Possibly Deep Thoughts

Really just testing private blog pages for a work journal.

h3. Heading * testing textile # list item 

Quark rhymes with dark, not dork!

I saw some of Borat last night. Only part, because I found it incredibly tedious and repetitive.
Guy says some unexpected and/or profane statement in front of “real-life” strangers and film their shocked reaction. 15 minutes of unfunny was enough for me. I left and got my money back.

I don’t know why so many people and critics give it a good rating. Rotten Tomatoes gives it 92%, the first time I’ve disagreed with them so much.

While upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft, I was asked this question by dpkg:

There are several entries for swat in /etc/inetd.conf

Do you want to ignore this potential problem and continue, or would
you rather not do so now ? Continue? (n/y)

I answered n, which ignored the problem; the complete opposite of what I thought. I’ll have to file a bug report. I always have trouble parsing questions like this, perhaps because I try evaluate it logically. I might have a touch of Aspergers
in that I take words too literally. If I don’t catch myself, I think somebody saying “How are you?” as a real question, not a empty greeting phrase.

I would make a very terrible witness at a trial if real layers asked questions like tv lawyers:

• Did you or did you not see the suspect? The answer would logically always be yes.


• You saw him, didn’t you? No, where most people would say yes.
  

Double negative questions always confuse me terribly. At least I have some understanding of kids with Asperger’s or autism.

I’ve been a programmer for 20+ years, and this is the first time it’s happened to me. Most of my friends have been through a couple of times, and I know someone who’s been through 6 layoffs, although he wasn’t affected this time.

The startup company I was working for, Databeacon, was ac acquired alnost a year ago. I was the first paid employee at Databeacon and was there for 8.5 years. Now I’ve been tossed to improve a quarterly result., almost on a whim

I don’t think I’m a large company person. I do very poorly at the political games, and I don’t do well with all talk no action kinds of people. I prefer direct communication. I’m sure I tick people off, but I much prefer clarity.

I’ll be looking for work at a smaller company. I don’t know if I have the energy for a new startup this time, but I want a job where I see that my work makes an actual difference.

I’m one of the many people who wanted to start a blog, but never really did much with it.  My working theory is that I don’t have a big enough ego to believe that other people would be interested in my opinions.   Easpecially the sort of trivial drivel

 

Lots of people say you have to force yourself to write regularly in the beginning, and then it becomes a habit.   Maybe I’m just lazy, but I’m going to give it another shot.

I wanted to avoid using if (o instanceof getClass()) and just compare if (o.getClass() getClass()). More of a style thing than any fear of instanceof being slow, and I know there won’t be any subclasses.

A quick look for information comparing classes didn’t reveal if it was safe to do this. I wondered if the same class came in through two different class loaders would be . I could test it myself, but it’s just easier to use instanceof.

I think it’s a symptom of our mindset when we’re writing documentation. We write for the common case. Unit testing encourages us to thing of the error and edge conditions up front. Maybe we should document them too.

Programming by contract style would make us be explicit about what we pass in as arguments, and exactly what we can get back. I’ve seens lots of documentation that doesn’t tell me what functions return when something goes wrong. My test cases make me think about this and I’d like to know the same information about the code I’m calling.

Naturally, as soon as I look for an example, I can’t find a good one. The doc for java.io.PrintStream.println(Object) doesn’t say what it will print if you pass it a null. (If you follow the links in the description you can find out, which makes it a poor example.) I’m sure we’ve all seen these sort of things.

Even if the language doesn’t support programming by contract, the documentation should.

In the Embarass Your Son category. John had Beautiful Boy which also contained the line “darling Sean”. On Kate’s new album Aerial she has a song called Bertie which contains the oft repeated line “lovely Bertie”.

He’s going to hate that song when he gets into high school…

There’s an interesting analysis of media “drug panic” in Slate, and another article there by the same writer. There’s a number of interesting articles by Jack Shafer, who seems to be applying logic and reason to the normally hyperbolic and reactionary drug stories.

Damn you Wal-Mart!