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I always mistype that as “SourceForget”.

I recently released an updated version of Rox and discovered that shell access is no longer available on sf.net. That blows because I push out JavaDoc content with each release which consists of hundreds of files. So now, instead of uploading a zip file, shelling in, blowing away the original directory and just unzipping the zip file, I have to upload each file individually. Sure, I can script it, but it’s painfully slow and it makes deleting files (for classes that I remove or rename, for example) a pain in the ass.

Thanks SourceForge. I love you too.

(That was sarcasm. I know, I know, I’m such a nice guy you’d never have guessed. Well, it was.)

For posterity I thought it would be nice to record some of Morris’ recent (and upcoming) accomplishments.

He’s on the cusp of walking. He’s cruising comfortably between window sills, items of furniture and random parents. And when he stops paying attention (usually because he’s desperately trying to reach something he’s not supposed to play with) he forgets and stays upright for tens of seconds at a time. Pretty soon he’s going to be moon-walking.

He’s mad about trucks, birds, cats, dogs and buses. But above all things he’s currently fascinated by aeroplanes. Fortunately we live in Seattle, home to SeaTac international airport, conveniently located so the flight path takes almost every arrival over downtown Seattle. Morris sees a lot of planes. And we realised just recently that he’s started trying to say “over there”, presumably because we point and say “look over there”. He’ll put his hand up to the window (we normally point with a finger) and if we don’t react appropriately (by whatever metric is currently most significant in his tiny but ever-so-busy little mind) he’ll even reach down and grab a finger and drag it up to the window.

He can open pretty much anything he gets his hands on. In fact he’s been able to open child-proof vitamin bottles for several months now. Drawers, ovens, cupboards and the dishwasher aren’t even challenging anymore. The latter is particularly unfortunate because he likes to climb into the dishwasher.

Oh and he can lift the toilet seat, and he’s fascinated with whatever his overactive imagination thinks lives in there

Ah, the 90s. A time when software was small, unobtrusive and worked.

I noticed earlier that my preferred WinAmp skin includes the date of its release and it reminded me that that skin has followed me through four countries and at least as many machines, trailed in the wake of a faithful copy of WinAmp 2.91 that I’ve kept around because, frankly, it works. And it works well. And unlike Apple iCrap it doesn’t slow even a modern machine to a treacle-like crawl or invade your desktop as though it’s a browser breaking the news of impending world war. WinAmp consumes less than 8MB of working memory while playing my music. Show me software today (any software) that does as well. Looking at my running processes there isn’t a single running application that beats that.

And, God bless the Internet, if you have a particular version of WinAmp you were unwillingly parted from, or long for the good old days, then oldversion.com can help.

Go on, keep the dream alive. You know you want to.

The title pretty much sums it up. Dreams of settling on our French office (a converted church) in an area I described as Rome to our visitors (I remember pointing out Rome’s hills to them) and a recurring sequence driving past a scrubland field covered in upright abandoned gas cylinders the height of a man.

Rox 1.2 was just released. Rox hasn’t seen a whole lot of work over the past 6 months but prior to that, spurred on by an inexplicable desire to understand how Java 1.5’s SSLEngine worked and an end user who wanted to use Rox to talk to a farm of thermostats (using HTTP, so he took an XMLRPC implementation and “downgraded” it to plain HTTP because he didn’t want to write a NIO HTTP client: I totally understand).

Rox now supports SSLEngine, much more flexible access to information about the calling context, including SSL session information (and the ability to reject a request early on based on this information), support for HTTP pipelining (HTTP purists avert your eyes, I know pipelining and POST is a horrible combination but this came from an end user and it makes sense in his case because he’s just sending stateless notifications), and a smattering of bug fixes.

I’m part way through a write up of SSLEngine for inclusion in my NIO tutorial (surprisingly popular) and have been for about 6 months. I plan to finish it before I retire.

Release 1.2
=====================

  - Fixed a bug in the SaxUnmarshaller that prevented internal state from
    correctly being reset when unmarshalling failed while handling a nested
    struct or array.
  - Improved error detection when a complex type is being unmarshalled and
    the target type is incompatible (e.g. unmarshalling a struct into a String
    member).
  - Introduced support for pipelining HTTP 1.1 requests (including POST
    requests, which violates the HTTP RFC but pipelining support for GET
    requests only is a little useless for XML-RPC).
  - Improved structural validation for XML-RPC messages.

Release 1.1
=====================

  - Stashing the SAXParserFactory instance for a (slight) performance increase.
  - Fixed a bug in the check for a reset() method on the SAXParser in use.
  - Pooled connections are now closed when a zero byte read occurs.
  - Giving up on supporting 1.4 only since it's starting to feel a bit antiquated
    and no longer worth the trouble.
  - Introduced rewritten SaxUnmarshaller. This implementation should function correctly with
    any off the shelf SAX parser. It's marginally slower than the previous implementation
    (but that's the price of correctness).
  - SSL support has been rewritten to use Java 1.5's SSLEngine instead of the
    black magic used prior to this release to combine NIO and SSL support on
    Java 1.4. SSL configuration is considerably more flexible.
  - As part of the SSL rewrite SSLSessionPolicy has been introduced, providing
    the ability to configure flexible session acceptance policy rules.
  - Much in the way of refactoring, some of which will break compatibility (but generally
    only for sub-classes, users of this library should be largely unaffected).

I’ve been bizarre-dream free for a few months already but last night was a winner.

I’m not even going to speculate as to possible root cause here. What I remember of it goes like this. I was out of phase with time, or space or something relative to the rest of the world. The only person who could see me (and who I could interact with) was … you guessed it … Superman. I remember crashing at his place and sleeping on a giant concrete slab (his place needs a woman’s touch). I remember finding his two celery plants and him pointing out tasty bugs crawling all over the plants. And he was right, they were indeed very tasty, although I found the scratchy legs a little off putting when swallowing them.

Tum, tee, tum … perfectly sane over here in the corner, keep walking …

I’m not sure what I was expecting today. The office was sufficiently quiet when I got in so that I thought for a moment it might be a national holiday I was unaware of. By 4:55pm I figured the day was going to slip by with zero references but at the last minute someone on the team slipped in a link to a remembrance page.

I wonder how Cheney’s day went.

Nothing like the Intarweb to make you feel old. Memes you don’t know (or just don’t get) and sarky Digg … er, I mean 12 year olds, users who get up your nose.

But all that aside I stumbled across this blog recently (I periodically search for a bunch of keywords which flushed this one out) and was taken with how … alien it was. It reminds me a lot of the handful of emails I’ve received from Claire’s youngest (~18 year old) brother. The capitalized HAHA is common to both, along with the ultra-dense sms style “prose”. It strikes me that the author of this blog may not be a first language English speaker, but it’s just as likely they are.

This must be what the previous generation felt like.

Edit: After reading a bit further it turns out this person may not be a first language English speaker after all. Interesting, given that their recent entries are so similar to Gordon’s emails. Also of note is that their prose style changes almost completely at one point. Peer pressure? Weird.

The best-laid plans of mice and men…

You know you’re in Seattle when the coffee at the local Zoo’s cafeteria is organic (good for you), shade-grown (good for Ma Nature), and fair trade (good for the communities growing the beans).

keep looking »