February 2003

27Feb2003

Apple Sucks (Well, NSAppleEventDescriptor does, anyway)

By carlfish on

Quick straw poll. Whoever wrote the Java interface to Applescript for OS X was: (a) So comfortable with AppleEvents that he or she just wanted to replicate them verbatim in a new syntax, instead of providing a useful abstraction, (b) Completely ignorant of the Java Language, (c) A sadist, (d) All of the above.

27Feb2003

Ouch.

By carlfish on

Sure, I could treat my body better. It could do with more exercise, and a better diet. (or maybe this is my body reacting violently to the fact that I actually fed it a large quantity of salad yesterday, and it was unused to the nutritious content?) But still, it's let me down this morning, and I'm not going to forgive it easily.

25Feb2003

YKYBHTLW...

By carlfish on

You know you've been hacking too long when you see the band-name ZWAN, and your first thought is "What does the Z stand for?"

24Feb2003

Interview With a Programmer.

By carlfish on

I'm a good programmer, and a pretty good designer. On all other counts, I'm told I interview quite well. That said, if you put me on the spot and say "Write this code in the next five minutes", I'll flounder around, and probably make a pig's breakfast of the whole thing.

22Feb2003

Introduce Yourself! Comments and Weblogging

By carlfish on

It's been pointed out to me once or twice that I don't enable comments on my posts. Today, I read that this is the number one habit of highly annoying bloggers. So in my inaugural comment-enabled post, I invite you all to say hello, in the spirit of two-way communication.

22Feb2003

Organised Cows

By carlfish on

I'm sure some people in the office wonder why the three of us greet each other in the morning with a hearty "moo". Or maybe they don't. Programmers tend towards eccentricity anyway.

20Feb2003

Livejournal: The Next Target

By carlfish on

"LiveJournal is currently under a Distributed Denial of Service attack, and has been since about 5:30pm PST (1:30 AM GMT) tonight. We have been working with our upstream providers (including several major backbones) to filter traffic as quickly and effectively as possible."

16Feb2003

Visualise Whirled Peas

By carlfish on

These pictures really don't do justice to the size of the crowd that turned up in Sydney today to protest against Australia's involvement in any war in Iraq.

15Feb2003

The Death of Democracy

By carlfish on

It's getting to the point where opinion polls on war in Iraq contemptuously ignored by my country's government, because those in power trust the power of their media allies to convince us they're right, and we're wrong. Where we all have questions we want to ask our elected officials, but get no answers because those in the position to ask them for us, have their own agenda.

15Feb2003

Moving, maybe...

By carlfish on

I'm considering moving from Newtown to Kirribili. I want a view of something more than just Erskineville Road, damnit.

10Feb2003

A New-Found Respect for Javascript

By carlfish on

Javascript is a small language, but the problem didn't lie there. The problem is that what we generally refer to as "Javascript" is really the intersection of the language itself, plus the DOM (and to some extent CSS) support of whatever browser it's being run in. And it's only in the last year or so that web browsers have had anything approaching decent DOM/CSS support.

10Feb2003

A foolish consistency

By carlfish on

Java, being rooted firmly in the C tradition, believes that the first number is zero. Arrays and lists begin at index 0. The first character of a String is string.charAt(0). Thanks to the legacy of time.h, Java even believes January is month 0, skewing up the mental landscapes of anyone used to thinking of June as month 6, and December as month 12.

03Feb2003

The 86 Rules of Boozing

By carlfish on

55. If you think you might be slurring a little, then you are slurring a lot. If you think you are slurring a lot, then you are not speaking English.

03Feb2003

JSR-666

By carlfish on

JSR-666. n. The Java Specification Request from Hell

01Feb2003

Shellshocked

By carlfish on

Tonight, just before going to bed, I learned of the tragic break-up of the Space Shuttle Columbia on re-entry, and the probable death of her seven crew. To those astronauts and their families, I send my thoughts before I go to sleep.

01Feb2003

My Place Part One: Kitchen

By carlfish on

This is entirely Lonita's fault. The rest of my apartment will have to wait until I've finished tidying, but I thought I'd do the kitchen beforehand, just for all the beer bottles.