rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Tuesday, 20 August 2002

James Strachan has a new Radio Blog. Not much there yet, but hopefully it will be updated much more frequently than his old blog! 10:48:23 PM  comment []      Adam Curry draws some interesting parallels between the history of the telephone and weblog evolution. Sounds like a good book to read too. 10:40:49 PM  comment []      A friend of mine is currently training for her job at IBM (formerly Monday, formerly PwC) and is displaying the classic problem of detailed training. They don't teach you how to learn, they tell you inane facts you will never need to know. ... but then the signed left shift operator wouldn't work, because it would discard the original 1 and add a 0 at the end meaning that the answer would end up being positive when it shouldn't be. My answer? Who cares. Never in my life have I had to know that, and if I did - I would look it up at the time. Use the API docs, the source or just find some examples on Google. This is not stuff you need to know. 99% of Java programmers will never need to know. Hence I have come up with my new theory, called "You don't need to know that." 99% of the time you don't need to know it. You can let some overweight, bearded uber-guru programmer-mathematician-geek (who hasn't showered in a week and only wears black t-shirts) write that kind of complexity. Then you use his libraries! (No offense meant to the stereotypical overweight, bearded programmer gurus - you guys write killer libs ) That is the ethos of Java - simplicity and powerful libraries. Oh, and you can sleep soundly at night not knowing the deep mathematical nuances of the binary left shift operator. 3:31:42 PM  comment []      Sadly it seems each day now The ServerSide has less and less useful content, and more and more bullshit PR. (This is just from the frontpage!) Maybe it's just me... 10:01:20 AM  comment []      hahaha Russell pointed to the Affirmation bullshit generator for New Age guys - very amusing. Today I will envision my intrinsic oneness. Yeah baby. 9:54:30 AM  comment []      Russell is trying to muscle in on my monopoly of the Java-related blog listing market. Good thing I applied for that patent. What's that? We're not living in the late 90's anymore? Fuck - thanks for telling me. 9:48:44 AM  comment []      shock A: Russell was reading my blog and making decisions based on it shock B: Bill Gates kills a penguin everytime you make a .Net program (see the proof and think of the penguins) Amusing Russ 9:42:17 AM  comment []      The Rah-Rah Boys is a fascinating dissection of the excesses of the past few years, particularly focussing on the lack of penance or penalty paid by the media pundits. "Messrs. Cramer and Kudlow should, by all rights, have been sentenced to some kind of lengthy intellectual exile, required to spend the next decade in a defunded public library somewhere, reading the complete works of John Maynard Keynes. " 9:37:27 AM  comment []