the corner office

I'm currently making my way through an Umberto Eco novel. Consequently, I'm spending a lot more time reading the free newspapers on the train & tube than I normally do. I make a thing of this because I took a conscious decision earlier this year to stop reading these papers. I felt my IQ dropping daily, as I worked my way through yet another page of pictures of stupid models and has-beens and never-beens in the London Lite. The Metro is especially bad for its sensationalist headlines, designed to spark outrage and paranoia and anger, like a Daily Mail for people too cheap to pay for their papers (like me).

It's ridiculous. On Thursday for example, the Metro ran a story about cocaine killing record numbers of people this year. Of course, that's not what the actual headline was - the real headline was something like SOARING COCAINE DEATHS. Don't remember the exact wording, but there was some 'soaring' in there. And I didn't read the paper, because I was working my way through a fairly accessible chapter of my book, but I did see the number quoted in smaller text - about 200 people. Looking at the now tamely-headlined online article, the real number is 196 people.

196 people died of cocaine abuse last year. On an island of 60 million people, half of whom can't schnarf anyway because the weather's shit and their noses are always blocked. There's nothing soaring or alarming about it. First, the human gene pool is not feeling hard done by on account of losing a few cokeheads. Second, it's just a ridiculously insignificant statistic. You probably have more chance of tripping over a discarded copy of the London Metro on the Embankment tube platform and falling in front of an oncoming Circle Line train than you do of dying of a cocaine overdose. Silly.

But that's not the point of this post. The thing I enjoy the most about these papers are the letters pages. This week it was particularly funny seeing the reaction to Boris Johnson's Olympics handover. In the beginning of the week it was outrage at the fact that Johnson didn't do up his jacket buttons, and people were writing in to complain about how sad and awful a mayor he was and an embarassment to the nation. This along with the outrage and scorn heaped upon Johnson by the Chinese media and bloggers (digging their freedom of expression, oh yeah).

By the end of the week, after Johnson wrote a response in the Spectator saying he'd checked protocol, wasn't breaking any rules and decided not to do his buttons to 'take a stand' (because sometimes you just gotta), the mood had changed. By Friday the letters pages were filled with people saying 'you go Boris' and how buttons were symbolic of the subjugation of the Chinese people by their communist masters and no damned Chinese were gonna tell free-thinking Britons how they should dress and they can all just fuck off to their re-education camps.

It was beautiful.

For me, I said my bit about the Olympics before, but quite frankly, go Boris. He might be a buffoon, but he's a buffoon after my own heart, at least in the matter of doing up the buttons to one's suit jacket. And the Olympics left me with a lot more respect for him compared to 200K all-expenses-paid Livingstone's luxury trip to chum it up with his totalitarian buddies in Beijing.

I never noticed it last year, but geez, everyone went holiday-nuts for this long weekend. I think half the office has gone away this weekend or taken the coming week off for a final summer holiday. I read somewhere that this bank holiday traditionally marks the end of summer, and people are out there making damned sure they catch them last few rays of sun.

Anyhoo, we weren't any different. We made our way along the M25, clogged with campers and caravans and all manner of holiday-bound transportation all making an exodus to who knows where.

It's always great going back to Oxfordshire... day to day you don't notice it, and least of all because we live in a really sleepy suburb, but as you head into the countryside, you feel the oppressiveness and bustle of the city disappear. There's nothing like zipping through the hills towards Henley, and then working through small hamlets towards Wallingford, finally crossing the bridge and into the old town with the old buildings arching over the road. Awesome.

We had a lazy Saturday with Leo stomping around his aunt and uncle's back garden. Sunday we went for lunch at The Reformation in Gallowstree Common, just outside Reading. Brilliant food. And Brakspears mmmmm. My sister and brother in law discovered the pub and now go regularly because they know the proprietors, and no complaints from us. Well worth visiting if you're ever in the area.

We ended off yesterday with a long walk around Wallingford, and a stroll up the Thames. I love the idea of walking alongside the river, idyllic and lazy with people fishing and boats dawdling back and forth, and knowing that at some point all that water comes flowing past where I work in Hammersmith, and under the bridge my train crosses in the morning. I romanticise the Thames, I know, probably because coming from Joburg, we had no rivers, just a few hardly-noticed spruits, and that was it. Rivers rock.

All in all, a very good-for-the-soul weekend.

The streets of London are filthy. Not necessarily filthier than other large cities, but filthy nonetheless. Millions of people puking and peeing and sweating and spitting and shedding skin and all manner of cells, litter and cigarette ash and food and crud.

