still verging on too slow, to the point that I occasionally revert to vi and ant. Outside of the speed question though, IDEA definately kicks some serious ass, I just love the way it points out problems I didn't even know were there. I've definately seen some weirdness with the way it complains about some perfectly valid Java 1.5 constructs, but all in all, I think it's worth the occasional backflip to work around that in exchange for the real problems it does point out.

Second, if you have to do any sort of multithreaded programming, in any language, but especially in Java, run to your nearest technical bookstore and pick up Java Concurrency in Practice. It's a fantastic book about the ins and outs of multithreaded programming in Java, and really comes in head and shoulders above any other book on multithreading that I've ever seen. Highly recommended.

Third, someone needs to explain to me what the appeal of Maven is. I just don't get it. Ant I can figure out, it works just fine, and aside from the XML bullshit I can certainly get along with it. Maven just seems to require me to bend my project into its image of what a project should look like (thanks for those LOVELY deep/directory/trees/that/go/on/forever even above and beyond the ones you get from Java in the first place!), and in return it will attempt to download all my dependencies and then fail half way through with some sort of network error. Thanks.

Finally, and this isn't because I'm interacting with it, but I just keep seeing it when browsing through the Java section of bookstores, how do these people take themselves seriously when their community actually makes use of a term like POJO. I mean come on people, you went and invented a special name for an OBJECT! It's a freaking object oriented language, it's composed almost entirely of objects, what does it say about the culture when you had to come up with a new name to market the practice of just using the fundamental abstraction provided by your language!

Anyway, it turns out I'm actually enjoying the Java work I've been doing lately. It's a pretty decent environment to work in, all things considered. I wouldn't want to live there all the time, but it's certainly a nice enough place to visit once in a while, if you stick to the less insane bits of it...

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

No Rain This Time!

So last night I went to the Red Sox/Indians game with Rob and Suzanne. It was a hell of a game, both team's pitching totally fell apart for the first half, then they managed to hold each other at 8:6 with the Indians in the lead. This held up until the bottom of the 9th, and all hope seemed lost until Ortiz managed to once again close things out with a 3 run homer to win it for the Red Sox.

This totally makes up for the game I missed due to rain earlier this year, and it's especially nice that they won because it means Rob and Suz won't proactively remove me from the list of people to bring to games when they have spare tickets. They're rather strict about the whole "avoiding bad luck" thing when it comes to the Red Sox ;-)