Hmm. It certainly does seem like the C# folks are getting all the cool stuff this Christmas :)
Two (four?) words: closures and lambda functions.
Oh puh-leeze... I just picked up an article talking about Eliyahu Goldratt having lectured in Finland at the Helsinki University of Technology about the Theory of Constraints.
First of all, I'm so pissed that I missed the event and only heard about it afterwards. Second, I'm pissed that they've made a pathetic attempt at translating TOC into Finnish. I mean really pathetic. Really pathetic.
Kapeikkoajattelu. I mean wtf is that? Sure you can reason your way from the meaning of Theory of Constraints to this word, but come on... Thank god I don't live in Germany. Then I would have to live with all the dubbed TV shows as well.
On the other hand, I haven't had a TV for some two months now and I'm perfectly fine without it so maybe Germany wouldn't be that bad. At least there would be some quite fun people to hang around with ;)
I just noticed that they've released Eclipse 3.1 M4. Here's a summary of the new features I consider worth polluting the web space for:
- Project-specific code style settings -- no need to worry about remembering to import the code style after upgrading your IDE
- Rerun failed tests first -- I've been waiting for this one for a long time!
- CVS commit review -- too bad I'm not using CVS...
- Eclipse startup -- not that important for me, personally, but I love having the option to launch Eclipse bypassing the native launcher
(yes, I know there's a whole bunch of J2SE 5.0 support -- it's just that I'm probably not going to use Tiger in anger until 2006 or so...)
Clarke Ching has found a lowered standards job ad. Well, at least they haven't listed UML as a methodology like so many others...
I'm actually currently listening to Kent Beck's recent talk on developer testing, accountability and the health of software at ITconversations.com.
Dion is right on the money on the limitations of servlet mappings. I've been wondering about this for a couple of years already although my number one wishlist item regarding servlet mappings has been support for search engine-friendly URL's a la Amazon.com. (although the importance of such a feature has probably been decreasing all the time...)
It's also nice to see Groovy progressing. I haven't really used Groovy beyond a hello world, but I sure like seeing the Java community push the envelope one way or the other.
I wonder when the XInclude support of J2SE 5.0 reaches Ant ant the like. Ok, so we've got the import element since Ant 1.6, but I still wouldn't mind a standards-based alternative.
It seems that JPOX is going to be the reference implementation for JDO 2.0. Nice.
Oh, and three spamming companies were ordered to pay $1 billion to a small ISP operating in Iowa. Ok. I get the big number and all but why a small ISP operating in Iowa? Why not me?
Yes, that's right. Well, almost. Or not at all. Depending on how you define "on the beach"...
I don't have a project until early January so I've got some two weeks of holiday before the trip to Riga! I do have a couple of days of internal workshop stuff at the office after Christmas and I have a couple of days worth of self-learning budget to spend, and I'm taking the remaining working days as holiday, but for me -- someone who has never really been on the beach during my almost 3 years at Accenture -- this is probably as close to being on the beach as it will get.
So, what am I going to do with my holiday? Probably stress my ass off because of all the Christmas shopping I've still haven't done... Heck, I haven't even started yet!