the corner office

The streets of London are filthy. Not necessarily filthier than other large cities, but filthy nonetheless. Millions of people puking and peeing and sweating and spitting and shedding skin and all manner of cells, litter and cigarette ash and food and crud.

So why the current trend for people to wear trousers that are too long, hanging below their shoes so the bottoms are being trampled on or dragging across the ground? Gross, especially on wet days when you see fashionistas with soggy and mud-covered leg-bottoms, damp and sludge slowly wicking up their legs. I just don't get the appeal. Ugh, ugh, and yet again, ugh.

The whole Java world reads Charles Miller's blog. He's that famous; I'm not sure why. But I read his blog too. And his latest post Recommended Reading for Java developers refers to a post from 2002 where he listed 5 books Java developers should read.

Now, 6 years ago I was just starting to learn Java in a university course, writing my simple classes in Textpad and getting to grips with javac and class paths and thinking that VisualAge was crap with its stupid-ass way of dragging lines between 'beans'. Thankfully I'm come a little further down the road since then (although man, Visual Age was crap).

Miller mentions Effective Java Second Edition. Somewhat coincidentally (not really since the damned thing was only recently published), Joshua Bloch's Effective Java is what I'm finishing off right now. It's an excellent book. It's not always geared towards what application developers do, with a much stronger focus on API design. Still, the principle is that if you see and design your components in terms of APIs they'll work better, and that's true. And beyond that, it's just a great big heap of Java experience and knowledge about the language and libraries, coming to you in little aphoristic bites that you can digest and apply to write less crap code.

In addition to Enlightenment, (capital E and all), the nice thing about Effective Java is that when it comes down to 'should I do A or B to solve this problem', as is so often the case, you can now choose a course of action safe in the knowledge that if anyone ever calls you on your decision you can just reply 'EJ item 71,' and that's the end of the conversation. Sometimes 'Josh Bloch said so' is all the justification you need.

My blog was down for a bit this weekend... I finally got around to getting the VM it runs on reinstalled. From unsupported old sitting-duck version of Debian to Ubuntu latest, I'm hoping that'll see me done on the system maintenance front for another year or two. I've realised I'm getting too old to get my jollies from fiddling with config files.

An annoying 'feature' of Firefox cropped up today. I don't know if it's just because I've never triggered it before or because I recently upgraded to Firefox 3, but I got caught by Firefox's domain guessing feature. What it boils down to is that if you're using a simple hostname (like 'blah', common on local networks), then if Firefox can't find the host, it wraps your hostname in a 'www.' and '.com' and then goes off and tries www.blah.com.

Nice feature for some, but I really don't like it. The nice thing about Firefox/Mozilla is that when they have these contentious features, they're usually rather good about allowing you to disable them. Which you can in this case, by setting browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to 'false' in about:config.

And you can disable the keyword search feature (similar, but contacts a search engine) by setting keyword.enabled to false, as well (via).

Between The Dark Knight and The Crow, if I was a movie star and I was offered the chance to play a dark and troubled character who wears lots of make-up, I'd Just Say No.

Went into London this weekend to see the Fields of the Nephilim at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. It was jolly good fun. There were lions and tigers and dancing bears and lollipops and sweets and a clown and a riding pony. Not really. There were lots of inflatable Nemo fish and a hand puppet, but I think that was an online group of fans who'd organised a bit of a get-together and occupied half the standing room in front of the stage, and seemed to be having a ripe old time.

Circa 2008 it's well understood that 'Fields of the Nephilim' means Carl McCoy plus nameless backing musicians. It's also equally accepted by all but the most ardent of adorers that Carl McCoy is a little on the self-important side, especially when it comes to the legacy of the Neph. He may be able to claim legal and spiritual woo-woo ownership of the major themes and conceptual underpinnings of the Nephilim as a b(r)and, but the band's appeal to me was always as much the music as vocals and imagery. So without the Wright bros and Messrs Pettit and Yates, I wasn't expecting too much on the musical front.

Having said that, it was a Neph gig, and Mr Neph himself was going to be up there, belting out the tunes, and I was determined to make the most of it. And the band circa 2008 acquitted themselves well. A little metalesque in places (understandable), but really tight and mostly true to the original sound.

Right, the gig. Shepherd's Bush Empire, the kind of old music-hall-looking venue you'd never see in ZA. All added to the charm, this is the appeal of London. We arrived a little late thanks to half of London's underground network being closed due to suicides, repairs or lack of interest. I thought the tubes got clogged up during weekday rush hours, sheesh.

Huge queues when we arrived, so we went into the Irish pub next door for a few pints. Packed with old-school goth types. Quite noticeably (and refreshingly) different to current-day goths. Fewer piercings but more wrinkles. And nary a patch of PVC. I felt more at home around this odd lot than I've felt around alternatives in many a year.

A few pints and we made our way into the venue. We had seats on the first floor, but chose to stand along the first floor balcony to the left of the stage. Virtually on top of the stage, perfect view, if a little too close to the speaker stacks for an old fart like me. As I mentioned, the atmosphere in the crowd was brilliant. I'm glad I wasn't on the ground floor, it was rather lively and the shirtless dudes moshing and building pyramids looked like they were having a blast, but I might have felt less charitable if I'd been stuck behind them.

