the corner office

Sadly, a friend of Ronwen's lost her mom last week and is back in South Africa for the funeral and to take care of family stuff, so Ronwen's gone down to Durbs to see her. So I'm alone in Joburg for a week.

Thus far my solitude has produced a fair amount of on-going spring-cleaning and a concerted study effort. Will I maintain my uber-diligence for a whole 7 days? We'll have to see :-)

...I'd probably be able to go buy myself an ice cream or something.

With my ADSL being capped for international bandwidth, it makes sense to go absolutely apeshit with local bandwidth before the clock strikes midnight on the 30th and the local + international counter gets reset. Internet Solutions' ftp site has a local Gentoo mirror (amongst other things), so now's the time.

Having learned my lesson, I'm backing up the source files as I go along. To this end, I realised that rsync is far simpler and more powerful than I had always thought. Digging through the man page, I realised that you don't need to set up and run an rsync server or daemon to sync files between machines: as long as the rsync client is installed on both, you can piggy-back everything through something like ssh and the clients on both end are invoked as needed to do their magic. So with about as much fuss as a command-line copy, I was able to push a backup of my /usr/portage/ directory to a back-up server, and mirror the files onto another hard drive on this machine.

Neat!

Final social bash before exams, Paula & Lee joined us for movies on Sunday. We watched Underworld. Not bad, but the whole vampire chic thing is a little tiring for an old ex-subcultural type like me. Having said that, the whole shades-of-Matrix PVC look does still have some mileage, I guess. The ending was seriously tired though - why not just come right out and say "hey, watch this space for a sequel!"

Well, as they say in the vernacular, that's 3 gigs in sy moer in, and we'll be stuck with virtually no international bandwidth until month-end (although I haven't noticed the slowdown, yet). I truly do hate Telkom.

The Star and even the BBC are running a story about South African paramedics who left a vagrant to die because he "was too dirty and stank."

Yes, it's horrible and wrong that they'd leave someone to die. Discipline them, fire them if needs be. Press charges if it's against the law. Whatever. By all means.

What I do think is utterly hypocritical is the Health Department's outrage because of it. One man dies in the street because of negligent and uncaring paramedics and everyone including the Minister of Health is up in arms. Thousands die daily and will continue to die because of Manto's near-genocidal AIDS policies, and nobody seems to get uppity about her deriliction of duty.

What about the countless tragedies that unfold when the paramedics don't even arrive, because they're too overstretched or underresourced?

Not to mention that these sorts of things are hardly unexpected given how overworked, demotivated, and underpaid our country's health workers are.

Gimme a break.

Just for search engines (and me if I ever run into this again) -

Running a Java Notes app from the command line, gave me the error:

java.lang.Exception: Notes initialization failure - err 421
        at lotus.domino.NotesThread.NnotesInitThread(Native Method)
        at lotus.domino.NotesThread.sinitThread(NotesThread.java:184)

Problem was related to my notes.ini not being in the normal place (ie. Notes program directory). I dropped a notes.ini into place and happy happy. I tried putting notes.ini elsewhere accessible by my PATH environment variable, and it didn't seem to work - so the native methods called by the Java API seem to look in the same directory, end of story.

Bit of a pain, that, especially if you juggle clients and have differently-named and stored ini files for your different clients. I know the C++ API allows you to specify the location of the notes.ini variable to use. It would be nice if the Java API allowed one to do the same thing.

(also: link to the sole other post about it on the ND6 forum.)

It's been ages since I posted anything remotely Notes-related. Blame that on taking a long, long holiday. But exams are looming, and that means one thing: procrastinate. The only way to procrastinate in a guilt-free manner is to do things that feel productive.

So I'm busy reworking my old ndsync app (backups...), but this time around I'm doing it purely with Java agents, which is turning out to be much easier. The java.io.File class plain rocks for file system traversal. I've got some ideas to expand on the general mechanism behind ndsync, so Java's OO-ness will hopefully keep things nicely extensible.

