If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I love JetBrains' IDEA. IDEA has been banned from my place of business for political reasons (which really sucks) and it has been made known that if you install IDEA at work, you will be fired. I like IDEA, but I like my job a bit better.
So my employer requires that I use JBuilder. Compared to IDEA, it just stinks. The only alternative to JBuilder is Eclipse. Now, Eclipse is nice and all. I would say even better than JBuilder, but it does not support JSP or XML files "out of the box". I can hear all of those Eclipse lovers screaming "Install the plugins!!" unfortunately the same politicos that say no to IDEA, also say no to Eclipse Plugins. At this point I just want to throw my hands in the air and give up.
While giving Eclipse a try today, I set up the syntax highlighting. I must say, Picasso would have been envious of my color coordination! Anyway, I gave up on Eclipse when I had to edit my 234238th XML file. So, back to JBuilder. Everything looks so bland. I get to color code the reserved words, operators and symbols, numbers, strings and comments. I bet vim has better syntax highlighting, I know jEdit does.
I wish there was something I could do, but I am stuck with JBuilder. Of course most of my friends think I am lame because they all like JBuilder. I just think they have a higher tolerance for pain.
Went outside and caught fireflies with the kids. Lots of fun watching them run around trying to nab one of the little buggers (hah!) before they flew to high. Of course it doesn't take much to get to high for my daughter :)
Every time I see a G35 I start to cry. When the car came out, I knew it was going to be a hit. I told my wife, my dad, my brother, and all of my friends, "The G35 is a great car and I want one." Then it won the Motor Trend Car of the Year and I knew that I was right and I definitely had to have one. Then the coupe came out. Pure lust. It was even worse than my longing for the sedan. The lines of that car are so sweet.
It reminds me of the lust that was created by the 300ZX when it was relaunched in 1990. But for some reason, it is worse. I know I could afford that car. So about 2 months ago, I decided that I was either going to move closer to work, or buy a new car that made my hour and a half drive bearable. Of course we decided to move which is definitely the right thing to do. But for a while, I was looking at cars.
I drove the Acura TL, it was nice, smooth, polished, refined... fast. But I knew I had another love, there was another car that made my heart go pitter patter. So about two weeks later, I drove the G35. It was the moment I had been waiting for, two years in the making. I sat in the show room and admired the inside. Leather, Bose stereo... not so comfy seats. Huh? Where did that come from? Bah... I will just ignore it and enjoy the ride. The salesman put my wife and I into a car and away we went. I hated it. The seats were all wrong. The armrest was way to low. The clutch was like one you would find on a crotch rocket (on or off). The ride was stiff and bumpy. This was a race car, with a beauty queen facade... and I hated it.
And I hated that I hated the car. The G35 was supposed to be the car of my dreams, and from the outside, it is... But it makes me so angry, that I cry every time I see one.
I couldn't hit GMail for most of the day today. I thought there was an outage over at GMail. My wife mentioned that she was unable to hit Yahoo and other websites as well so I stopped blaming Google and started wondering what was going on. I logged into my webserver that is colocated in Ohio and did a wget on gmail.com. It returned a full page so I knew Gmail was online I just couldn't get to it. I resolved the issue temporarily by VPN'ing to my work's network.
If Comcast doesn't have it resolved tomorrow morning, I will have to give them a call.
*UPDATE* Apparently it isn't Comcast either. I gave them a call and they asked if I was behind a firewall. I have one of those linksys routers, so I popped out from behind the router and voila, I can connect to Gmail. Is there a new hack for Linksys routers that I don't know about?
I am closing on my house today. This has been a rough and windy road, but at the end is a nice house that has room for everyone and is fifteen minutes from my office. The daily commute will be the biggest change and will affect the family the most. The fact that I can put in the same amount of time at work and see my family for two hours more a day is going to be a big change.
I hate being sick. It robbed me of my entire Saturday. I woke up yesterday morning with an upset stomach and head-ache. I was supposed to accompany the family to some fun and festivities at the local community college, but I asked them to go without me. Showering didn't help. I ended up sleeping all day. I woke up at 9pm went downstairs for about 5 minutes, long enough for the kids to show me the goodies they gathered at the fair. And then it was back upstairs for more sleep. I think I was awake a total of 3 hours. Today is much better. But what a waste of a Saturday.
Steve has done it again. He has created a very cool, completely useless (unless you are trying to learn JavaScript and CSS) Color Shifter. Fascinating stuff really, and I am sure that it will slowly morph into something more useful like some of his other tools have in the past.
TiVo is now giving the Home Media option away with all subscriptions. That must have been a very hard decision to make, but I think it will be a profitable one. When I got the TiVo I was interested in getting a second TiVo for my other primary television, but decided against it because I couldn't see paying for the unit, a subscription and the Home Media twice. Now, I am much more interested in buy a second TiVo since they will be able to share shows. I think this is what TiVo is hoping will happen and thus drive profits up. I wish them luck.
Why are smart developers in love with dynamically typed languages?
When are they using these languages? I am betting that they use them to help generate code their type safe languages. Does that mean that the dynamically typed languages are better? No. Dynamically typed languages lack frameworks (currently) to produce large systems. And the frameworks will never exist until a large company, like IBM, Sun or Microsoft stands behind a dynamically typed language and says "This is the way of the future." Sure, Python has a couple of web frameworks that are available and PHP has several billion, but neither has the following that ASP or Java has.
Perl had a chance. I cannot tell you why Perl did not become the defacto server side language, but I would think alot of it had to do with timing. PHP has a chance if Sun really pulls it into Java, but I would hope Sun would see Groovy as a better alternative than PHP. Python and Ruby are probably the two strongest dynamically typed languages, but neither of them have the corporate backing to become the next Java, VB or C++.
I was a dedicated PHP hacker at one point in time in my life, and then I started writing my web apps in Java. I cringe everytime I have to go back to PHP because it makes me feel dirty and unwashed. I believe it is because of the weird things like how PHP handles method overloading, which drives me bananas. After I left PHP for Java I gave up on dynamically typed languages. Maybe I should give Python or Ruby a try.
Kevin Fox has an interesting article on Positive Reinforcement in your day to day life. A very interesting concept and one that I believe I have been doing for quite some time. Thanks Kevin for putting into words what I have been thinking for so long.
I wish I hadn't reread the book this past week. The movie may have been a bit better. I went in with all of the details in the back of my skull and every detour that the book took caused me to cringe. Books in general are difficult to translate onto the big screen. Sci-fi and fantasy books are tremendously more difficult to put together. There were a couple of times where I wished they had ignored some of the "fluffy" CG that did not lend itself to the story and added something that actually had something to do with the story. The decisions on which parts of the book to use and which parts have to be changed just to make it feasible must give the producers ulcers. CG and plot rants aside, the movie was good.