Author: Paul Tomblin

My Oscar

Oscar
Well, not really mine. The division I work at just won their 9th Oscar, and to celebrate they sent it around to the division offices so everybody could get their picture taken with it. In spite of the fact that I had nothing to do with it, I sat down at the table. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to actually touch it or anything – the photographer and her assistants handled it with rubber gloves on so it wouldn’t need re-polishing.

I guess I should answer this

A few weeks ago I did one of those “guess the tune from the first line things. I guess it’s time to post the answers. Any ones that commented managed to figure out will show as strike-outs, and ones that nobody guessed are not. The answer follows in <em> tags (italics). This is where you all get mad at me because I’m not good at deciphering lyrics.

The rules, as quoted from Eminy’s LiveJournal:

You know the rules: 20 random consecutive songs from my library, first lines given here (or second lines if the first contains the title). You identify the song, and I’ll cross it out. Googling is cheating. N.B.: Items in square brackets are instrumental only, included here to preserve the consecutivity principle.

  1. I have to swear by Almighty God Guns On The Roof, The Clash – Rob G
  2. When we were young, we pledged allegiance Stones In The Road, Mary Chapin Carpenter
  3. All you pretty women, bring it to my home Bring It to Jerome, Bo Diddley
  4. [skipped one in Bulgarian]
  5. I’ve been [loved?], down in the delta How Long Blues, Odetta
  6. Her eyes they shone like diamonds Black Velvet Band/Galway Shawl, 4 To The Bar – Ayana C
  7. Dust falls on the empty halls of my old school Within A Mile Of Home, Flogging Molly
  8. Well, you could see it in his eyes as they strained against the night Canol Road, Stan Rogers
  9. Men and people will fight ya down (Tell me why!) Exodus, Bob Marley – Ian York
  10. [Bach keyboard concerto]
  11. [Red Shingle Bay, Many Hands]
  12. He started out to be a tugboat man, but he never got the hang of a ratchet bar Steamboat Whistle Blues, Bob Bossin
  13. [Something from Green Linnet]
  14. Many’s the day I took for granted, breathing the air that silenced some The Kilburn High Road, Flogging Molly
  15. Ships may come and ships may go, as long as the sea does roll Jolly Roving Tar, Great Big Sea – Becca
  16. Now come tell me Sean O’Farrell, tell me where you hurry so Rising of the Moon, Shane McGowan and the Popes – Ian York
  17. [Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus]
  18. High speed drift on a prairie road, hot tires sing like a string being bowed SteelSilver Wheels, Bruce Cockburn– Ian York
  19. Well I’ve got a friend who’s a man (who’s a man?) Hateful, The Clash – Rob G
  20. [Duologue, Rare Air]
  21. I was a miner, I was a docker Between The Wars, Billy Bragg – Becca
  22. [Marion Livingstone, Rare Air]
  23. There’s a noble fleet of whalers, a sailing from Dundee Old Polina, Great Big Sea – CMD
  24. In the merry month of June, when from my home I started The Rocky Road To Dublin, The Irish Descendants – Fnord Prefect
  25. [skipped first line]He had a little tavern by the strand Yarmouth Town, Great Big Sea – Laura
  26. [Infernal Dance of King Kashei, Stravinsky]
  27. [Water Music, Handel]
  28. [skipped first chorus]Said – said – said: I remember when we used to sit, In the government yard in Trenchtown No Woman, No Cry, Bob Marley – Ian York
  29. [Trumpet Concerto, Wynton Marsallis]
  30. [The Pigeon On the Gate, Casdh An tSugian]
  31. The island, it is silent now, but the ghosts still haunt the waves Thousands Are Sailing, The Pogues – Ian York

Another software developer who needs to be kicked in the balls

Whoever wrote the fucked up dependency checking in javac, and didn’t provide a way to turn it the fuck off.

I’m really sick and tired of having javac deciding that it needs to recompile something 3 directories ago in spite of the fact that both the jar file and the class file that it made about 3 seconds ago are in the CLASSPATH. This seems especially bad on directories that are NFS mounted, but if there is any clock skew between the NFS server and the NFS client, it’s less than a second and those source files haven’t been touched in weeks or months. It means that every time a low level class gets a new dependency, you have to modify the CLASSPATH in every fucking Makefile in the system because maybe, just maybe, javac will decide it needs to recompile that class for no apparent reason.

And don’t tell me “just switch to ant”. I have another rant building up against how ant and eclipse cause developers to forget everything they’ve ever known about partitioning of code and they start putting in calls to higher level stuff in low level code and causing circular dependencies.

Software Developers who need to be kicked in the balls

The following software developers need a good swift kick in the balls:

  • People who can’t let a boolean stand alone, and have to compare it to another boolean, as in "if (isOffline() == true)“. Why not be extra safe, and make that “if ((isOffline() == true) == true)“?
  • People who don’t realize that after you’ve modified a value in a Map, you don’t need to re-add it back to the Map to have it take effect. “get” returns a pointer to the original object, not a clone of it.
  • Eclipse (or maybe Visual Age) users who leave the code littered with comments that say “ * TODO To change the template for this generated file go to Window - Preferences - Java - Code Generation - Code and Comments" or Insert method description. Either configure the template, or turn off automatically generated comments.
  • Anybody who declares a method to throw “Exception”, and anybody who calls methods that have explicit lists of what they throw, but who surround it with a “catch (Throwable t)” block. I don’t care if all you’re going to do is print the stack trace and continue, there’s no excuse for that sort of laziness.
  • Anybody who changes huge swathes of somebody else’s code without asking the original developer if there is a better way. Especially if it’s code I wrote just a few weeks ago.
  • People who use ‘do {…} while(cond);” People who use “if (cond == true) do { … } while (cond == true);” need to be kicked repeatedly.
  • The entire staff of my company’s China office.