Speaking of the draft, I really hope the Pats trade up for Oregon's Steven Jackson. He's a moose.

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armour?
Joker: A peace symbol sir.
Colonel: Where'd you get it?
Joker: I don't remember sir.
Colonel: What is that you've got written on your helmet?
Joker: "Born to Kill" sir.
Colonel: You write "Born to Kill" on you helmet, and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: Well what is it supposed to mean?
Joker: I don't know, sir.
Colonel: You don't know very much do you?
Joker: No sir.
Colonel: You better get your head and your ass wired together or I will take a giant shit on you.
Joker: Yes sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question, or you'll be standing tall before The Man.
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Who's side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don't you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Well how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and c'mon in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I've ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook, there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've got to try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Joker: Aye aye, sir.

The dearth of appropriately skilled professionals was underlined by Bill Pence, CEO of the Napster unit of Roxio Inc., of Los Angeles. "In the last 18 to 24 months, it has been much harder to find talent," he said.

The example Dave gives is something he wrote to generate code for working with database tables.

class RegionTable < Table
     table "region" do
       field autoinc, :reg_id,        pimary_key
       field int,     :reg_affiliate, references(AffiliateTable, :aff_id)
       field varchar(100), :reg_name
     end
    end

To demonstrate how this could be done I'll show a version of the Table super class that generates some simple SQL. The output of my code will look like:

CREATE TABLE region (
reg_id AutoInc PRIMARY KEY,
reg_affiliate Integer REFERENCES AFF aff_id,
reg_name VarChar(100) ,
);

class Table 
	def Table.table (name)
		puts "CREATE TABLE #{name} (";
		if block_given?
			yield
		end
		puts ");";
	end
	def Table.field (type, name, *rest) 
		print "#{name} #{type} ", rest;
		puts ",";
	end
	def Table.autoinc
		"AutoInc";
	end
	def Table.int
		"Integer";
	end
	def Table.varchar(size)
		"VarChar(#{size})";
	end
	def Table.primary_key
		"PRIMARY KEY";
	end
	def Table.not_null
		"NOT NULL";
	end
	def Table.references(a1, a2)
		"REFERENCES #{a1} #{a2}";
	end
	AffiliateTable = "AFF";
end

 do
    	field autoinc, :reg_id,        primary_key
       	field int,     :reg_affiliate, references(AffiliateTable, :aff_id)
       	field varchar(100), :reg_name
end

	if block_given?
		yield
	end

The only really weird bits here are the things :reg_id, :ref_affiliate , :add_id and :reg_name. These are basically string constants. In Ruby terms they are atomic strings. or Symbols. In terms of our example (at least as I've coded it) you could replace them with regular strings and it would work the same.

Like I said earlier I'm not a Ruby expert. I just wanted to understand the example Dave made a little better. If you made it this far I hope you found it informative too.

Tarsiers are active only at night, hiding during the day in tangles of vines or in the tops of tall trees. They subsist mainly on insects, and, though very curious animals, tend to be loners.

So it was with some sadness I stumbled across the Save the Philippine tarsier site. Of course I'm glad that people are trying to save the Tarsier, I'm just sad that they need saving.

Up until today my browser of choice has been Safari. I tried Firebird 0.7 but it had stability issues and since I try not to use Explorer on the PC I'm sure as heck not going to use it on a Mac. I've been happy with Safari for the most part. One thing that's annoyed my about it however has been that the full Blogger web app doesn't work. You need to use the limited UI from Safari. As I mentioned earlier I use the Mac for blogging and this was a major annoyance. I finally installed FireFox (0.8) today and was pleasantly surprised that it was both stable and ran the full Blogger UI.

Yes, believe it or not, it's now 19 February 2004! Hard to believe this famous date came around so soon. I wonder if NASA is having any official event to commemorate this day? More likely everyone will just leave work early and get dead drunk.

The book covers other topics but not as well. There's a decent chapter on JNI and a chapter on Generative programming. The Generative programming chapter is more of a philosophical statement than a deep dive on some aspect of Java technology. While I agree with Stuart that GP is a good technique the chapter doesn't feel like it fits in the book.

All in all this is a very good Java book. I highly recommend it.

Excalibur introduced a generation to the music of Carl Orff and Wagner. It's hard to listen to O Fortuna without thinking of the scene in Excalibur with the knights ridding through the flowering dogwood trees.

While the cast was composed of mostly unknowns actors, many have had fine careers and are still working today. Notables include: Helen Mirren as Morgana, Gabriel Byne as Uther Pendragon, Liam Neeson as Gawain and of course Patrick Stewart as Leondegrance.

In the true spirit of nepotism, Robert Boorman worked his children into the production. His daughter Telsche played the Lady in the Lake, his daughter Katrine played Igrayne, Authur's mother and his son played the young Mordred. Lore has it that Telsche got the part because she was the only girl on the set who could hold her breath long enough to get the shot.

I've been pondering how to avoid this problem in the future. Do you generate the meta-data at build time? Do you add a meta-data validation step to the build? If the meta data is all in external files that's not so bad but what if the data is in a String in the code. How do you ensure its integrity?

