No Open Blockers

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try {
    String line = input.readLine();
    while (line != null) {
        line = input.readLine();
    }
}
catch (IOException ioe) {
    logger.debug("IOException...really need better handling here");
}

Everyone, at one point or another, is guilty for just swallowing an exception. Java tends to be a bit trigger happy with its checked exceptions (especially in the IO packages), so it’s inevitable to be in a position of having to deal with an exception that admittedly will probably not happen while trying to get something else accomplished.

The nice part is that I’m cleaning this up and actually providing the better handling. The cool part is that I’m using code I wrote for CodeTurtle to do it.

I’ve been reading Dreaming in Code for the past week. I forget where I first heard of it, but after a recommendation from a coworker on the Spacewalk team (thanks Partha) I finally followed through with checking it out.

The subtitle does a good job of explaining the book’s purpose: “Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software”. I hesitate to call it a case study in software projects because I don’t think it does justice to the book’s relaxed, conversational style. Rather than reading like a formal study, it’s the story of the development of Chandler an open source personal information manager with high goals. Rosenberg also provides a ton of related information to help frame the choices the Chandler team had to make, which increases the book’s audience significantly to include non-professionals.

I wish I was in a position to assign required reading for CSC majors. I’m not sure what class this would fall under (the most likely candidate is Software Engineering). Even then, the bigger challenge is convincing students of the value.

In short, anyone considering a career in programming needs to read this book. It provides an incredibly good insight into what it’s like to work on an actual project, an insight that students normally only get with experience after they’d graduated. Like I said, it’s presented more as a story of what happened rather than a technical manual, so it’s not painful to read.

But I cannot stress enough how much I would have appreciated such a detailed look into a real software project before I started on my career. Software Engineering text books describe what to do “by the book”. This book shows you a more realistic view of how those theories and practices can (and often do) go wrong.

Of course I bought her a Mario. A Donkey Kong too.

Sorry for the quality, my wife’s phone is such crap that it might as well be a banana.

She apparently spent the day carrying him around and hugging him (I was at school at the time). And when I take her to GameStop, she runs to the Mario games yelling his name.

Hell. Yeah.

I’ve been boycotting the movies for about a year now. I don’t really like… well, people in general, so the prospect of sitting in my family room watching a movie three months after it was out in crowded, noisy theaters is really appealing. And with the recent flood of pure crap in the theaters, at the end of the day I’m still just watching Fight Club rather than renting the new releases anyway.

I do love the feeling of a good summer movie and was happy to realize that this summer shows promise. After poking around IMDB for a while, I came up with a quick list of potential summer movies to get me out of the house. Maybe.

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine – Actually, I’m already behind on this list. I just got back from seeing it. Surprisingly better than I expected. It had the cool explanation aspect that is usually reserved for the first movie in a comic book series with enough foreshadowing that you can pick up on because you know the story. Really excited to see what they do with the next ones about Magneto and Xavier. Though I have to admit, I’m pissed they didn’t get Sawyer from Lost to play Gambit. That would have rocked.
• Star Trek – Over the course of my life I’ve watched approximately 6 minutes of Star Trek. I’ve just never been into it. This one, however, has me pretty excited. It’s got the guy from Heroes, the guy from Harold and Kumar, and the guy from Shaun of the Dead (too damn lazy to look up any of their names). How can it not be good?
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – I have virtually no doubt in my head that this is going to suck. I loved the first one, it was the epitome of summer blockbusters. Sure, the plot made about as much sense as the ramblings of my 21 month old daughter, but seeing giant robots throwing each other through buildings kinda negates the need for a plot. That said, I’m afraid they are going to try to really out do the first one in this one, in the end producing a disaster of a sequel. Let’s just hope it doesn’t do to Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one was amazing) what its abominations they called sequels did.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Anyone reading this site for longer than 3 minutes will realize I’m enough of a geek that this shouldn’t come as a surprise. This was my favorite book in the series and I’ve been pretty happy with the movies so far, so I’m hoping it doesn’t disappoint.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra – A Transformers and a G.I. Joe movie in the same summer. I think part of my excitement is that it makes me feel young again in a year where I turned 30. Whatever the motivation, this has the potential to completely rock (like the first Transformers) or be a complete failure (like Spiderman 3 — someone needs to be publicly flogged for that one).
• Inglourious Basterds – Ok, so Quentin completely dropped the ball with Death Proof. It would have sucked on its own but was made all that much worse by having to follow Planet Terror which was simply awesome. But I’m still a big Quentin fan and this looks like it has some real promise. In short, it’s Brad Pitt kicking the shit out of Nazis in graphic gore. It’s like Fight Club 2. Except with Nazis.
• Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – A cookie cutter romantic comedy that is the theatrical equivalent of stabbing yourself in the eyes with a spoon. Anyone who thought for even a second that I was going to see this, please send me your IP address so I can add you to my firewall. And then go find the nearest person and ask them to slap you for me.

I’m a bit late on posting this. Two weeks ago, after signing our names a few hundred times, we finished with the initial batch of contracts for our new house:

… at least, that’s what it will look like when it’s actually built (exact model, orientation, side car garage, and siding/shutters). For now, however, this is what we actually own:

A big pile of dirt. More accurately, an expensive pile of dirt. I’m pretty sure somewhere on the land where the house should be is a pile of dog shit.

Once it’s actually built, it will be a 4 bedroom, living room, family room, dining room, study, basement, gourmet kitchen, and two car garage full of pure awesome.

The process sounds like it’s going to be… long. Really long. We’re past the phase of selecting options and just today selected the colors for the granite counter tops, outside siding and shutters, carpets, hardwood floors… and so on. If it sounds intimidating, it is. Thankfully, my wife and I have virtually identical tastes, so we literally didn’t run into a single problem selecting any of those details.

Amazingly, this is still just the beginning. We haven’t even had our “pre-build orientation” yet. I’m not sure what that is, but if it involves any ice breakers or having to learn goofy songs (a la Villanova’s orientation), I’ll be downright creeped out. After that, we have a bunch of walkthroughs at various points. The one I’m most interested in is when the frame is set up but without drywall, at which time I’m going to show up with about 500 feet of CAT5 and wire up pretty much every square foot of the house with internet access (including the toilet, thereby fulfilling one life goal of one day taking a dump on a toilet with an IP address).

Outside of the house itself, the location is freaking great. We’re in a cul-de-sac (I’d love to know why I actually know how to spell that). Across the street — er, circle — they are putting a park with a “tot lot”, so assuming my daughter doesn’t inherit my allergies to everything outside, she’ll have the opportunity to spend a lot of time outside. We’re number 144 in the development layout:

Now we just need to decide if we’re going to sell our current house or rent it out. Anyone want a place in scenic NJ?

I just found out that Hugo Weaving is the voice of Megatron in both Transformers and its upcoming sequel. That’s in addition to playing Elrond in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Agent Smith in The Matrix Triology, and V in V for Vendetta. If it somehow came out that he was in Empire Strikes Back he’ll legally be declared a god among geeks.

// why can't I just pass in a dictionary? sigh, there are
// times where python would make this SOOOO much easier.

To give this some context, this was seen above a manual population of attributes in a bean from a map.

I don’t really have any witty comment on this one. There are definitely times where one language would be nicer than another, so I’m in no way saying the comment is incorrect in any way. It just usually makes me laugh to find conversational comments like this, as if you could actually hear the developer sigh when typing out the wordy bean copying.