the corner office

We're staying with my in-laws, and they have DSTV, which negates some of the productivity gains being back on dialup would normally afford me. I digress. Ronwen and I have started watching Sky News, to "acclimatise" ourselves. UK "problems" make a nice change from South African "problems".

Today's big news was that a town council is planning on hiking the price of street parking permits for 4x4s and other high-pollution cars. Fancy needing a permit to park in the street in front of your house. In South Africa, if you're dumb enough to park your car in the street, you deserve what's comin' to ya, as your insurance company will be quick to remind you.

Also, I don't think that Sky News likes the Liberal Democrats. I kinda got that Fox News talking about US Democrats ptoey vibe. I don't really know who the Lib Dems are, but I do know from a new poll that the Tories are kicking Labour's butt. I don't really have any strong opinions about British politics, and since I can't vote for any of these people, it's not something I'll be losing any sleep over. Being dependent on the benevolence of people you didn't vote for pretty much sums up South African politics for me too, so it's not that much of an adjustment.

The other oddity is the weather. Man, I dunno why they bother. "Somewhere under this mass of cloud is Britain. Our forecast for the week is 'shitty and wet'. Check back next May." Not that we're complaining: Ronwen and I are both rain nuts, and we're looking forward to it. We'll be those irritating people who get up every morning and throw open the curtains and go "More grey! Yay!"

I've been scarce, because the Real World has kept us a little busy, and we have some News. It kinda went like this:

Her Majesty's Government says "pull in!" Consider having quiet civil wedding to keep visas clean. Decide it's not a good idea because we might get lazy and keep postponing the big party wedding. Find out that sproglet is on the way. That was quick! Yay! Decide keeping visas clean is a very good idea. Convince family that big party wedding will still happen, we promise. There Will Be A Buffet. Have quiet civil wedding. Yay! Resign from work, flog half our worldly possessions, put the other half in boxes pending cross-equatorial trek, clear out of flat, relocate to Durban until we fly, get paperwork sorted, get final visas approved, Ronwen starts exams, I work like crazy to catch up a year's worth of assignments before cut-off. Only just make it.

The dust is finally starting to settle, and now it's just leisurely studying, doing the final admin, and some much-needed unwinding before we're on our way to the UK. In the meantime, blogging is likely to continue to be sparse, but at least you know why :-)

HP have digital cameras which can 'slim' their subjects (via Aquila Online). You could get really philosophical about what that says about modern society, but I suspect this is a feature which could backfire.

Her: did you use the slimming feature for the photo?
Him: yes
Her: why, do you think I need it?

Front-end development is not my thing, but I've done some Struts development, and recently, I've been doing some JSF work. I'm by no means an expert in either framework, and I'll probably look back at this in a few years and laugh, but I have to be honest, the flexibility and complexity that JSF brings just doesn't seem worth it. I was banging my head against some obscure rendering-order issue in JSF the other day, and found myself thinking "I miss Struts". I never thought the day would come when I would think that.

My Eve Online character's career is taking something of a commercial slant - mostly running courier missions and doing a spot of trading. This is mainly because it's a fairly hands-off way of playing, and because it appeals to my Inner Accountant. My Inner Accountant gets along quite well with my Inner Geek, who finally had a Project again: gather up lots of data from the game markets etc, build a simple app to stay on top of things, and see what sorts of obscene profits I could make. It's been a fun distraction.

All of my less than exciting endeavours take place in what is known as hi-sec space, where apart from the extremely rare suicidal nutter who tries to get a few shots at your ship before the cops arrive and blow him out of the sky, you have nothing to fear. I like this, because I can leave my chappie flying around for ages on end, while I'm koff studying or working on other things.

Predictably, the real fun happens outside hi-sec space. Each system has a security rating between 0 and 1, and anything 0.4 and under is 'low-sec'. Police presence becomes sparser as the rating goes down, and by the time you get to 0.0 space, it's the Wild West meets downtown Hillbrow.

I haven't ventured into low-sec much. Too much adrenaline. In my first month I made the silly mistake once of accepting a courier mission to a 0.0 system, and ended up having to fly down a corridor of low-sec systems to drop off a parcel. Getting there was fine, but the baddies had spies out, and there was a waiting party for me on the way back. Some git blew up my ship and then squished my escape pod just for good measure, too. His theory was that since I was a n00b flying in unsecure space, I must've been someone's alternate character and a spy, and therefore had to be destroyed just in case. I was rather a good sport about it and the chap invited me to join his pirate corp. I politely declined.

Getting podded isn't the end of the world if you're a new character, since if you're insured you just get a good-as-new clone and a free rookie ship and you're right back in the thick of things. It grates me that someone has one of my frozen corpses though (somewhat reminiscent of the old Diablo ears). Since then, visits to low-sec systems have been few and far between.

Anyway, that circuitous waffle leads me to the real point of this post. Some bloke decided to take his brand-new character, and head straight into 0.0 space, and see what happened. It might not make much sense if you haven't played the game, but it's still something of a hoot: The Eve Online 0.0 Experiment.

Yep, I'm still around, just rather weighed down by deadlines of the work and study variety. This is short and sweet.

