iGoogle?
I’ve had my head down consulting on-site for two weeks now, so I haven’t had a chance to keep up with the news. I heard about a press conference Google held to discuss this big “iGoogle” announcement. And, sure enough, I went to Google, and saw a new “iGoogle” link in the upper right-hand corner. Sweet! “What new from the Googles?”, I wondered, a bit excitedly. I clicked on it, and… got the standard personalized homepage.
I tried Google’s personalized homepage for a few weeks and eventually dumped it because it took too long to render and stole focus once it finished rendering (nice, thanks). It looks the same. No new features are obviously visible. No “This-is-why-its-now-called-iGoogle” message anywhere, no “About-iGoogle” link, etc.
So I Googled around a bit to find out what I’m missing about iGoogle, why its introduction required a press conference, etc. And, after reading a few random articles, yep, it looks like its all about renaming whatever they called the personalized homepage before to… iGoogle. Am I missing something? Back to work.
Apple Ate My Email
I spent a few minutes organizing my email by moving some messages in Apple Mail to an IMAP server running on my local system. I dragged the email (3000 pieces) to the IMAP server, it seemed to work just fine, and then I noticed about 10 emails from today just gone. No undo. No evidence as to why they vanished. Spotlight finds no evidence of them anywhere. They’re gone.
I rely on my email for sooooo much. Fortunately, I have a backup of nearly everything on Gmail. Ugh.
The Fish are Bigger in NYC
Seen on a random night on a random street in mid-town: Two Bentleys, one of which was left parked over-night on the side of a busy street sandwiched between a Hyundai and a Honda.
In a parking garage on the same street on the same night: another Bentley and an Aston Martin DB9.
Mercedes Benz S-series sedans are to mid-town what Subaru Outback’s are to Boulder: a dime a dozen.
The Joy of Writing Swing Frameworks
One of the best parts of writing frameworks around Java’s Swing GUI toolkit is how often components don’t actually follow the component contract.
For example, JComponent defines a FocusListener which predictably enough fires an event when a component receives and loses focus. Yet, many components in Swing and its ecosystem (e.g., JComboBox) simply fail to fire a focus event. Why? Because they are composite components (i.e., they are comprised of several components mashed up together) and they expect you to get some of the internal components and register the FocusListener on one of them. Mind, this is rarely documented, adding to the fun.
No no no no! I wish Swing’s team published some kind of “requirements to be a component” document or “best practices” document that did away with this foolishness. Writing a framework that treats components generically is next to impossible (i.e., requires a special adapter layer that makes all components obey some kind of contract) thanks to all of this–to say nothing of the poor newbie.
3 GB is the MacBook Pro Sweet Spot
Since the price on a 2 GB MacBook Pro-compatible SO-DIMM recently entered the atmosphere on NewEgg.com, I went for it. I’m very, very pleased. My MacBook Pro generally performed well with 2 GB, but when I launched Parallels, I’d have to trim down my working set to make sure my system didn’t crawl.
After the upgrade, I can leave my full OS X working set up while Parallels does its thing and it all works fine (allocating 700 MB to a WinXP VM). Once thrashing starts during an OS X / Parallels session, man, game over.
No More Wildcard Imports
I’ve long been fascinated by the impact that a culture’s language has on its thought processes and social interactions. Is the ease by which adjectives become nouns in Spanish a major factor in their culture of commonly calling people “fat one” (gorda), “old one” (vieja), and so forth?
In a related area, I’m interested in the changes that better tools have brought to the code that I write. For example, despite the advantages of Java 5’s enhanced For loop construct, I’ve only used it a couple of times because IntelliJ IDEA makes it so easy to write loops by typing “itli[tab]” and so forth.
And because of tools, today I finally stopped using wildcard imports. When I first starting writing Java code, I would frequently import “java.util.*” and so forth. In recent years, the IDE will automatically write the import for me, but it would often switch to wildcard imports once a certain number of classes from a package were used, or when certain packages were used (java.swing and java.awt, for example).
I decided that it just doesn’t make any sense to do wildcard imports, largely because file sizes are completely irrelevant to me and its worth sparing myself from the occasional conflict (java.awt.List, anyone?) to splurge on the extra bytes writing out import lines.
