the corner office

I saw a quiet article a few pages into the City A.M. this morning: is IBM going to buy Sun?

Interesting to see how that pans out, if it does. It would mean, amongst others:

1. IBM owns the Sun JVM
2. IBM owns MySQL
3. IBM owns Netbeans
4. IBM owns Glassfish
5. IBM owns Solaris

Hrm indeed.

I've never been very good at the whole degrees-of-family thing. I've never really bothered to figure it out, and whenever someone would say 'so-and-so is a third cousin thrice removed' I'd just nod. I'm lazy that way.

This week, however, I got a friend request on Facebook from a distant family member, whose branch of the family moved to Canada many years ago. I was chatting to my aunt about it and she said 'she'll be your second cousin'. This didn't feel right, because on my father's side of the family, most of my cousins were my parents' age, and their children were our age, and we always referred to them as our second cousins.

Feeling rather ashamed at my lack of mastery of this whole degrees-of-cousins thing, I decided to educate myself (thanks Wikipedia) and put an end to my ignorance, once and for all.

As it turns out, my aunt was correct, but calling your cousin's children your second cousins is a common (but incorrect) usage of the term, and they're more strictly first cousins once removed. Overall, it works like this:

A system of degrees and removes is used to describe the relationship between the two cousins and the ancestor they have in common. The degree (first, second, third cousin, etc.) indicates the minimum number of generations between either cousin and the nearest common ancestor; the remove (once removed, twice removed, etc.) indicates the number of generations, if any, separating the two cousins from each other.

Wikipedia has a pretty graph which sort-of explains it better. The trick of it is that because the degree refers to the minimum generations between either you or your cousin, and the common ancestor, you can have a first cousin once removed no matter far out the common ancestor goes. Between your nth cousin and the common ancestor, moving up the generations reduces the degree and increases the removed.

Did that make sense? I'll probably have forgotten it by tomorrow as well.

I have not spent the rest of the week eating Doritos and watching YouTube. I've been hard at work, at work. I intend to start working on my noble-intentions list this weekend. In the meantime, I'm sitting here trying to muster the energy to be productive at something, anything, but failing miserably. I think it's time for bed. After this blog post, of course.

One night this week I was thinking about some old work colleagues, especially one colleague whom I haven't spoken to in a couple of years. The next morning, I got an email from him saying 'hello, why don't you ever mail me?' It's happened to me before, and even when it's true, the 'wow, I was just thinking of you' reply always sounds a little thin.

I saw a new brand of pizzas on special at Tesco yesterday, so thought I'd try 'em. Only when I was sticking the pizza into the oven, did I notice that instead of being made with cheese, it was made with a 'cheese flavour analogue'. Easily the most disgusting thing I've seen or tasted all decade. Didn't finish a bite before throwing it out and having a sandwich for dinner. Supermarket frozen pizzas are pretty low on the budget ladder, is it really necessary to cost-cut the cheese? San Marco pizzas. Ugh, avoid. I'm tempted to write a letter. I'm scared they'll reply by sending me more pizzas.

Ronwen and Leo are doing the visit the Mother Kountry thing, so I have the run of the place for a while. I have noble intentions and a long list of things to do while they're away.

I have spent my first 36 hours of freedom eating Doritos and watching YouTube.

When I read the word 'pants' on non-British websites, it feels weird.

I love junk food. But even I'm grossed out by some of the stuff at thisiswhyyourefat.com.

Halfway down the page is a picture of a tin of Pork Brains In Milk Gravy, which happens to have a cool 1170% of your RDA of cholesterol. I've seen the picture crop up on a few blogs this week, and so I googled it. I didn't look too hard but I suspect that this was one of the originals, and there are blog posts referencing this picture as far back as 2006.

On the subject of pig brains, my googling found this page about potted meat products, which just makes me feel uncomfortable deep inside.

The odd thing is that as kids (and I don't think, looking back, that we were alone in this), we grew up eating things like corned beef and polony, and as I grew older and more discerning, first the corned beef went (only so many aorta bits you can deal with before you give it up), and then the polony after a fellow articled clerk during my auditing years told me about his experiences doing a stock count at a polony factory.

I still eat viennas and sausages, and I find it best to live in denial on that front.

Aw man. Why do these things have to get so complicated? I wanted to whip up a simple webapp using Hibernate. But when I fired up the app, I got:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.slf4j.impl.JDK14LoggerAdapter.trace(Ljava/lang/String;)V
	at org.hibernate.cfg.annotations.PropertyBinder.make(PropertyBinder.java:184)
... etc etc...

I found this discussion and a comment that it was an slf4j version mismatch with hibernate-annotations. So the solution is to explicitly include slf4j-log4j12 in your maven dependency list, before your hibernate-annotations dependency.

So with that sorted, I ran into the next problem:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter
	at org.hibernate.bytecode.javassist. BytecodeProviderImpl.getProxyFactoryFactory(BytecodeProviderImpl.java:49)
... etc etc...

To resolve that, you have to add javassist as an explicit Maven dependency.

That cost me the better part of tonight's tinkering time. Bah.

I don't play Eve Online anymore but I chuckled when a work colleague (and then Ronwen) told me about the Band of Brothers industrial espionage that ended up with one of Eve's largest virtual corporations being completely decimated. Quite something for an online gaming event to prompt a BBC article.

But I wonder how far the real-life parallels go. For people who've devoted years to building up some of these corps, the loss must be very, very real, as is the shame and loss of face amongst peers. Is it not just a matter of time before a player does in fact react much the same as a real-life CEO would, and jump out a window? I'm sure it's happened before with unstable gamers, but if a really high-profile event, like the BoB affair, had a tragic ending, what would the BBC be saying then, and how long before real world regulators start turning their attention to these (refreshingly) free and chaotic online worlds?

A gotcha. I was trying to load a native library, and to speed things up when fiddling with a test app I tried to set the java.library.path system property directly in the code, before anything else was loaded or instantiated, a la:

System.setProperty("java.library.path", "/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib");

This didn't work, and I still got an error saying:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no myspeciallib in java.library.path

I had to specify the system property on the command line with -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib. Presumably the JVM resolves the library path a lot earlier in life, not just when you try to explicitly load a .dll or .so. Stands to reason I suppose.

I was hoping we'd get more snow this week, but it's looking unlikely. I wouldn't mind heading out in this more often: