the corner office

Yep, I'm still around, just rather weighed down by deadlines of the work and study variety. This is short and sweet.

Real life: some people take an extreme view of South Africa, and say that we're a banana republic. That's a bit too extreme for me, but an argument could be made that we're a beetroot republic. It would be funny if it wasn't so saddening.

More real life: surely there must be laws against demoting planets? Not that the distant, barren chunk of rock and gas gives a shit, but it just seems a bit rude to turn Pluto back into a non-planet. The Sitchin crowd must be heart-broken. A few months ago they were celebrating the discovery of their 10th planet, and now we're back down to 8. Sorry for yoouuuuu.

Personal life: I'm getting miiighty tired of studying.

Tech: I wouldn't go so far as to say that JBoss can reduce grown men to tears, but I will say that I've seen a few men who need a good hug after a week or few of doing battle with it. Me included.

More tech: I've seen a host of good tech articles I wanted to link to the past few weeks, but then I don't have time and forget. Of all the articles I can't remember, the one I do is this one by Cameron Purdy. Gestation time needed for an architecture to settle in, late projects and bugger-ups without it. Real-world wisdom, well worth a read.

Dear Sun and associated smart people,

Generics are a nice feature and it's really nice not having to do all that horrible casting anymore. Over the past year I've come to appreciate the clarity that something like

HashMap<Integer,List<Vertex<String>>> map = new HashMap<Integer,List<Vertex<String>>>();

brings to my code. I am also very glad that I've avoided the 2 detectable-during-testing crashes I would probably have encountered if I'd stuck with non-type-safe code, like in the 1.4 days and before.

Now granted, any feature that makes Java developers feel as syntax-savvy and hardcore as C++ developers has a certain cool factor, and deep down I do agree that generics are an improvement, but at least C++ has typedefs. I'm just saying...

Yours,
Colin

Eve Online is fun. Lots and lots of fun. There's only one problem: Eve is Windows-only, meaning I have to boot into my (until now) hardly used Windows partition, whenever I want to play. This is a little suboptimal, because my whole life is now on an ext3 file system. I've tried using Eve with Wine, but it's still a bit broken. It's good enough to log in, update skills training and chew the fat in chat channels, but there are a few memory leaks which leave it all falling apart after a few minutes.

Aptly (pun originally unintended), I read a blog post by Ian Murdock this week, contemplating the fact that Windows still has the best driver support:

Me, I actually prefer the Linux desktop over Windows. But now, with all the improvements in virtualization over the past few years, I can still use the Linux desktop as my primary UI and have access to the most extensive set of device drivers.

Tempting. In my case it's not drivers, it's just that little thing called DirectX 9. I'm rather partial to my Linux desktop too, and all the booting between Windows and Linux is a pain. I think it might be venturing into the realms of overkill to change my entire set-up just because of a game (no matter how addictive), but booting into Windows and running Linux in a VMWare partition would certainly be the best of both worlds...