Watching the Car Rental Train Wreck in Slow-Motion
I’m a big fan of today’s travel-friendly world. I fly a bit more than I’d like, but I’m very happy that I can regularly leave my house an hour before a flight, drive 25 minutes to the airport, and walk onto the plane 25 minutes before takeoff (don’t try that in a big city). Normally, on the other end, I can get from my arrival gate to the inside of my rental car in anywhere from 10 minutes (e.g., EWR, JFK) to 20 minutes (e.g., SJC, OAK, ATL). For someone who has adjusted his life in many ways to avoid waiting in lines or otherwise wasting time, this is great stuff.
All of this, of course, is completely moot when traveling with the (four very young) kids. The biggest pain point is the rental car at the other end. So painful, in fact, that we usually drive to many of our vacation destinations rather than fly. But sometimes, we have to fly.
Avis generally is a no-hassle rental car experience (except for that time I left my driver’s license at the other airport). But when you need a car seat? Horrors. Four car seats? (Shudder.)
So for variety, this time I switched to Hertz. And man, was I ever punished for it. From the first moment when I walked up to the express lane line and was greeted with a lovely “Hey there’s only one line sir!” shout from behind the counter, I knew I was in for a treat.
As the line piled up behind me, the clock rounded 2 am, and the amount of time it took for two employees to service a customer continued its steady rise past 20 minutes, the tension in the air was palpable. A few Wall Street types finally broke down, shouting something about how important they were as they left the line to shout loudly into their PDA-phones in their vain attempts at other ways out of the Hertzatz quagmire.
My favorite part of the experience was how the agents sent the customers out to check and see if their car was in fact there, and both times it wasn’t.
I have no idea what happened to the rest of the poor saps in line, as I was #3, and though it took them a full 20 minutes to service me (including for some reason inexplicably blanking out all of my personal information character-by-character in their green-screen application and re-entering it all over again, character-by-character), I was so ecstatic to have actually gotten the car I reserved by the end of it all and miss the inevitable riot that was to ensue in the coming hours. I have not scoured local news but I would not be surprised to learn that the Hertz location at Newark International Airport was burned to the ground at some point that evening, with the two stock-brokers I sailed past on my way out charged with any associated crimes.
More on the Amazing IntelliJ IDEA
When I code Java Swing UIs, I often use Karsten Lentzsch’s excellent JGoodies Forms library to scale my pixel measurements in accordance with the font DPI setting of the underlying operating system (e.g., to properly support Windows’ “Large Fonts” setting). This is done by employing a symbolic measurement unit called a “DLU” (dialog unit) in place of pixels at design-time and then converting the DLU value to a pixel value at run-time.
An unfortunate aspect of the library’s design is that I have to invoke separate methods for converting the units along the X-axis and Y-axis (i.e., I invoke Sizes.dialogUnitXAsPixel and Sizes.dialogUnitYAsPixel). This lends itself to many a subtle bug.
To my amazement, my trusty IDEA was once again one step ahead of me:
Notice in the overly-small screen-shot above that I’m passing a constant containing the word “HEIGHT” into a method that’s expecting a unit value along the X axis. I’m not sure what algorithm IDEA employs to figure this out, but I say again, wow.
Once again, money well spent.
When 24 is not 24…
Driving around mid-town Manhattan at 3 am. Turn into parking garage with big “Open 24 Hours” sign. Closed. Back-up, avoiding a collision with one of the many pedestrians walking around on the surprisingly lively streets. Drive one block. Look before turning into second garage with big “Open 24 Hours” sign. Closed. Repeat with a third. Finally, find a forth that’s open.
Ugh.
You Know You’re a Geek When…
I took a day-trip to San Francisco yesterday to participate in a panel at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo. I’ve been through SFO a kabillion times. For as long as I can remember, they’ve had this mini-museum in the United terminal going towards Gates 76+. In all that time, I’ve never, ever stopped to look at any of the displays.
Until yesterday:
I’m embarrassed to say I got a little emotional looking at the games, each of which I played endlessly as a little boy, and recalled many memories of fighting with my brothers, beating high scores, leaving the 2600 on for hours so I could do chores and come back and pick up where I left off (all about the score), and so forth.
You can find an emulator and play Yars Revenge, but you can’t go back to the good ol’ days. Sniff.