If anyone has any thoughts on this I'd like to hear them.

Every man's fear is 411 Length Required or 417 Expectation Failed. Many of the emails I receive promise that in a few short months, I can receive 413 Request Entity Too Large instead.

This made me think of naval signal flags. While I don't have time to market a line of underwear. I offer the following table of flags and there meaning and leave it to you to determine their merit for the task.

Flag	Name	Meaning
	Alfa	I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed.
	Bravo	I am taking in, discharging, or carrying dangerous cargo.
	Charlie	"Yes" or "affirmative".
	Delta	I am maneuvering with difficulty; keep clear.
	Echo	I am directing my course to starboard.
	Foxtrot	I am disabled; communicate with me.
	Golf	I require a pilot.
	Hotel	I have a pilot on board.
	India	Coming alongside.
	Juliet	I am on fire and have dangerous cargo; keep clear.
	Kilo	I wish to communicate with you.
	Lima	You should stop your vessel immediately.
	Mike	My vessel is stopped; making no way.
	November	No or negative.
	Oscar	Man overboard.
	Papa	All personnel return to ship; proceeding to sea.
	Quebec	Boat recall; all boats return to ship.
	Romeo	Preparing to replenish. Ready duty ship.
	Sierra	Conducting flag hoist drill.
	Tango	Do not pass ahead of me
	Uniform	You are running into danger.
	Victor	I require assistance.
	Whiskey	I require medical assistance.
	Xray	Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.
	Yankee	I am dragging anchor.
	Zulu	I require a tug.

via Gregor J Rothfuss

In his keynote address, Intel chief executive Craig Barrett will discuss how Intel escaped the industry downturn. Chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger, meanwhile, will look ahead toward the "tera-era", an age where powerful teraflop computers access terabytes of storage, and the challenges Intel will have to overcome to reach that threshold.

There is a subtle difference between the two of them [EAI (Enterprise Integration Architectures), B2B], in that EAI, you need to have federated infrastructure across your enterprise. You need to have solutions that are thinking about identity management, security management, just management, to distributed directory and naming, all of those problems that it takes to run your application, run you enterprise, your IT ship. And so, it's EAI, B2B, they're very, very important, but when I think about services, I fundamentally prefer to call it HST, or Hooking Shit Together

While 'Hooking Shit Together' is refreshingly candid and personable coming from a high level technologist, it's not the most interesting thing in the article. During the interview he talks about the demise of distributed object system and how to integrate legacy systems into service level architectures. All good stuff. The context of the interview is .NET but his ideas apply equally well to the Domino/Workplace and J2EE world.

It's a good interview, if you have some time give it a watch.

via Bill Bumgarner

Eskimo	English
apun	snow
apingaut	first snowfall
aput	spread-out snow
kanik	frost
anigruak	frost on a living surface
ayak	snow on clothes
kannik	snowflake
nutagak	powder snow
aniu	packed snow
aniuvak	snowbank
natigvik	snowdrift
kimaugruk	snowdrift that blocks something
perksertok	drifting snow
akelrorak	newly drifting snow
mavsa	snowdrift overhead and about to fall
kaiyuglak	rippled surface of snow
pukak	sugar snow
pokaktok	salt-like snow
miulik	sleet
massak	snow mixed with water
auksalak	melting snow
aniuk	snow for melting into water
akillukkak	soft snow
milik	very soft snow
mitailak	soft snow covering an opening in an ice floe
sillik	hard, crusty snow
kiksrukak	glazed snow in a thaw
mauya	snow that can be broken through
katiksunik	light snow
katiksugnik	light snow deep enough for walking
apuuak	snow patch
sisuuk	avalanche

Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: WARDROBEMALFUNCTION.COM
Created on: 01-FEB-04
Expires on: 02-FEB-05
Last Updated on: 01-FEB-04

Maybe its best use for me will be as a way to jog my memory. And that's actually not a bad use for it as far as I’m concerned.

If I can extend that thought, the value of Orkut increases over time as a link from the blogsphere to the meatsphere. Using Orkut, as people move between jobs and cities you can keep track of them effortlessly.

The Jakarta Commons package also has some simple ones that perform logical opertation on other filters: AndFileFilter, OrFileFilter and NotFileFilter.

If you really don't want to write your own you can also buy some. This collection is for sale at the odd price of '$26.70 East Caribbean Dolla' or standard $10.00 US. I don't know the conversion rate for East Caribbean Dolla but I hope it works out to less than 10 US. Neither seems like much of a deal.

While these are all fine and dandy I still feel like there's something missing. The filter that started me thinking about this was my desire for a simple exclusion filter to implement ANT like exclude capabilities. This led me thinking further about size filters and date filters, recursive listFiles methods, sorting decorators etc... Sounds like the roots of a little side project. Maybe if I find the time.

The budget also allows funds for "demonstrations of space nuclear power and advanced propulsion technologies and other breakthrough exploration systems".