So why the current trend for people to wear trousers that are too long, hanging below their shoes so the bottoms are being trampled on or dragging across the ground? Gross, especially on wet days when you see fashionistas with soggy and mud-covered leg-bottoms, damp and sludge slowly wicking up their legs. I just don't get the appeal. Ugh, ugh, and yet again, ugh.

In principle I'm on the side of the separatists, the secessionists, the federalists and independence-seekers and the little guy. So while I know next to nothing about the historical context, I'm not quite sure where all the anti-Russian indignation comes from.

South Ossetia is a small Russian-friendly breakaway state. Georgia invades South Ossetia, wanting to re-annex it. The Russians step in and help South Ossetia, with waaay over the top aggression. While Bush and Brown and Milliband and Rice are getting all huffy, the US and UK are so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan that there's next to nothing short of dropping nukes on Moscow that they can do, and Russia undoubtedly factored this very neatly into their calculations. In essence, Russia has sent out a very convincing 'don't mess with us' message in a language that everybody understands.

So, the Russians are the bad guys, and I won't argue that they probably are, since I don't for one second think their actions were altruistic, but in this conflict, I don't exactly understand why the Georgians aren't bad guys too?

The whole Java world reads Charles Miller's blog. He's that famous; I'm not sure why. But I read his blog too. And his latest post Recommended Reading for Java developers refers to a post from 2002 where he listed 5 books Java developers should read.

Now, 6 years ago I was just starting to learn Java in a university course, writing my shitty classes in Textpad and getting to grips with javac and class paths and thinking that VisualAge was crap with its stupid-ass way of dragging lines between 'beans'. Thankfully I'm come a little further down the road since then (although man, Visual Age was crap).

Miller mentions Effective Java Second Edition. Somewhat coincidentally (not really since the damned thing was only recently published), Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is what I'm finishing off right now. It's an excellent book. It's not always geared towards what application developers do, with a much stronger focus on API design. Still, the principle is that if you see and design your components in terms of APIs they'll work better, and that's true. And beyond that, it's just a great big heap of Java experience and knowledge about the language and libraries, coming to you in little aphoristic bites that you can digest and apply to write less crap code.

In addition to Enlightenment, (capital E and all), the nice thing about Effective Java is that when it comes down to 'should I do A or B to solve this problem', as is so often the case, you can now choose a course of action safe in the knowledge that if anyone ever calls you on your decision you can just reply 'EJ item 71,' and that's the end of the conversation. Sometimes 'Josh Bloch said so' is all the justification you need.

Half the worldly goods in our home probably have a 'Made in China' label or stamp on them. And I'm not particularly sporty, so I really don't care about the Olympics. So I may be a bit of a hypocrite, but I think that boycotting the Beijing Olympics is a good thing.

China's government is an oppressive regime. Any other country with the same dismal human rights record would be in line for boycotts, protests, and sanctions. Yet, as a nascent economic superpower, China gets special treatment. The West falls over backwards to do business with China. Gotta get into those markets before anyone else does.

It's pure hypocrisy. Hypocrisy and greed. Maybe I'm also a hypocrite for saying it, because I don't go out of my way to avoid Chinese products. But the Olympics are a big deal, the Beijing Olympics are an inordinately symbolic event, and the West's support of the event is equally symbolic, in that it amounts to tacit condonation of China's behaviour.

So if Tibet protesters disrupt the Olympics, then good. If athletes wear armbands and cause controversy, then good. If the media spends more time talking about censored Internet connectivity and heavy-handed policing than sports, then good. If people in the West wonder why the fsck they bother recycling their plastics when they see China choking to death in a miasma of smog and get angry about it, then good. If lots of people say 'screw you sponsors, we're not watching the Olympics and we're not buying your damned products', then good.

It won't make a jot of difference in the greater scheme of things, and it's hardly any effort on my end, but I'm not watching the Olympics and given a choice, I'll spend money on companies not sponsoring the Olympics.

I've been doing a lot of multithreaded work recently, so this is rather apropos (via):

What I would have learned had I been more dedicated to my education were the two fundamental facts about multi-threading with locks:

1. You're going to fuck it up.
2. If you think that you haven't fucked it up, you have. You just don't know it yet.

Multithreading is difficult, even with the right kind of help. The problem is that common wisdom circa 2008 is that core counts are going to keep climbing, so concurrency matters and is going to keep mattering. I don't know much about transactional memory, but it looks rather interesting.