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Main | Next day (Jun 22, 2004) »
20040621 Monday June 21, 2004

Our son wants a puppy

Currently we have two cats that live with us; Bob and Sorcha. When our son Duncan was younger, he used to chase these cats everywhere and basically scared the bejesus out of them. They've never forgotten that. Now that he's older and not so wild, they just don't want to know him.

He wants a cat or dog of his own. For quite a while now, we've been telling him that he'll have to wait until one of the two cats dies before we'll get another pet. Now it hasn't quite got to the stage where he's trying to push them down the stairs, but his patience has definitely gone and he was nagging us constantly. Over the weekend we broke down and said he can have a puppy.

Now we already have a "cat" flap that's just the right size for small dogs too, so we said he must choose a smallish dog so I don't end up being dog doorman.

My wife surfed to Animal Planet and showed him all the small dogs. He wants a chiwawa. Argh! I hate those dogs. There is a special place reserved in hell just for them. I know I'm going to end up walking this darned dog most of the time, so he needs to pick something that I don't mind being seen in public with.

We told him how yappy they are. And they bite you. All the time. It'll probably eat all of your toys too. So he's backed down from that, and we now just need to steer him gently in the right direction.

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( Jun 21 2004, 06:09:58 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Kill Bill

No, it's not a new Sun marketing directive; it's the recent film from Quentin Tarantino, that we watched on Pay-per-View on Sunday Night. Well Volume 1 of what's guaranteed to have a followup. I've seen all of Tarantino's other films, so I was looking forward to this.

Like all of his films, it is never obvious what is going to happen next. Yeah, you know there is going to be lots of violence (and this film has buckets of blood) and you can be sure that there will be the well choosen expletives, but from scene to scene he's not predictable. I love the way he goes from something that seems ordinary and familiar right into a marshall arts display. The way it goes from the over-the-top carnage scene in the restaurant to the "peaceful" snow scene in the garden (prelude to yet another marshall arts show).

I'm sure I didn't get all the references and in-jokes to the marshall arts movies from the 70's, but it thoughly entertained me anyhow. If you are looking for realism, this film isn't for you. You need to ignore the excessive violence (body parts flying everywhere) and just watch a master director getting off on what he can do well.

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( Jun 21 2004, 12:19:10 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

Java, now with builtin lint.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to see Josh Bloch and Neal Rafter do one of the talks they will be giving at JavaOne this year. This was in the Auditorium at the Santa Clara campus, and was for Sun employees who might not get a chance to go to the conference sessions at JavaOne.

The talk described the new features in J2SE 1.5.0 (which is currently available in beta2).

Lots of great stuff, but something that caught my ear was that the "javac" command now has a -Xlint option that provides lint style output of your Java code.

Cool. So I tried this on JSDT, a Java collaboration toolkit that I wrote, just to see what it would pick up on. I always run lint on my C code, so it's nice to automatically have something similar for Java (yes, I know about Java lint but it's not quite the same thing).

Well first javac in J2SE 1.5 wouldn't compile my code because I was using "enum" as a variable name, and it's now a keyword in the language. That was an easy one to fix. After it successfully compiled, it started giving me lint messages. Lots of them. They boiled down to the following three types:

Nothing life threatening, but they should be easy to fixup. Thanks for adding this facility to the compiler.

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( Jun 21 2004, 09:50:51 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [4]

Links to my java.net posts.

I initially starting posting to a weblog on java.net. I like the blogs.sun.com site better so in the future I intend to just blog here. Also the folks on java.net want you to just talk Java (seems fair), so even though my posts would have been appropriate for a Java audience, I had intended them to be more general.

So I'm going to post pointers to them from here. Anybody interested can check them out.

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( Jun 21 2004, 06:59:54 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink