Ok, here’s mine!

Vote for Java6 on Leopard!

As mentioned previously a lot of Java developers on OSX are upset at Apple’s silence as to its intentions with respect to the release of Java 6. There used to be a developer preview available, which was pulled recently with no indication as to when a replacement would be available. People like me who upgraded in the hope of having the latest and greatest – which we have been very patiently waiting for over a year for – are very disappointed. Some who are working on Java 6 projects cannot use their computer easily, without resorting to installation of a separate OS in a virtual machine, to do their job. We all like OSX: its a beautiful easy to use Unix that usually really helps us get our work done. I have been very happily using it since 2004.

The solution of course is to have our voice heard. One way to do this is to file a bug with Apple. Please do this! The only problem I have with it is that as opposed to the Java bug database which is completely open, the Apple bug database is completely closed. So there’s no real way of verifying how many people have posted a report. We must therefore complement that action with an equal Open action. Following the noble example given to us by Nova Spivack, when he asked for people to make their voice heard in support of the Burmese people and got some real results, let us do the same to help Apple make the right decision. Anybody who would like to support this issue in the blogosphere, should help post a blog with the string

13949712720901ForOSX

You are a web developer, and your web application is up and running at last.  You can only hope it will become popular.  But are you ready for when it happens?  These two ticket selling operations didn’t have to wait and wonder if they would “become” popular, they KNEW exactly when the flood would arrive… And still, they were unprepared.

High demand crashes Beijing Olympics ticket website

On Tuesday, organizers were working to fix the problem, the BOCOG website said. It asked ticket buyers to be patient and to avoid constantly refreshing the online ticketing site. Within the first hour of sale, the website was visited eight million times and received more than 200,000 ticket requests per second, BOCOG said. It’s unclear how many tickets were sold Tuesday, but BOCOG said 9,000 were sold within the first two hours.

Colorado fans rock World Series ticket system

On Monday, there were 8.5 million attempts to connect with the Rockies’ computers in the first 90 minutes after sales started, he said, and only several hundred tickets had been sold before the system had to be shut down.

So, in a very well timed coincidence, the CRUserS topic this month, “Rails Caching”, given by local member and creator of Baby Name Map, Guy Davis, will be addressing some of the problems that arise, when your web application is “discovered”. Hope to see you there. November 20, 6 pm, at the Calgary Central Library.

An excellent posting, countering some of the FUD spreading out there in Mac/Java developer land.

The Fishbowl: Java on Apple is dooooooomed

This puts Apple behind Sun (duh), on a par with IBM, slightly ahead of the remainder of Unix-land and, it’s worth mentioning in passing, light-years ahead of Microsoft and the Linux vendors who don’t even maintain their own JDKs any more (hands up if you remember waiting for the Linux Java ports from blackdown.org).

David Rupp’s Blog: The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You’ll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)

The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You’ll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)

I do have a problem with this post, though. The Rails framework is being misrepresented as the Ruby language… ;-)

Editor’s Daily Blog: Out Of My Hands

What was once two racks of Java books at my nearby Barnes & Noble is now half a rack, not as a result of Java fading relative to other languages, but as a result of the entire programming section shrinking.

My husband and I have pretty much abandoned the local bookstore (an Indigo, since they closed the Chapters) because their tech-book section has been sucking more and more. We put in down to the evils of monopolies (Indigo bought out Chapters in a hostile takeover). But this snippet seems to indicate it is an industry-wide, not-just-Canadian issue…

Rats.  It was more fun to blame Indigo.

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails – O’Reilly Ruby

Back in January 2005, I announced on the O’Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch.

Frankly, the idea of taking something that works, however ugly, and rewriting the whole thing in another language is ludicrous. Who came up with the business case for that?!? Fire them! No business case? Then fire the guy who proceeded with the project without one!

People get excited about new technologies, and then go and make some very strange decisions.  Rails has it’s advantages.  But you should have a solid business case for any project, Rails or not.  Rails is not a magic wand to wave, that solves every problem for you.  You still need to use your brain.  And your business sense… if you have any.

My build failed today, after I added some new code to find the min and max value from inside a Hash.  My hash was keeping track of x,y pairs, and I needed to find the min and max of the x’s.

min = data_series.min {|a,b| a[1][0] <=> b[1][0] } max = data_series.max {|a,b| a[1][0] <=> b[1][0] } Looks pretty simple. But sometimes, I had nil values for the x’s. At which point you get treated to the, not very descriptive, error message:

ArgumentError: comparison of Array with Array failed

I tried a few things like:

min = data_series.min {|a,b| a[1][0] <=> b[1][0] unless a[1][0].nil? or b[0][1].nil? }

But that didn’t work either. After some Googling, and reading some documentation for a completely different Enumerable method, the answer occurred to me. The block CAN’T return nil. It has to return one of the Comparable values of -1, 0, or 1. So:

min = data_series.min {|a,b| (a[1][0].nil? or b[1][0].nil?) ? 0 : a[1][0] < => b[1][0] }

And, finally, that worked. The lesson learned here is that the block versions of max and min MUST return -1, 0, or 1. Remember that next time, Lori.

Headius: Java Native Access + JRuby = True POSIX

but the result will be true POSIX functionality in JRuby…the “last mile” of compatibility will largely be solved.

I don’t normally just post links to other blog postings, but this is a very important milestone in the evolution of JRuby, and is very exciting.