Another article in the long, ongoing debate (30 years? 
about static and dynamic typing. Oliver Steele’s Test versus Type is probably the most accessible and believable of the arguments I’ve seen. One variable that he does not account for is that IDEs are able to provide you with more hints and assistance in statically typed languages.
I’ve come around to the point now where I think that static typing is actually not a bad thing. One major difference is that the folks creating dynamically typed languages are actively trying to make the programmer’s job easier. Despite being statically-typed, Java could compete favorably with Python and others if the language itself had some more features that are built in elsewhere.
Software Development
Here is a translation of a short article about a translator for a baby’s cries.
Parenting
Found via jblog, the Performance Optimization for Java tips used in Java ACS. Update: Even more useful is this rebuttal which includes a link to a presentation given by one of the HotSpot creators. If you really want to know what’s going on with performance, listening to a HotSpot person seems like a good place to go.
Software Development
Raymond Hettinger has written a How-To Guide for Descriptors which is a very good intro to the topic. I thought Python’s new staticmethod and property syntaxes were rather odd compared to Java’s way of doing it, but reading about the general purpose Descriptor mechanism makes it clearer. Looks like a very useful language feature indeed.
Software Development
Ever since the BSA raided made an example of Ernie Ball (the guitar string maker), they’ve gone Microsoft-free. Sterling Ball, the CEO, says that they’re a real-life example of a company successfully using open source and that analyst estimates of the cost are too high:
What support? I’m not making calls to Red Hat; I don’t need to. I think that’s propaganda…What about the cost of dealing with a virus? We don’t have ‘em. How about when we do have a problem, you don’t have to send some guy to a corner of the building to find out what’s going on–he never leaves his desk, because everything’s server-based. There’s no doubt that what I’m doing is cheaper to operate. The analyst guys can say whatever they want.
Organizations that don’t treat their customers with respect or provide quality product at a fair price will always lose out in the end.
Technology
Blogs take on many shapes: diaries, photo journals, lists of links that act as as massive, time-ordered bookmark list. Blogstakes has come up with a neat way to get people to put advertising right in with their blog links. By creating links to contests like the The Clip-n-Seal Fresh Party Pack and Free BrowserCam for a Year, bloggers may bring a fair amount of traffic to the sponsors. Blogdex listed Blogstakes and the two contests today (3 of the top 40 links). Cool idea, and the site seems to be working dandy. Congrats on a good launch!
Random
The Black Sun Eclipse Plugins include some nice additions like regex searching and a method view that shows all of the methods for the class you’re looking at (including its super classes).
Software Development
Erik Thauvin in the JDJ newsletter talked about Java software repositories and linked to Open Snippets :: GPLed Source Snippets, Served Daily. Open Snippets looks pretty cool and supports several languages. Beware, though: the default license for the code is the GPL. As mentioned, you can write to the author to ask for a different license, but it’s still a shame that something like a “snippet” would be traded under the GPL.
Software Development
PowerFrontiers - Power and Energy News covers a variety of energy topics. I’m still waiting for the day that we get affordable solar power systems.
Technology
I’m in Ann Arbor, so we were hit by the massive power outage. We’ve got friends that are outside of the city that weren’t hit, because they get their power from smaller power companies. I was at work when the power went out. I left work in time to catch the 4:38PM bus, but Main Street was gridlocked. I got out of the bus around 4:45 and walked home (probably 5 miles). There was a grocery store open along the way, so I got a couple of bottles of cold water. Between the water and my umbrella blocking the sun, I did quite fine with the walk, and I’m sure I got home faster than the bus would have gotten me home.
Our power was out for 24 hours. The worst part of it was the heat. Without air conditioning or even fans, Thursday night was fairly miserable. Most important, though, was that Crysania was fine and didn’t get overheated.
During the night, phone service and cell phone service both died. That wasn’t so bad though, because we had running water throughout, and we’ve got a gas camping stove that we used to heat food and boil water.
The restoration of power was pretty impressive. 24 hours and millions of people were back online. I went to the grocery store this morning, and it looked like they had to throw out a lot of food, which is a real shame.
CNN has a ridiculous video in which a guy is talking about Iraqis’ lack of sympathy for Americans hit by the blackout. Why do they even ask questions like that? Of course the Iraqis won’t care about that. In fact, in much of the developing world, power outages are a regular occurrence.
For the biggest blackout in US history, which Bush did could have (but did not) called “a matter of grave national inconvenience”, people seemed to handle things pretty well.
Random
