the corner office

We spent last week in Dartmoor. Beautiful place. Bleak, grim, but that's a large part of the appeal. Did some walking and got to see some interesting things - tors, ancient woods, stone circles and burial mounds, winding country lanes, cathedrals and abbeys etc etc. I think the only thing that could have made it even cooler is if we'd been snowed in and didn't have to come back!

The story of the sham Lapland theme park in the New Forest has been a hoot since it broke earlier this week, and now with a perfect ending (per the Times):

Today families were arriving to find the entrance coned off. A woman from the park shouted through the fence: "Santa's gone home, Santa's f*****g dead."

Not entirely coincidentally, since it is December, but somewhat apropos nonetheless, we took Leo to a Christmas thingy at a garden centre up the road from us on Monday. At least they had live reindeer (Leo not interested), animatronic animals and a pretty display (Leo very interested), a 'magic ride' aka wobbling train carriage in a darkroom with lots of UV paint and two scrolling painted murals on either side (Leo thoroughly unsure what to make of the experience, much like his parents) and getting to sit on Satan Claus' lap (Leo not liking one bit).

It was cheap and cheerful and the queue wasn't too long (just as well because some kid ahead of us had pooped and the smell was what can only be described as insistent), and we got a nice photo with Leo not looking too traumatised. And Leo got a teddy bear as a gift which we named Jabulani on account of the cheerfulness our son was (not) exhibiting by the end of the day, which has now turned into his new best friend.

The joys of Christmas!

There's an interesting discussion at TSS about the Servlet 3.0 spec. Two noteworthy things coming from the new spec are continuations, and annotations.

Continuations are great... they're already implemented in Jetty and Tomcat - subjectively, Jetty's approach looks better - and are a brilliant way to break away from thread-per-request processing, allowing better scalability and interesting new ways of doing things.

Annotations... eeeeh, not so much. Annotations are great when used judiciously but they must have turned into one of the most abused features in Java. Sure it might be convenient to specify your paths and mappings in a POJO and start specifying arbitrary methods as GET and POST handlers, but by the time you do that, you no longer have a POJO... you just have lots of hard-coded configuration in the guts of your code. Thumbs down from me.

I like arctic winds. Today was gloriously wet and miserable, and it snowed! There was only a white dusting on the ground and it didn't take long to melt, but that doesn't matter. It snowed, dammit.

Something technical for a change. For months this year, I had a weird problem in Eclipse where I'd be typing away, and suddenly my keyboard would start working like it was a US keyboard, instead of the normal UK keyboard that's actually plugged into the box. I'd mutter something unkind about Eclipse, restart the IDE and the problem would go away. I presumed it was some bug in Eclipse itself.

I eventually got annoyed enough by this semi-regular problem that I did a search to see whether it was fixable. It turned out not to be Eclipse's fault at all. When I travelled to Romania earlier this year I was still working on my PC back in London, and had to enable US keyboard support because that's what they use in Romania. Problem is, Windows uses Alt-Shift as a default shortcut to switch between keyboard types, and it goes without saying that Alt-Shift is two thirds of a great many shortcuts in Eclipse. The keyboard shortcut applies only to the application you're currently using, so it looked like it was 'fixed' each time I restarted Eclipse.

To properly resolve the problem you can either just hit Alt-Shift to toggle back, or change the shortcut keys in the Regional Settings control panel (iirc that's where it is), or as I did, disable all keyboard layouts except for the one I use daily.

It's hard to believe that this counts as news:

The government is preparing to confirm that a huge and unplanned rise in government borrowing will have to be paid back in the years to come.

In a few days' time we'll have been in the UK for 2 years. Which means that it was time for our visa renewal. We weren't worried about not qualifying, but an unkind and cold universe and an unkind and cold government department whose raison d'etre is to tell people to sod off more often than not are never a good mix, and caused us a bit of angst anyway. Thankfully the Home Office decided we're fine upstanding immigrants and said we could stick around for a little longer. Yippee (and phew!)

My annual sports post. Last year I said I didn't believe Lewis Hamilton deserved to win the F1 Championship. This year he won it fair and square, good for him.

There are times when I'm homesick, and times when I'm not. Ronwen and I met through mutual friends at a club called Jamies in Durban. It was a stomping ground and meeting place for many of Durban's alternative types. I spent many weekend nights at Jamies while working on an extended project in Durban. It was a really cool venue, big airy old building near the beachfront. I made many friends there, many happy memories.

It was run by Jamie and his wife Mary, who lived in a closed-off section at the back of the club. Last weekend Mary was shot by robbers, and her two daughters spent the night trying to comfort her while she bled to death.

The funniest thing I've seen on TV in a while was a filler on BBC news about the big old clocks which all have to be changed for the end of daylight savings time this weekend. The BBC went around asking people whether they actually relied on these old clocks on old buildings, and one young woman said something along the lines of "I don't trust them... but that's probably because where I come from they never work." She sounded very South African... after Ronwen and I stopped laughing, I felt a little homesick. I don't know if many people would understand why that's so funny. But it is.