I recognize the artistic talent required to do good taxidermy and appreciate the carrying on of an old craft but for your average non-hunter just stumbling on this site it's quite surrealistic. Take the Noonkester Boar Jaw Set for example:

Mike Noonkester is in the heart of hog country, and no one knows hogs better than Mike. The detail, quality, and exactitude of the boar jawsets is unmatched. Tusks are included with every premium boar jawset

1. Keep the animal in a good cage.

Dec 2000, Morgan County, MO
Simba, 80-100 lb African lion, escapes his enclosure. He kills family dog and 6 puppies and then traps small child in room. Boy is rescued through window. Possessor is charged with child endangerment

June 6 1999, Yorktown, TX
Male tiger (1 of 2 owned by her stepfather) jumps on 10-year-old girl and drags her through cage. She dies of head and neck injuries. (Associated Press)

Jan 31 2004 Fort Wayne, IN
While driving his 4-year-old 140-pound lion home from veterinarian appointment, man crashes his car into ditch. Lion is not secured in cage within car, so escapes from car and is found 4 hours later hiding in bushes. Animal Control attempts to dart animal to no avail; as lion runs he is shot and killed.

Note to work associates: The Westford 'cougar' sightings made the list too.

June 11 2003 Westford, MA
Big cat, likely cougar, is spotted roaming neighborhood. No one reports missing exotic cat to authorities, but it is illegal to possess "big cat" in Massachusetts. (www.capitalnews9.com)

Personally my favorite backyard objects have always been the Horse head Nebula and Orion Nebula in the constellation of Orion. What looks likes just stars to the naked eye is revealed in its gossamer glory with a simple telescope. Albiet without the cools colors.

Boss talking to Catbert

Boss: Would you like to join me for a hardening?
Catbert: What's that?
Boss: A hardening is when an employee is given more work than his central nervous system can handle. His whole body suddenly goes stiff.
Catbert: I'm in.
Boss: I've been ripening Asok all month.

Asok sitting in cube, Boss and Catbert arrive

Asok (thinking): So much work... No Time.
Boss: Asok, I have another assignment for you.
Asok (becoming hardened): GAAA!!!

Wally and Dilbert arrive at Asok's cube, Boss and Catbert are gone

Wally: I heard a hardening. Get the apathy cream.

Apathy cream has been applied over Asok's face

Wally: He'll be okay when the apathy sinks in.
Dilbert: We forgot the air hole.

via boing boing

...have we now transitioned to a world in which there is a sustainable advantage for redistributable commodity middleware versions of "good enough" solutions? Although "Windows bundling" used to represent a surefire way to create a de facto systems-level standard e.g. MAPI, might new Windows innovations be ultimately less utilized/leveraged than commodity middleware, given the increasing fragmentation of the market?

To receive a high score a student should write a long essay of three or more paragraphs, with each paragraph containing topic and concluding sentences and at least one sentence that includes the words "for example." Whenever possible the student should use polysyllabic words where shorter, clearer words would suffice. The SAT essay will not be a place to take rhetorical chances. Flair will win no points; the highest-scoring essays will be earnest, long-winded, and predictable.

For fun, guess the movie from the four word review:
Restless pair Orient themselves.
Powerful pumps protect protagonist.
Jack-O-Lantern carver runs amuck.
Young farmer saves galaxy.

The labyrinth of false doors is an organization with many managers/leaders without the power to do anything. Each manager is a person you need to go through in order to make something happen but without the individual power to make any real changes. Some doors may initially appear to lead someplace but inevitably lead nowhere. The true labyrinth nature becomes more apparent once you've pass through a few door and think your making progress but find out you're just as lost as before.

I'm in a time warp - my head is spinning - is this 1998 or 2004? Skip this at all costs.

I ended my previous discussion of functors, you might say, perfunctorily. Before diving on the next part of this essay let me add the following example of the fore mentioned functor in action. The idea of the following example is to mimic a scripting idiom for processing text files.

