The Occasional Masthead

Not regarding Christmas though. New Year. New Year Resolutions to be precise. Someone, sometime, somewhere pointed out to me that it is meaningless to resolve things to begin after New Year. If you’re going to do something, just do it. Making grand scale resolutions for New Year is going to result in broken resolutions.

Hence, a not-New-Year resolution. I have, for the first time this year, emptied my e-mail in-box. Now, let’s see if I can keep it that way. Heck, I might even get carried away and discard most of my to-do lists… in the New Year.

Cheers.

I feel like I’m getting too old to learn anything new. I’ve been trying to learn all about Struts, with a side helping of JSP, and it has proved an uphill battle.

One thing I really like about the Java world, is that there are lots of very clever, very useful, frameworks and libraries that are available for free. But one thing I really don’t like is the general attitude towards releasing packages and documentation. For a proportion of what’s available, there is fairly comprehensive documentation. But it generally suffers from two things: every package invents new jargon, which is never adequately explained, and it almost invariable describes what is in the package, but not how it was intended to be used.

Which leads to the second issue. To save crusty old coders like me, please, please, if you release a new whiz-bang library or framework, include a reference implementation that is more complex then a “Hello World”.

Here endeth the rant.

Which is in reference to this heavy-handed example of why companies shouldn’t automate threats of litigation without putting a human between the gun and the target to make sure it’s pointing the right way.

For what it’s worth, a Google search shows up over 4,000 listings for that magic number, although only 355 show up if you restrict the search to English-language sites, 1 if you search for Serbian sites, and none if you limit yourself to Icelandic sites.

The power of large businesses to make themselves look really stupid continues to amaze me.