The lack of entries around here lately has been mostly due to my discovery of City of Heros. Great game – very addictive. Anyway, but get back to it – I’m hoping to reach level 12 tonight….

I really hate computer hardware. My PC started to randomly freeze every so often a month of two ago. It’s been totally out of action for a few weeks now and I’ve finally gotten around to trying to get it up and running again. After replacing the motherboard, RAM and CPU I can boot linux again and it seems stable if lacking a lot of features. It doesn’t seem to have support the ethernet card, sound card and has some issues with the hard drive controller.

I got involved in a long argument last night centering around different language paradigms and how the perl language fits into them. My “worth adversary” argued that perl could be considered a functional language at least in some ways because it supported function language constructs. In particular the example was given: map { freq $_ } @list The particular point being made here was that perl supported passing code into functions as parameters and that was a principle construct of functional languages.

The word of the day (and it’s a cool word so probably the word of tomorrow as well) is: gynotikolobomassophilia The love of biting a female's earlobes. It's just wrong when the definition of a word is about the same length of the word itself…. Still, cool word.

Just browsing stuff and came across a list of requirements to become a US Citizen. One of them is: you must demonstrate an elementary level of English (reading, writing, understanding); Is this right? I always tend to question legal advice from random websites, and this one seems to have the entire purpose of getting you to find a lawyer using their site… If this is right, how is this different from the extremely controversial, and now removed, White Australia Policy?

A couple of interesting articles I stumbled across today that the lawyerish types (both professional and armchair) might be interested in: Firstly from Radio Australia: Under the new laws, migration lawyers, instead of their clients, will be personally liable for the cost of cases that have no merit. Billing the prosecution for cases that have no merit sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure if the lawyer should be billed or not.

Demazin is a wonder drug as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been sniffling and struggling to breathe all week until today I gave up and went to the chemist to get something, anything, to make it stop. He gave me Demazin and some 7 hours later I’m still breathing easy (it only claims to work for 6 hours). Of course, from about the 5 hour mark it seems to make you very drowsy so I’m very much considering just crawling into bed and going to sleep even though it’s now only 4:30 in the afternoon.

I was just wondering what to have for dinner and realized that I just don’t give enough credit to the good folks who keep me fed, so having grabbed a quick bowl of cereal (Sultana Bran for what it’s worth) I came back upstairs to investigate who invented that traditional food of the bachelor – 2 minute noodles. I couldn’t find anything even vaguely related to that, but I did stumble across this amusing thread.

Just noticed that ever since I moved trackbacks onto the same page as the article (ie: got rid of the stupid little pop-up window), trackbacks weren’t being displayed. Apparently MoveableType doesn’t rebuild the page when a trackback is registered. Oh well, a quick php ‘include’ later, I’ve got the trackback page being included directly and trackbacks should be working normally again. Shame, I did find Brian McCallister’s pseudo-trackback somewhat amusing.

I may have missed the mark on my attempt at an over the top, yet at least vaguely humorous reaction to Marc’s comments about explicit or implicit imports in Java. The golden rule of coding styles should apply: do what the rest of the team is doing. Having said that, I have to point out a couple of things in response to Marc’s update: Code get’s read (at least) 100 times more then it gets written.

I’ve always been very critical of the fact that private schools in Australia often receive as much or more government funding than public schools and particularly of the fact that it’s getting worse, not better. This comment I recieved in a private email really hit me though: but as i said… mega mega awesome…. as far as cleveland musicals go coz we don’t really have a budget seeing as it is a public school etc.

Marc Portier discusses the current recommended practices for import statements in Java. This is a never ending argument that is so completely irrelevant to development that only fools get involved in it. So let me jump into the argument. The rule is very simple, always use .* until you hit a conflict then add the appropriate specific import. Mostly with my code that means you wind up with: import java.util.*; import java.