Category: Revelation

Below the cut is a highly illegal picture of my 17″ Powerbook G4 (1440×900 screen resolution) at work, connected up to my 24″ SGI/Sony GDM-90W11 CRT monitor (1600×1200 screen resolution), with the big screen being used for Eclipse, and the small screen showing my web browser open to Sun’s Java API documents, as well as a couple of convenient Terminal windows including one dedicated to pgsql.

The Safetype keyboard and mouse are also plugged into the Powerbook. All I really need now to make my work environment complete is a KVM so I can actually switch over to Linux and check my Lotus Notes and build in the dynamic vob.

So this is what I do now – I bring my laptop into work, hook it into the corporate network, and rsync my laptop’s /vob to my snapshot view on the Linux box. I run clearviewupdate on the snapshot view to get everything I’ve changed overnight checked into the vob, and then rsync it back so that everything that got checked in gets turned back to read-only. At that point, I’m good to go and I can plug the keyboard, video and mouse into the laptop and work. When I’m ready to leave at night, I unplug the laptop from the monitor and put the keyboard and mouse back on the Linux box, and run the same procedure all over again.

I also have a dynamic view of the same development stream, so I can build the bits of code that are actually working. (I can’t build in the snapshot view because you can’t make a snapshot view anchored at /vob, and far too many Makefiles have hard coded full paths instead of relative paths).

It’s all pretty sweet so far.

Continue reading “You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much screen real-estate”

I just finished reading How To Recognize A Good Programmer, and kept thinking “hey, that’s me” for every point. So why did my last two job interviews not go so well? I’m a good programmer, I know I’m damn good actually, and according to this, everybody else should think I am too.

Oh well, I’ve got 6 months left on this contract. Maybe I should get some paper qualifications to impress the people who aren’t smart enough to read that article.

For this current project I’m on, I’ve resolved to give Eclipse a try. This is a major step for me, because my fingers have been typing vi commands for 20 years now, and it’s really hard to get out of the habit of typing “[escape]jjjjj” or “ZZ”. Everybody else here laughs at me because besides etags and the syntax colouring of gvim, I don’t have all the fancy stuff that they have. On the other hand, I can do everything through a ssh connection and can keep my hands on the home row.

Oh well. Welcome to the 21st century. Here’s your kazoo.

I’ve been doing Java since 1998, and yet I only just discovered this interesting fact. If you have a class called, say, DBAsset that has a bunch of static methods in it, and you have some static member variables, and you initialize the static member variables, like so:

class DBAsset
{
static PreparedStatement insertStmt = null;
static PreparedStatement deleteStmt = null;


Then calling multiple static methods from within DBAsset’s static main using just the unadorned method name doesn’t do anything to those variables, but each time you call one of those static methods from some other class using DBAsset.methodname, those static variables get reinitialized to null. Huh.

Update: Figured it out. The code that initialized the variables was getting called *before* the code that set it to null, because I had a static DBAsset theAsset = new DBAsset(); before the static initializers. I’m such a slaphead.