Every so often an event happens that makes you realize just how globally oriented the world is today. I’ve been watching the results of the US presidential election over the course of the day, getting updates in real time. This in itself is nothing particularly special. The fact that I’m Australian adds a little to the sense of “globalness” but it really struck me when I realized that I was an Australian watching the results of the US election in real time over the web – via the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Sigh, while my comment spam avoidance measures seem to be exceptionally successful, I got hit by my first batch of trackback spam this morning. Nearly 100 trackbacks to various entries. Fortunately they were all for the same domain so MT-Blacklist could clean them all up in one hit. I guess I’ll have to rename the trackback CGI next….

Andraes Schaefer finally comes up with a solution to the great equals debate. It turns out that in fact it is possible to implement equals in such a way that it works well with subclasses that add additional constraints to equals. Andraes’ solution is still not great though because of the restrictions he mentions: All sub class must overwrite and adjust the equals() method otherwise line 8 in the base class will create an endless loop The equals() method in the sub class cannot call the equals() method in the base class otherwise it ends up in an endless loop, too Line 11 in the Complex class cannot check against a sub class of Irrational in a different branch (meaning it is not a sub class of Complex, too) I think we can solve the first two of those problems by throwing more code at it (I’m not sure we want to but I think we can).

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you get to work and discover the building surrounded by police tape with 3 policemen standing outside and the chairman of the board asking “when did you last do a backup?” You know it’s going to be an even worse day when your response is “since when have I been in charge of backups?” The restaurant above our office caught fire sometime Monday night, fortunately the fire brigade managed to contain the fire to the restaurant so our office only suffered minor water damage to one room.

Benjamin still doesn’t like exceptions but I sense I’m making some headway. Again, I think it comes to the number of paths through a piece of code. and much later: Exceptions put a possible branch on every line of code, and that is why I consider them evil. It seems to be this belief that exceptions put a possible branch on every line of code that is making Benjamin dislike exceptions.

Until just recently, we haven’t had any real rainfall for quite some time. During such times, one tends to become rather lax about getting washing done because it’s just so easy to throw it on the line whenever and within hours of daylight it will be dry. Sadly, this went someone wrong for me on the weekend. I did a load of washing on Saturday and didn’t get around to bringing it in before the evening dew set in.

Benjamine Carlyle and I have been discussing exceptions. Put simply, he hates them, I love them. I think I know why now. Adrian Sutton argues that exceptions are not in fact harmful but helpful. I don’t know about you, but I’m a stubborn bastard who needs to be right all the time. I’ve picked a fight, and I plan to win it ;) I’m also a stubborn bastard (just ask Byron about ampersands), so let the death match begin!

Benjamin claims that exceptions are evil, he couldn’t be more wrong. Exceptions are in fact one of the best ideas that has been added to languages, particularly checked exceptions which force people to deal with error situations. Benjamin’s first problem with exceptions is that they’re impossible to test. This assertion is flat out wrong. Exceptions simply make you aware of a case that you’re not testing. For instance, say we have a function that writes to a file, as part of our testing we should test that it behaves correctly (ie: produces the expected behavior) even in situations when the file can’t be written either because of a lack of permissions, a full disk, missing directory, network error or hardware failure.

(I’m upping the anti) The next person that whinges about restriction of smoking to private homes will receive a free gift. Yes ladies and gentlemen I shall stand next to them, and share with them the gaseous byproduct of my digestive process. It�s my RIGHT isn�t it? Isn�t it? — David Jericho No it is not. Quite the opposite in fact. As part of your right to life, you have the responsibility to not interfere with the right to life of others.

If you ever try to download, burn and install the Ubunto warty ISO image on OS X you’ll find that Disk Utility crashes and hdiutil crashes. To get it to burn you need to install cdrecord using fink (fink install cdrecord) and then use the information on this page to work out how to burn it. On my PowerBook G4 with a DVD-R/CD-RW drive I used the command: sudo cdrecord -v speed=24 dev=IODVDServices warty-rc-install-powerpc.

Iain points to this gem of an article. Some choice quotes: Dr Greening and colleagues asked 42 men to ejaculate every day for seven days Excuse me Sir. Yes, sorry to interrupt – would you mind doing me a favor? Yes, I just need you to jerk off every day for a week. … Say, how’d I wind up in hospital again? I think it’s exciting Don’t we all Dr Greening.

I’ve had my old powerbook lying around for a fair while now not doing anything so I thought it was time to put Linux back on my desktop. I’ve pulled the laptop back off the shelf, booted it and found Debian is already installed and running okay. So I officially have Linux running on the desktop! Now what?