here's some more because its just too much fun:

What would be yours? Blog it up and send me a Trackback or just reply!

March 30, 2003

Microserfs

So I was rummaging through the bookstore today and came across one of the funniest books I ever read. Douglas Coupland's Microserfs

I decided to pick it up again and re-read it, if you've never read it, you MUST pick this book up. It's mandatory reading, I mean how can you argue with a book that has 2 whole page written in binary? It's a masterpiece!

March 28, 2003

serious flashbacks

Check it out old school sierra mmorpg! Its pretty funny, now they just have to add NPC's (non player characters).

I played most of these games back in the 80's as a kid, I still play them once in a while.

March 27, 2003

A Time-Traveller !

What a cool story ! I wonder if his "time-craft" is a Delorean.

March 25, 2003

Javaworld does WebWork

Check out Javaworlds hello webwork tutorial they even use Velocity.

So if you've been having trouble finding something like this that actually sticks around for more than a few days, here you are courtesy of javaworld.

March 24, 2003

haha this made me laugh

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, The Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the US of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." - Chris Rock

March 23, 2003

Listen.

To this excerpt of a conversation between an Iraqi-American immigrant with an obviously clueless anti-war drone...

March 22, 2003

more c++

ok continuing down the path of some weird syntax, this is just plain disturbing.

void(int*&);

A reference to a pointer,hrm. My mind is reeeeling with the awkward kludginess of this!

Why do we need to pass a reference to a pointer? if a pointer accesses the same object as a reference to that object would I'm not sure I see the need for this.

int i1;
int* i2=&i1;
int& i3=i1;

i1=11; or *i2=11; and i3=11;

All do the same thing right? I must be missing something here, big time, hrm.

March 20, 2003

Another Funny link for this day in history

JSTL make JSP viable again?

Will JSTL/JSP2.0 make Velocity advocates think again about using JSP for new projects or is it too little too late?

If you saw Velocity and JSP2 in a project intermixed depending upon the situation what would you think? Is that a bad design strategy? Do you think it would be inconsistant or swiss army like efficient, I'm not sure what I'd think, I can see it both ways.

It might worthwhile to pick and choose your view in certain situations perhaps, they dont really have to be mutually exclusive.

Right now I'm thinking JSTL/JSP2 is pretty cool if they have to be mutually exclusive I'd choose it, but I'm open for dialogue.

Dim newUsers As IdoubtIt

"Simpler" Java hrm sounds weird, it's not clear exactly how they are going to to do it, but it seems that it will be tool based I guess aimed to appeal towards VB developers.

If they want to make it easier for developers to do java they should just CNAME sun.com to intellij.com.

I know after all the fuss made about not introducing a new keyword for 1.5's foreach syntax they wont be touching "our" java.

eek im up too late...

March 18, 2003

Fun links for this day in history

man these are fun:

Trogdor and Helicopter

hrm, c++

Ok, so i'm kind of doing this backwards, I've been programming java for about 3 years, and before that I was a solaris sys admin the only programming I really did being perl and shell with some very light c thrown in for good measure. I fundamentally understood C/C++ and I was always interested in programming, I just never could pick up c/c++ and get into it completely and since java came along I never really looked back. But for a lark I decided to really dig into c++ again to see if i could actually get it this time, I love java dearly, but I always kinda wanted to get a firm handle on c++, but over the years of casual interest/study I never really felt competent.

I was browsing at a bookstore last week and saw Ivor Horton's beginning visual c++ started leafing through it, and said wow, he's actually making sense to me and explaining things the way I always wanted them explained.

So the next day I ordered it on bookpool. Java always made sense to me, but whenever I looked at c++ it just looked ugly and weird, this book has helped me understand a lot better the ugly weird stuff.

So far it's been a pretty fun endeavor, there are some really interesting bits in c++ that are not in java, there are also a bunch of things I never had to do or think about before. One interesting new idea that I never really came across before was pointers to methods. More interestingly passing as part of a method signature a pointer to a method, That blew my mind a little. I'm not sure when and why you'd want that for an app, maybe some odd twist on the Command pattern.

Anyway here comes the newbie question I have on my mind at the moment to any of you c++ types out there. Pass by reference or passing a pointer, is one more preferable than the other in a certain situation.

for example:
void method(int&); versus void method(int*);

Is there an advantage or reason to use pass by reference other than the fact you don't have to dereference it? I noticed that pass by reference is used in an example about writing proper copy constructors but the reason is not apparent to me at this time.

March 12, 2003

xPetStore, nice.

Pretty cool project, I like that they implemented it two ways "A pure EJB solution based on JSP, Struts, Sitemesh, EJB 2.0 and CMP 2.0" and "A Servlet solution based on Velocity, WebWork, Sitemesh, POJO and Hibernate." I always find it interesting to look at projects like this. cheers to Herve, Brian and James. I have to get in on this xDoclet craze one of these days.