Covering band - Inkubus Sukkubus. Or, as it was more accurately put last night: 'hey, this is one of those 90's goth bands' 'yep, I recognise this song from Gothic Rock II', 'yeah, me too, who are they?' 'stuffed if I remember'. They weren't bad but a little too cheezy gawth for me. Never mind that I was paying good money to watch a band whose entire ethos is being dust-covered, trenchcoat-clad post-apocalyptic spaghetti-western cyberpunk cowboys with a thing for Cthulhu and Crowley and Sumerian mythology. It's a subtle distinction, I'll admit.

Impressions and memories...

Flour. Wouldn't have believed it, but a song or so into the gig, you could see flour/powder on the stage floor. That made me chuckle.

McCoy. Well, you see videos, then you see the real person. Ain't the tallest fella in the world. Huge presence, though, leathers, boots, crazy hat, and of course, voice right outta a thousand packs of Camel Plains.

Big-ass septagram on stage. True to theme, I suppose. I think McCoy was taking pains to stand at certain points in the thing during different songs, so maybe he was being all magickal and heavy. At other times he just stomped around in his big boots like he was pished. Maybe a bit of both.

Songs. Not enough of them, sadly... when they went off before the encores I thought it was a half-time intermission. No songs from Dawnrazor, which was disappointing, but a little bit of everything else, including Zoon. A few tracks from the latest material, which didn't blow me away. Best songs for me were Endemoniada and Psychonaut, and the Moonchild encore. The Elizium stuff wasn't far behind - beautiful and haunting as always.

Strange experiences, meeting new people - met a South African dude who was standing next to us, and asked 'how did you guys hear of this band? I only got into them a few months ago, never heard of them in my life before, but they're brilliant'. I'd have felt rather old if the bloke wasn't my age. After the gig they disappeared, I'm sorry I didn't get to chat to him and his missus further, their enthusiasm brought a smile to my face. Made me wonder how many new fans a band like the Neph can still attract - what they sound like to people who don't have the subcultural history or context.

Trip home - we stopped off at the pub next door for a final pint, which wasn't a good idea, because my mate R and I missed the last trains and ended up missioning around outside Victoria station before finding a night bus out to Chislehurst, which went through every dodgy suburb south of the Thames, and picked up lots of youngsters who had 'knife crime' written all over their spotty faces. But still, all part of the adventure.

So there you go. I've now seen FoTN live.

As a sideline to the trading, I've been dabbling with production in Eve. I did my homework, picked a border system in secure space that leads to a network of low-sec systems (I reckon ship turnover is a lot higher in those sorts of areas, and it's also nice and close to the dirt-cheap minerals that're being mined in the low-sec systems), and set up a production run.

This evening, wallet icon flickered, money's changed hands. Checked the journal, another happy sale, someone bought one of my Cormorant destroyers. The player's name was distinctive, I remembered it. Let's call him Mr X. A few minutes later, I was warping in, preparing to dock at the station, and who was undocking, but Mr X in his brand new Cormorant. A Cormorant I made. Now it's off with its new owner to take on pirates and bad guys (or good guys) and seek fortune. I felt like sending the dude a message saying 'hey, good luck in my ship'. I decided against it. But it's a pretty cool thought. I'll keep an eye on the books and see how soon before he needs to buy another one :-)

Of all the things you expect to hear when the Voices are announcing delays on the tube, 'delays due to an unexploded bomb from World War II' is not one of them.

A 1 ton bomb, sitting there for 65-odd years, waiting to go boom. And then, when the bomb squad tries to defuse it, it starts ticking! Crazy.

I was looking at some sample code today, and found a Java file with about 5 classes in the file - one public, and another 4 default-scoped classes. Although it's perfectly legal, my experience is that you hardly ever see this in production code. You'll see enough inner classes, member and static, often a healthy dose of anonymous inner classes (and almost never a local class), but bundling a number of classes into a Java file? It just doesn't happen.

I wonder why that is. I suspect it has a lot to do with how people work with IDEs. In the old days when crazy people coded Java in Notepad or vi, it might have made sense (and been more convenient) to have multiple classes in the same file (it's common enough in C++ code). With an IDE like Eclipse, and using something like the Package Explorer, files are the top level of abstraction within a package, and I think developers make an easy file = class equivalence.

Arguably, multiple classes in a file allows an extra level of organisation, logically grouping related classes. Whenever I want to do that, though, I favour inner classes. I can scope the classes more tightly, and associations are more explicit. The down side is you can lose some encapsulation. To be honest, I just never think about anything other than class-per-file with inner classes as needed. So is there a place for multiple classes in a file? Is this a useful but much-neglected feature in Java, or does it hurt readability for developers who don't expect to see it? Not sure...

After my previous Linux installation broke and I barely noticed because I was spending most of my time in Windows playing Eve, I got around to reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop recently, and I'm now running Hardy Heron. I don't know why, but I just couldn't get my fonts looking good in Gnome again. I'm not a fan of Gnome, but since the two apps I spend most of my time in (Firefox and Eclipse) both only have Gtk bindings, I was never too compelled to try alternatives.

With the font problem, I decided to take the plunge and try Xubuntu. I've fiddled with Xfce once or twice before, never done much more than poke around. This time I think it's for keeps. I'm glad to say that my fonts are displaying as nicely as can be, and I'm much taken by the look and feel. Is it genuinely lighter on memory and CPU than Gnome? I'm not sure, and it doesn't matter that much. It looks good and it feels good (even handling Gtk apps quite gracefully), and I'm chuffed.

Now the job of getting everything set up again...