Just when you thought it was safe to turn the TV on again, Young Talent Time makes a come back. The worst part is that the Minogue sisters have promised to appear on the show – any hope that some actual talent may be found is lost…

I have slightly obscure tastes in music – particularly, I like musicals, not the highlights CDs the full recording of the original cast. It’s certainly not the most obscure taste in music but it does lead to an awful lot of trouble tracking down what I want and worse still I know what I want ahead of time unlike most people with really obscure tastes who just stumble across things they like.

Tor Norbye politely requests that the caps lock key be removed and the control key put there instead. There’s one very good reason why that shouldn’t be done: Everyone (except old school UNIX geeks) is used to the control key being where it is. Moving the control key would seriously annoy people. If you’re one of the people who are used to control being next to ‘a’ then imagine the whole world being as annoyed as you every time they use a computer and find that control is in the “wrong” place.

There seems to be a growing trend for projects to use XML configuration files – fine. There seems to be a growing trend for those projects to provide a schema for those files – good. There seems to be a growing trend for those projects never to validate their configuration files against the schema – bad. As I’ve previously mentioned, my job involves creating an XML forms editor and it turns out that this forms editor is really quite good at editing configuration files (see our very own configuration tool).

Anton Tagunov added an excellent comment to yesterday’s entry: The one thing that has always stopped me from doing this was: interning must use some global lock. So, while interning would cause little to no harm for desktop application it is likely to introduce extra synchronization bottleneck for server applications. Thus potentially degrading perfromance on some multi-cpu beast. Would you agree with this, Adrian? Firstly, let me make something very clear: string interning will cause bugs in your code and they will be hard to track down – they will however be easy to fix once found.

Elan Meng investigates the behaviours of string constants, interning and == compared to .equals. Very informative. The question remaining is, why would anyone ever use == instead of .equals on a String considering how likely it is to cause confusion and the potential for disaster if one of the strings for some reason isn’t interned. The answer is performance. In the average case, the performance difference between == and .equals is pretty much non-existent.

Angel Studios is starting to plan a round of screen tests for the people interested in being a part of our films and stage productions. We’d essentially like a database of actors we can flick through and find a list of people who might be suitable for a given role. We also need to do a bunch of auditions for our upcoming short film which is just starting production. There are a few people I want to get back in touch with to particularly invite along to do a screen test but we need to sort out exactly how we want to do it yet.

This is a great example of getting stuck in a mindset. A piece of very poorly written Java code is presented followed by a much shorter piece of Groovy code and Groovy is declared the winner. The original Groovy: list = ["Rod", "James", "Chris"] shorts = list.findAll { it.size() <= 4 } shorts.each { println it } Java: for ( String item : new String[] {"Rod", "James", "Chris" } ) if ( item.

Continuing my journey of learning regarding scripting languages (starting here): I like it because it saves typing. There was a good example of a 20-line Java program that was reduced to 3 lines in Groovy. I’ve lost the link though. Posted by: Jonathan Aquino I like readability. Java can definitely be overly verbose at times, particularly with IO: BufferedInputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(new InputStreamReader(System.in()); however, number of lines required to do something isn't something that I really consider when choosing a language.

As much as the title seems to suggest one of my rants, this is actually a valid question along with a bit of my own pondering. Scripting languages seem to be the flavor of the month these days and I’m not really sure why. I’ve got nothing against scripting languages but I don’t see why they should be considered the be all and end all solution that people seem to think they are.

A while back Kyle Rankin questioned why people would use InstallShield under Linux. He suggests people use the standard package management schemes that the various distributions provide and he’s dead right. You should make things consistent for the user because it’s consistency that makes a user interface easy to learn and makes it more productive (once you’ve learnt it once you can use it in a whole heap of places at once without taking the time to think of the right way to do it).

On a more positive note, if you need to work with the Swing Text APIs in any detail,would like to do something with text that you currently can’t or for some reason are implementing a text API, take a look at this overview and the articles here (the text articles are towards the bottom). Some of the docs seem to be fairly old but the basic features of the API really haven’t changed all that much and it’s far more important to understand the design than the specific methods that are available anyway.