So I’m multiple thousand feet in the air relying on a hunk of metal to keep me up here – you’d really want to have some confidence in said hunk of metal. Sadly, this particular hunk of metal seems to be doing everything possible to instill fear, short of actually falling out of the sky. Since I’m sitting in the emergency exit isle, there’s two seats for the crew in front of me which have a phone between them so that the crew can communicate easily. As we’re beginning to acelerate down the runway, the crew tried to use it for the first time with no success. Apparently the crew’s communication system doesn’t work. Then as we cruise happily somewhere over the pacific ocean, we discover that the toilet door is about as well made as the comms system – it fell off. Fortunately the woman inside was fully dressed otherwise it would have been somewhat embaressing. On the plus side, watching the crew try to fix it was excellent in-flight entertainment.

Sometimes it pays to be persistent. I’d called QANTAS earlier in the week to request a seat with extra leg room because I’m very tall and have problems with my knees that makes it difficult to sit cramped up for long periods. I was told the best they could do was a back seat and they weren’t even sure if that had extra leg room. I asked again at checkin if there was a seat with extra leg room available and gave my pitiful story – the girl at the checkin counter was very nice and called downstairs to see if they could free up an emergency isle seat for me and they managed to find one. Should make the 13 hour flight a lot easier. I think the seat was really empty and was just being kept free until absolutely required but if you were told at the last minute that your seat with extra leg room was no longer available – sorry….

So I was invited into GMail today, particularly good timing considering I’m about to leave for JavaOne tomorrow and while I’m away I’ll also be moving house meaning that my home mail server will be going offline. I figure this way I can just redirect all my email to my gmail account for the couple of weeks I’m away and see how it goes. If I like it I’ll keep my mail redirecting over to Google, if not I’ll switch back. The biggest complaint I have so far is that GMail doesn’t have any support for PGP which I was just getting into the habit of using. Sigh. Guess that’ll be a feature request. Either way, I’ll get to feel cool because I have a GMail account. I’m just a little surprised it doesn’t come with a Mickey Mouse badge….

I’ve been browsing through the list of sessions for JavaOne. There’s 411 events listed. How the heck am I going to find time to read the abstracts of each of those let alone actually make a decision as to which I want to go to… Once I’ve gotten that far the schedule conflicts will bite….

Apparently there’s a JavaOne Blogger Meetup on Monday. I’ll definitely do my best to get there. I’ve still got no idea where I’m staying or how hard it will be to get home again after having a few beers but I’m up for the challenge. Besides, their drinking advice is superb:

And remember, Atlassian … doesn’t recommend any Australian alcohol starting with ‘F’ and ending with ‘osters'.

I just discovered that every email that passes through procmail is logged (I’d forgotten I’d set it up like that). A quick analysis of the log shows that 62.8% (5473 out of 8655 emails) of my email is moved to the spam folder by procmail (after being identified by spamassassin). There are a few extras that wind up in my inbox but no more than one or two emails a week and I’ve only come across about 5 false positives since I set up spamassassin (most of which are QANTAS’s flight detail emails). That’s a pretty sad state of affairs really. Fortunately, thanks to spamassassin, I use my email completely unhindered.

So apparently I’m off to Java One. The details are all very sketchy at the moment but apparently the flights involved will be something like: Depart Brisbane on Friday 26th June, to Auckland, then Los Angeles (I think) then “SFO” (can you tell I have no idea about where I’m going yet?). Should arrive at the final destination on Friday 26th June (apparently just before I left). Stay somewhere, do something of which the only certainty is going to the Moscone centre while the conference is on, probably get arrested trying to sneak into WWDC which is also on at the Moscone centre and watching the 4th of July fireworks from somewhere. Fly out on the 6th of July via Sydney (skip the New Zealand connection this time) and arrive back in Brisbane on the 8th of July. So yeah, pretty disorganized…. Any advice/pointers/suggestions/opportunities to meet up would be welcomed. More details as they unfold and I’ll do my best to blog as much as I can while I’m there, this is probably as good a place as any to store my notes.

