the corner office

I love junk food. But even I'm grossed out by some of the stuff at thisiswhyyourefat.com.

Halfway down the page is a picture of a tin of Pork Brains In Milk Gravy, which happens to have a cool 1170% of your RDA of cholesterol. I've seen the picture crop up on a few blogs this week, and so I googled it. I didn't look too hard but I suspect that this was one of the originals, and there are blog posts referencing this picture as far back as 2006.

On the subject of pig brains, my googling found this page about potted meat products, which just makes me feel uncomfortable deep inside.

The odd thing is that as kids (and I don't think, looking back, that we were alone in this), we grew up eating things like corned beef and polony, and as I grew older and more discerning, first the corned beef went (only so many aorta bits you can deal with before you give it up), and then the polony after a fellow articled clerk during my auditing years told me about his experiences doing a stock count at a polony factory.

I still eat viennas and sausages, and I find it best to live in denial on that front.

Aw man. Why do these things have to get so complicated? I wanted to whip up a simple webapp using Hibernate. But when I fired up the app, I got:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.slf4j.impl.JDK14LoggerAdapter.trace(Ljava/lang/String;)V
	at org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.PropertyBinder.make(PropertyBinder.java:184)
... etc etc...

I found this discussion and a comment that it was an slf4j version mismatch with hibernate-annotations. So the solution is to explicitly include slf4j-log4j12 in your maven dependency list, before your hibernate-annotations dependency.

So with that sorted, I ran into the next problem:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter
	at org.hibernate.bytecode.javassist. BytecodeProviderImpl.getProxyFactoryFactory(BytecodeProviderImpl.java:49)
... etc etc...

To resolve that, you have to add javassist as an explicit Maven dependency.

That cost me the better part of tonight's tinkering time. Bah.

I don't play Eve Online anymore but I chuckled when a work colleague (and then Ronwen) told me about the Band of Brothers industrial espionage that ended up with one of Eve's largest virtual corporations being completely decimated. Quite something for an online gaming event to prompt a BBC article.

But I wonder how far the real-life parallels go. For people who've devoted years to building up some of these corps, the loss must be very, very real, as is the shame and loss of face amongst peers. Is it not just a matter of time before a player does in fact react much the same as a real-life CEO would, and jump out a window? I'm sure it's happened before with unstable gamers, but if a really high-profile event, like the BoB affair, had a tragic ending, what would the BBC be saying then, and how long before real world regulators start turning their attention to these (refreshingly) free and chaotic online worlds?

Gotta get 'em off my chest:

• The UK taxpayer does not own Northern Rock, nor does the taxpayer have a stake in RBS or Lloyds. The Labour-led government has stakes in these enterprises. If Labour gets hoofed, then the Tory-led government will have stakes in these enterprises. At no point do taxpayers have stakes in these companies. We just foot the bill for the government. Journalists and politicians who talk about taxpayers-as-shareholders are either economically ignorant or disingenuous.

• It is impossible to talk about bankers being irresponsible or talk up the idea of conservative banking and then insist that banks dish out loans they didn't want to give out in the first place.

• People get upset because Royal Mail is due to be part-privatised and it's a natural response to the idea of a national institution being peddled off to foreign investors, but how many people would be willing to pay twice as much for a postage stamp?

• The word 'spend' is a verb, not a noun. The word people are looking for is 'expenditure'. People who keep talking about their 'spend' sound silly, and I don't care if that includes half the financial world.

• If Jade Goody hadn't gotten cancer, she would have descended into well-deserved obscurity, and her marriage this past weekend to a convicted thug wouldn't be front-page news. Having said that, her impending expiry is sobering and thought-provoking, and it's hard to loathe someone who hasn't got long to live.

(Update: censored myself, hate the sin, not the sinner)

A gotcha. I was trying to load a native library, and to speed things up when fiddling with a test app I tried to set the java.library.path system property directly in the code, before anything else was loaded or instantiated, a la:

System.setProperty("java.library.path", "/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib");

This didn't work, and I still got an error saying:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no myspeciallib in java.library.path

I had to specify the system property on the command line with -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib. Presumably the JVM resolves the library path a lot earlier in life, not just when you try to explicitly load a .dll or .so. Stands to reason I suppose.

I was hoping we'd get more snow this week, but it's looking unlikely. I wouldn't mind heading out in this more often:

The current outrage about bonuses is standard banker-bashing fare, but the media is also being a bit disingenuous.

On the one hand, of course it would be unfair if people directly responsible for huge bank losses got big bonuses. And the government has every right to add whatever conditions it wants to the bail-outs it's giving.

However, when you get past the headlines to the details, many of the bonuses now being paid are to executives and staff in divisions of banks which were actually generating profits, profits which are offsetting the losses being incurred by toxic divisions. Cutting bonuses to the people responsible for those profits would very likely cause them to leave, leaving the bank worse off than before.

So while some of the bonuses may be unwarranted (and the government has every right to step in and block them at banks it's bailing out), to talk about evil fatcat bankers being rewarded for failure is an oversimplification.

Of course the Browns and Darlings and Camerons and Osbornes of the world know this, so their righteous indignation is simply populist posturing. A pox on all of them.

Most ironic of all though, is that the reason the 'bonus culture' is ostensibly so bad is because it encourages bankers to gamble large sums of money and take extraordinary risks, since they have everything to gain if it pays off and very little to lose if it doesn't.

Yet doesn't that perfectly describe the government's bailouts and stimulus packages?

(and for the record, I think that negative bonuses and incentivisation towards long-term profitability are good things, that should have happened a long time ago. But it's up to shareholders to demand it, not the government).

So that was quite a week, weather-wise. I loved it to bits, although it wasn't without its frustrations. It started snowing last Sunday. I got up extra early on Monday morning, thinking I'd get to the train station before the rush started. This thinking didn't factor in the fact that SouthEastern are an INCOMPETENT OVERPRICED EPITOME OF FAIL. Empty station, no trains, a bunch of commuters milling around thinking 'oh well, now what?'

Since most of the neighbourhood was still unspoiled, I trudged home through the heavy snow via the scenic route, which included me wading through deep snow drifts and scooping up handfuls of virgin snow and generally having a ball. Magical.

The downside of VPN connectivity means you get to sit at home and work on days when everyone else is out building snowmen.

By Tuesday SouthEastern managed to provide a half-hourly (which meant: hour-and-a-halfly) service into London. I was lucky enough to be one of the poor buggers on one of the two different trains which both packed up at Elmstead Woods station at the same time, blocking up an entire branch of SouthEastern's network. 4 hours to get to work. Yay.

Since then the week's improved commute-wise, if you exclude the fact that the pavements in our neighbourhood have turned into slippery deathtraps. Still, it's snow and ice and nothing like anything I ever experienced growing up, so I'm still enjoying it, and I'm going to keep enjoying it until every last patch of white disappears.

The only down side to this being the heaviest snow London's seen in 18 years, is that it might take 18 years for it to happen again.