No, it’s not some knock-off that Microsoft came up with. It’s a darn good video which captures pretty well the differences between Apple and Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, microsoft, parody

Sarah and I have broken up. It was hard to do, but I think it was the right thing. I think it’s kind of funny that Sarah has her blog up which I can read. It’s kind of like I get the ‘gossip’ of how she’s doing without the trouble of mutual friends.

A very modern breakup.

In Sarah’s first post after it happened, she posted some song lyrics. I like the idea, so I’m following suit. At the end of this are the lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s Overs.

Three years is a long time, and it was mostly good. Here’s to moving on and doing the right thing.

Why don’t we stop fooling ourselves? The game is over, Over, Over. No good times, no bad times, There’s no times at all, Just the new york times, Sitting on the windowsill Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart. It hardly matters, We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall But there’s no laughs left ’cause we laughed them all. And we laughed them all In a very short time.

Time Is tapping on my forehead, Hanging from my mirror, Rattling the teacups, And I wonder, How long can I delay? We’re just a habit Like saccharin.

And I’m habitually feelin’ kinda blue.

But each time I try on The thought of leaving you, I stop… I stop and think it over.

I’ve been away in Ruby land for a while, and now that I’m doing (a little) bit of Java at my job, I find it so infuriating. For example, we have a logger class that I can call like so:

Fine and dandy. But say I want to output whether something is true or false, like whether something is null. My instinct (Ruby-encouraged) is to do this:

“Oh no”, says the compiler, “you can’t do that! That’s a boolean! I need a string!”

$&^!@&^%#@(

Frickin’ Java! Just turn it into a string! Call its toString method. Holy crap do some work for me! The other problem I have is with null. This thing is a special beast in Java. Doing something like this will yield a spectacular failure:

So I have to check whether something is null before I convert it to a string. This gets real ugly real fast:

Except that I don’t even think this’ll work because Java (maybe, I can’t remember) evaluates both parts of the ? : construct. So we’re left with this:

Jeez! Took long enough. Here it is in Ruby:

Ruby, my terse friend, you are just great! Duck typing is the future!

Technorati Tags: java, ruby

Well, of course I knew this, but it didn’t really hit home until today when the latch that keeps my laptop closed broke off. So now I can’t actually close my computer and keep it shut, making sleep difficult. I need to find my sleeve for it.

Is my PowerBook destined to be a desk queen? Eventually, but not right now. I still like having it at work, and I’ll probably continue using it there so long as I don’t have two screens.

Technorati Tags: bike, powerbook

The article makes some good points, and is at least an easy read.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod

What a concept. Hahaha!

Technorati Tags: garfield, comic