Real life: some people take an extreme view of South Africa, and say that we're a banana republic. That's a bit too extreme for me, but an argument could be made that we're a beetroot republic. It would be funny if it wasn't so saddening.

More real life: surely there must be laws against demoting planets? Not that the distant, barren chunk of rock and gas gives a shit, but it just seems a bit rude to turn Pluto back into a non-planet. The Sitchin crowd must be heart-broken. A few months ago they were celebrating the discovery of their 10th planet, and now we're back down to 8. Sorry for yoouuuuu.

Personal life: I'm getting miiighty tired of studying.

Tech: I wouldn't go so far as to say that JBoss can reduce grown men to tears, but I will say that I've seen a few men who need a good hug after a week or few of doing battle with it. Me included.

More tech: I've seen a host of good tech articles I wanted to link to the past few weeks, but then I don't have time and forget. Of all the articles I can't remember, the one I do is this one by Cameron Purdy. Gestation time needed for an architecture to settle in, late projects and bugger-ups without it. Real-world wisdom, well worth a read.

Dear Sun and associated smart people,

Generics are a nice feature and it's really nice not having to do all that horrible casting anymore. Over the past year I've come to appreciate the clarity that something like

HashMap<Integer,List<Vertex<String>>> map = new HashMap<Integer,List<Vertex<String>>>();

brings to my code. I am also very glad that I've avoided the 2 detectable-during-testing crashes I would probably have encountered if I'd stuck with non-type-safe code, like in the 1.4 days and before.

Now granted, any feature that makes Java developers feel as syntax-savvy and hardcore as C++ developers has a certain cool factor, and deep down I do agree that generics are an improvement, but at least C++ has typedefs. I'm just saying...

Yours,
Colin

Eve Online is fun. Lots and lots of fun. There's only one problem: Eve is Windows-only, meaning I have to boot into my (until now) hardly used Windows partition, whenever I want to play. This is a little suboptimal, because my whole life is now on an ext3 file system. I've tried using Eve with Wine, but it's still a bit broken. It's good enough to log in, update skills training and chew the fat in chat channels, but there are a few memory leaks which leave it all falling apart after a few minutes.

Aptly (pun originally unintended), I read a blog post by Ian Murdock this week, contemplating the fact that Windows still has the best driver support:

Me, I actually prefer the Linux desktop over Windows. But now, with all the improvements in virtualization over the past few years, I can still use the Linux desktop as my primary UI and have access to the most extensive set of device drivers.

Tempting. In my case it's not drivers, it's just that little thing called DirectX 9. I'm rather partial to my Linux desktop too, and all the booting between Windows and Linux is a pain. I think it might be venturing into the realms of overkill to change my entire set-up just because of a game (no matter how addictive), but booting into Windows and running Linux in a VMWare partition would certainly be the best of both worlds...

An internal dialog (on the way to work)

Me: the biggest problem with bumper-to-bumper traffic is the concertina effect.

Myself: oh jeez, here we go again...

Me: when traffic comes to a stop, people start pulling away only some time after the person in front of them pulls away. So it takes a lot longer for the entire column to get moving.

Myself: ...wait for it...

Me: the best way to avoid this, is for people to stop looking at the car in front of them. If you look at the car 2 cars ahead, and start pulling away when they move, then your movements are more in sync with the car directly in front of you. Try it, it really works. Imagine if everyone did that? It would go a long way towards reducing the concertina effect.

Myself: yeah yeah, you saw a documentary about this in LA once...

Me: I think a huge education campaign is needed, encouraging people to do this.

Me: (and telling people not to let taxis and yellow-lane cars back into the flow. Make it difficult and expensive for them, they'd be less inclined to do it in future. But that's another internal dialog...)

Myself: you know what the problem is, don't you?

Me: Hmm.

Myself: it doesn't work if you can't see past the vehicle in front of you. Trucks and 4x4s and bakkies block your view, you can't see the car in front of them.

Me: very true. You know my opinions about status symbol 4x4 drivers and slow trucks. I think the best solution is to make a law that 4x4s and trucks should be relegated to a single lane during rush hour, or kept off the road completely. Common good and all that.

Myself: lovely, but enforcement would be a bit difficult.

Me: traffic cops doing their jobs is another internal dialog... let's pretend they do.

Myself: yeah right. Even if they did, all lanes on the highway are clogged. How are cops going to be able to move around to catch transgressors and enforce those rules?

Me: helicopters... ?

Myself: ...

Me: ... with big frickin' lazer beams...

I: Hmmmm. Today is the start of the Large Pizza Special at Roman's...

No posts for a week. Reason: I discovered the joys of Eve Online.

I've been fascinated by MMORPGs for a while, but I was always too chicken to take the plunge because I was afraid it would take too much (a) time and (b) bandwidth. A colleague of mine has been carrying on about Eve for a while, and it turns out the bandwidth requirements are (fairly) negligible. So with lots of enticing by said colleague, a general had-enoughness with studying and a trial account, I finally decided to give it a try.

Wow. Wow. Wow. The game itself is great, but I think the coolest part of it is seeing and experiencing what happens when 20-odd thousand people from across the planet are thrown into a virtual world and let loose at the same time. This is undoubtedly old hat for a lot of people, but I'm still blown away.