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 ;-)

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?

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...

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...

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 ;-)

OSCON Day 1

So I started this morning by waking up at like 6AM so I could stare at the ceiling and worry about my tutorial about using the Subversion libraries in your own code.

Fortunately, the tutorial actually went quite well. I had something like 30 people show up, and most of them managed to stay awake throughout most of the talk ;-)

Additionally, I actually had enough content to fill all three hours, almost exactly. Ideally I would have actually had slightly less stuff, since I ran about 5 minutes over, and it would have been good to stop a few minutes early to leave time for questions.

Most importantly though, it's over, and I can move on to worrying about my talks later in the week.

Post-tutorial I ran into Ugo Cei, who's blog I've read for some time. We grabbed lunch at the Red Robin near the convention center, which was a great way to wind down after the tutorial. I swear the entire convention was sitting in that place over lunch...

Right now I'm sitting in MJD's talk on Higher Order Perl. The high point so far was him going off on a rant about the correct plural of the word octopus, which was quite amusing. Other than that, not too much stuff I hadn't gotten out of his book (although the trick to bless a closure into an object is pretty slick, I don't recall seeing that before), but I have high hopes for the section about parsing at the end of the talk.

Anyway, back to paying attention...

Bash + Readline + Sanity

So yesterday, in a futile attempt to convince Firefox, X.org, Ubuntu, and a really large s5 presentation to work together without consuming ridiculous amounts of CPU I upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper.

Naturally, tihs didn't actually fix anything of consequence, although it did give me a laptop that boots quite a bit faster (bonus!), and an X screen resolution control panel that is capable of controlling the resolution on more than one display (kind of slick).

Unfortunately, it broke my .inputrc, which sets up and down arrows to history-search-backward and hisory-search-forward respectively, and since I'm totally addicted to that feature I had to stop all productive work and find a way to fix it.

After flailing around hopelessly for a while, I came upon the /usr/share/doc/bash/inputrc.arrows file, which has various different ways to configure your arrow keys. Now just cut and pasting all of them into .inputrc didn't help much, well it did actually fix the problem I was working on, but it made me have to hit enter twice to do anything, which isn't really a step forward in my opinion. But after paring it down to just the basics, I found that the following worked:

set enable-keypad on
"\C-[OD" backward-char
"\C-[OC" forward-char
"\C-[OA" history-search-backward
"\C-[OB" history-search-forward

Previously I had gotten away with:

"\M-[A": history-search-backward
"\M-[B": history-search-forward
"\M-[C": forward-char
"\M-[D": backward-char

This worked on dozens of systems, and I still have no idea why it stopped working, but whatever...

Just figured I'd post it in case anyone else has the same problem, or, more likely, I have the same problem again and need to look up what I did to fix it ;-)

The Housing Situation

So, despite Jessica's attempt to jinx us by posting about it on LiveJournal earlier today, we successfully managed to sign the lease on our new apartment tonight. It's incredibly cool, way nicer than any other places we looked at, and I can't wait to move in. There's a ton of room, it's near all sorts of stuff, and is just generally awesome.

Oh, and the bar that's just down the street from it is just too damn cool. We're totally going to rule their trivia night.

Anyway, now that we've settled that I just get to sit back and relax until September 1st when we move in.

XMPP/Jabber Fun

So just yesterday Paul and I were talking about the various options available for running your own Jabber server (short version, Wildfire and DJabberd appear to be the best options available, which you use probably depends on whether you want to extend it and if so whether you prefer to hack in Java or Perl), and then today the Livejournal guys announce their new Jabber support. It's pretty slick, if you're already a Livejournal user you automatically get a Jabber acount that's integrated with your existing Livejournal friends list (your mutual friends anyway, other friends show up as pending). Perhaps most importantly, server to server support works (although there are still some issues with regard to cross server buddy lists apparently), which means this will work just fine with other Jabber based systems (like Google Talk). The IM world continues to get more and more interesting. Wonder how long it'll take until one of the big three IM systems start supporting Jabber natively...

Railroad Bridge

As part of my ongoing attempt to actually get out and take more pictures I took a quick trip down to the Cape Cod Canal and got some shots of the railroad bridge at the south end.

The results are up on flickr.

It was actually a pretty lousy day down by the canal. Both windy and cloudy. I had planned on waiting around for dusk to get some shots of the bridge as it got dark, but there was no way that was going to happen.

Fortunately, there are few pictures of large metal objects like bridges that can't be made to look at least reasonably artistic by applying the "remove color" command in Photoshop ;-)