Rich Bowen talks about his camping trip and it reminded me of something my Father and I used to do a fair bit of – spider spotting. In Australia we have a huge range of different spiders and they are literally everywhere – much more common than most people would be comfortable with. Most of these spiders are really small so you don’t see them in the light of day but during the night spiders are much easier to spot because of their brilliant blue eye-shine. Spider spotting basically involves getting one of those “pencil” torches (2 AA batteries and you twist the end to turn them on/off and adjust how focussed the light is). Turn it on and adjust it so it has a single focussed beam, then hold it just below one eye and look straight down along the beam of light. When you see a spider its eyes will shine back a bright turquoise color. You’ll find them everywhere in the Australian bush, around the ground, on tree trunks, in trees – pretty much everywhere you look there’ll be a bright blue set of eyes looking back at you. Just don’t do it if you’re afraid of spiders or you may never feel safe again. One other thing, Rich writes:

Every time I see someone talking about the wonders of GPG I think to myself, “I should probably at least have a GPG key” and then I promptly forget about the whole deal. When Bertrand mentioned he was getting into it I went through the same thought process but this time, because of the exceptionally convenient link to an exceptionally conveniently packaged OS X version of GPG, I actually got around to doing something about it.

Joshua Marinacci has started writing a new XHTML renderer in Java. He’s done a pretty impressive job at getting started but I get the impression that he has no idea what he’s in for. At the moment the rendering is pretty good but the speed is absolutely awful. While you shouldn’t ever optimize too early, it’s certainly possible to optimize too late and HTML rendering is one of those areas where you suffer death by a thousand cuts. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he has to rework large parts of his architecture to reduce the number of string comparisons to speed things up. That’s the kind of thing that you probably should think about before hand (note that I haven’t even looked at the code so he may have already considered that). The other thing that I notice is that it doesn’t seem to support incremental layout yet so it has to wait for all the images to download before it can do anything. In an HTML editor that pretty easy to do because you’ve already got the code to update the layout quickly in response to changes but I’m not sure if there’s an easy and efficient way to do it without having to implement all that. The big complaint I have though is that there doesn’t seem to be any licensing information which is something you really should sort out at the very start of the project so people know what they’re getting themselves in for. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the project goes. Update: The project page says the license is LGPL. Oh well, guess I won’t be having anything to do with it then.

Java.Net is having conversations about removing stuff from the standard Java libraries because they’re getting too big. The comment below really stuck out at me:

Combine that with a program to remove redundant functionality (by declaring it deprecated so it gets killed 2 releases later) and you have a powerful tool to get people to stop using old stuff like Vector and StringTokenizer.” Vector and StringTokenizer aren’t “old stuff” – they’re extremely useful classes with a specific purpose. Vector is a guaranteed thread safe implementation of List – something you can’t possibly get other than declaring that you want a Vector. To clarify that, consider the method signature public void doStuff(List items) what are the thread safe requirements on items? There’s no way to know and the default assumption would be that it doesn’t have to be thread-safe. Whereas with: public void doStuff(Vector items) the code may be less flexible now but the compiler now guarantees that you’ll get something that at least claims to be thread safe. It is still possible to extend Vector and perform non-thread safe operations but that would be a bug in the extending class because it failed to live up to the contract of the parent class. StringTokenizer is a particularly useful class in that it provides the simplest way to break a String down into tokens. You could iterator of the characters yourself or you could use regex to do this but manually iterating is reinventing the wheel and regex are highly inefficient for doing what StringTokenizer does. Furthermore, nothing in StringTokenizer is marked as deprecated in my copy of the Java 1.4 API, nor anything in Vector. Seriously, just because you don’t find something useful doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

While browsing a collection of stupid pranks (most of which aren’t at all funny) I stumbled across some really great responses to a “10 year old school kid” (who in fact was the prankster) writing in to ask all 100 US senators what their favorite joke was as part of a school project. I think it’s fantastic to see that a number of them replied, but one that really stood out was this one from Senator Jon Corzine from New Jersey. Not only did he take the time to respond with his favorite joke, it was actually a good joke and he took the opportunity to teach this young child about the state of New Jersey. Now whether or not he wrote the letter personally or one of his aids wrote it for him, it’s still great to see that there’s a culture in that office of going beyond the minimum required and taking the opportunities to do good that are presented. Disclaimer: I know nothing else about Senator Jon Corzine, I’ve never been to New Jersey (or the US for that matter) and until I read his letter I knew nothing about the state of New Jersey (which for some reason that noone seems to know, is called the Garden State). For the record, “the garden state” in Australia is Victoria. Who knows why…. They have since changed their license plates to read “Victoria – On the move” to which most Queenslanders add: “to Queensland”.