LineProcessor lp = new LineProcessor(new File("foo.foo"));
lp.lookEachLine(new IStringFunctor() {
    public Object call(String s) {
        System.out.println(s);
    }
});

Compare this to some Ruby code that does the same thing:

aFile = File.new(“foo.foo”)
aFile.each_line( ) do  |line|	
    puts line.dump
end

BufferedReader br = null;
try {
    br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.foo"));
    String line; 
    while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
        System.out.println(line);
    }

} catch (IOException e) {
    // do something with the exception?
}
finally {
    if (br != null) {
        try {
            br.close();                    
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // do something with the exception?                    
        }
    }
}

The HomestarRunner web site is great. Not only are the animations funny the website store's t-shirt selector is great fun to play with. If you like little flash games this little kick the cheat game is fun too. The head-tilts my dog Cori made when I successfully kicked the Cheat were very cute.

In fact it's a recent post on Martin Fowler bliki that sparked this post. Whether or not his observation on the bifurcated nature of software culture makes a dent in the developer zeitgeist isn't an issue for me. I just find it amazing that he was able to snatch that observation from the ether and write it down.

Its a small feature but it works so well I hope it gets ported in some way to Windows. Even if there's some patent on the specific gestures the ALT-TAB feature could be improved by using larger window snapshots instead of icons. If you're like me you tend to have multiple copies of the same application open so ALT-TAB presents you with a list of identical icons. To make matters worse the icons change position as you select them so it becomes a mental puzzle keeping track of their movements in order to cycle through all identical icons.

I’ve used the words simple and concise to describe the goals of this library. It’s worth spending a few sentences on what I really mean by this. In my mind a class library is simple and concise if it allows you to do what needs to be done in a minimal set of understandable steps without a lot of support code. That may not be a very deep explanation but its all I mean.

One of the simplest ways this library keeps support code to a minimum is to generally throw unchecked exceptions instead of checked exceptions. Unchecked exceptions can still be caught and processed if required but handling them is optional. I don’t recommend this approach for all class libraries but for the domain of simple utilities I think it’s a good fit.

Another way this library reduces code is to rely in heavily on functors. Functors are as close as approximation I know of in Java to true scripting language blocks and closure. By relying on functors to represent the inside of an IO processing loop the library can wrap and package all the standard setup and teardown code needed to do IO. The following is a example of functors interface.

/**
 * This interface describes a function that takes a single String object as a parameter.
 * Its intended to be used in a manner similiar to a c or c++ function pointer.
 */
public interface IStringFunctor {
    /**
     * The main entry point of the functor 
     * 
     * @param s - the string to be operated on 
     */
    Object call(String s);
}

I recently had a mini epiphany when I realized it’s not Java the language’s fault that the utilities are so verbose, rather it’s the base class libraries. Java’s heritage is as a system language not a scripting language and as such the standard classes are geared toward performance and fine grain control instead of productivity and conciseness.

So I asked myself what would a concise library for Java look like? I’ve been playing around with some ideas and so far I like what I’ve found. The results are not as concise or cool as Ruby or Groovy code but I think they are a lot nicer than what someone using standard Java class libraries would produce.

The core areas I’ve been focusing on are

In a large organization with a hierarchical structure that’s not how things are done. Most developers are a level or two below any decision maker so they are generally out of the decision making loop. The ideas that get presented to the decision makers come from an ‘elite’ rank of ex-developers, called architects, who exist in a psuedo-development world between the decision makers and the development staff.

The architect ranks tend to be made up of two main categories of people: developers who are just so damn good that they rise to the top on the power of their skills or intellect and developers who are great at convincing decision makers that they have a clue. It’s this later class of architect I label salesman.

Not all architect salesmen are bad; some are good leaders who know their own limitations and actively engage their development peers to come up with workable plans that benefit the project. Unfortunately there is a dark side as well and it’s populated with egotistical sycophants whose only goals are self aggrandizement

The funny thing is that everyone at the development ranks knows who at the architect level fits into which category. It’s only the decision makers who have been hoodwinked.

My little front page ranked 1% evil and 99% good. I don't get it. If this floats your boat they have another disturbing site called killeveryone. Kids these days.

via notestips.com

Favorites include:
Eubetia boop
Darthvaderum
Polemistus chewbacc
Ichabodcraniosaurus Novacek
Macrostyphlus frodo
Macrostyphlus gandalf

My long time favorite example of this sort of playfulness has been Hallucigenia; a very weird little Cambrian marine invertebrate. Hallucigenia is a favorite subject of engineers and artists around the world. Here are a few examples.