I was hanging around at work late, doing a few practical checks on the effects of different isolation levels on overlapping entity bean accesses under Websphere. Oh, the exciting things I get up to in my day-job! →

I don't test private methods. Being able to quickly create, move around, and change the functionality of private methods is vital to remaining agile while developing. →

(No excerpt) →

PortableRemoteObject.narrow() was the first step in my steady, and now complete disillusionment in Enterprise JavaBeans. The first time I saw it, even though I was a relative newcomer to OO modeling at the time, something clicked in my head, something said to me this is so very, very wrong. →

I've written about this before. So has Mark Pilgrim, and he's got a much bigger audience than me. If you are writing a news aggregator, web robot, blog indexing tool, whatever, you MUST NOT advertise your product's website in the Referer header. If you do, your product does not comply with the HTTP standard. More importantly, you're being incredibly annoying. →

As I was paying for my copy of NetNewsWire, it occurred to me that I've bought quite a lot of Mac software in the last year and a half. Especially when compared with... well... the nothing I bought for Windows in ten years. →

I've been meaning to write an article about why I'm discouraged from using Prevayler by the over-blown and annoying hype of its supporters, but Alan has beaten me to it. →

The JSR-666 expert group has noted that since Java source is essentially Unicode, there are thousands of potential operators going begging, simply because they don't appear on regular keyboards. This minor inconvenience should not deter us from improving the language, so we are proposing the following additions: →

Another picture of my view, this time at night. →

Exception catch-blocks that took multiple exception types would be incredibly simple to implement in the compiler, would require no VM changes, and would tidy up a lot of source code. How about it, Sun. With a bit of a push, you could get this into 1.5 easily →

It's absolutely insane that there's no way in HTML to associate a caption with an image. The closest you can get is putting the image in a table, and then giving the table a caption, which is Just Wrong. And of course, because the standards bodies are going off into the ether with XHTML2, this'll never get fixed for the mainstream web. →

You find the strangest things in old piles of paper. I've been preparing to move to the new apartment, and this time I'm trying to minimise the amount of stuff I have to transfer across the Harbour Bridge, and that involves going through my old piles of paper, some of which have lain undisturbed for up to six years. →

Most Wednesday nights, you can find me at the Menzies hotel opposite Wynyard station, playing in the pool competition. I first went four years ago, and I've been a regular ever since moving to Sydney, three years ago. If you're in Sydney, pop down some day and say hi. I'll buy you a beer. →

Charles' wacky left-field idea of the day. Incorporate an optional grid-computing client into Everquest. →

February was the first time my weblog's exceeded 100,000 hits in a calendar month. And that's even if you ignore the two days where I got hit 11,000 times by the same bot. Go me. →

One of the tricky aspects of API design, especially when designing the base APIs for a programming language, is deciding what goes in, and what stays out. Some languages, such as Smalltalk, Objective-C, Ruby, Python, Perl, CLOS... Okay, a great many languages allow you to add behaviour to existing classes. Java doesn't. Which is why the humble Util is here to stay. →

I took the not-CD back to the store. I may very well download it from the Internet (where it is readily available, despite the copy-control) as an act of protest. →