I'm writing everything in Eclipse (of course, he says nonchalantly), and I'm working my way through a developerworks article entitled Using Lotus Notes with Eclipse to manage and run your Java programs, pointed out by Ferdy Christant. Nifty thing - I don't have a Domino server installed right now, and I learned that while the article says you can use the 1.3 JVM from a locally installed server, it seems you can also just rely on the JVM from the Notes client. Just point to your c:\lotus\notes\jvm directory and Bob's yer auntie.

Eclipse and Notes is still a kludge, but less of a kludge than relying solely on Domino Designer to do java stuff. We eagerly await the merging of the Notes client and the Eclipse Deep Voodoo aka ND8. Andrew Pollack has seen the future and he says it rocks.

While I'm on the Notes/Java topic, I mentioned nearly a year ago that the old Lotus Technical Learning Centers had dropped off the face of the web. At the time, I'd sent an email to the IBM webmaster (or someone vaguely fulfilling that role) and I soon got a polite reply saying terribly sorry, nobody seems to know where they are, so you can pretty much take it as a given that they're gone, but feel free to visit our other wonderful content. I was pleasantly surprised that they got back to me and made an effort to investigate what had happened to the LTLCs, even if I wasn't happy to hear that the LTLCs are gone. At this stage, the only public incarnation of the Java LTLC is hidden away in Poland. The Java LTLC gives a good run-down of the different ways to work with local/remote, in-and-out-of-client Notes Java apps. Which is quite topical given how in vogue the Eclipse client is becoming as an alternative IDE.

No mess, no fuss. I swapped out my monitor with nary a hassle. This monitor's better than the previous (which had a slightly asymmetric warp), but this one still "bows" ever, ever so slightly (as did the previous monitor). So my only conclusion is that this is how these CRTs are designed, and that's what you get for going with "Real Flat" as opposed to dinkum flat.

It's hardly noticeable (Ronwen didn't at first). So is it worth pursuing? Probably not. Tomorrow's a public holiday here, and if I'm still unhappy by Saturday, I'll phone the suppliers and see what they think. Most T's & C's don't allow for refunds on opened goods, so short of real benevolence on their part I don't see that as an option. Besides, the only other monitor in this price range and spec level is a mid-level LG, and since LG and Philips have merged their CRT operations, that wouldn't do me much good either :-/

*sigh*

Assume a method is given an object as a parameter. You want to check whether this object is null before using it, because that's what good defensive programmers do. So you start thinking real deep thoughts about what sort of Error or Exception to throw. The main point being that if the method gets given a null reference, there's no graceful recovery required. Just skreem and die.

In a flash of brilliance, you realise that if you were to throw something called a NullPointerException, you'd get the message across quite succinctly.

Then you realise that this is what the JVM will do, anyway. So is there any worth to explicitly checking whether the object is instantiated or not, as good defensive programmers are wont to do?

And if you decide not to do an explicit check, then how do you make sure that the next person coming along doesn't just think you were sloppy? Do you start the method off with something like:


'Cause that could get really messy.

I cheated a little with my online purchase. I finally decided to go with a Philips 109B55, and I decided to zip through to Kyalami to pick it up in person, rather than have it delivered. So it ended up not being an online purchase after all.

Mixed feelings. It's big, it's beautiful, it's got a bright, crisp display, and it's a million times better-looking than my old Sahara monitor. There's just one small problem: the display looks a little concave on the horizontal axes, and I can't adjust it away. It's not badly warped, but just enough for it to be noticeable and to bother me. So I'll be phoning back tomorrow to see about replacing it. I *hope* that it's just this monitor, and not a general problem with these models. I also hope I don't have to fight and scream and be given a "that's not a warranty issue" runaround, and I hope I don't have to go through a rigmarole to get it swapped or sorted.

We'll have to see. Bugger.