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  They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say! — Humpty Dumpty Hello, world! Today we're going to hear the story of Evil King Java and his quest for worldwide verb stamp-outage. 1 Caution : This story does not have a happy ending. It is neither a story for the faint of heart nor for the critical of mouth. If you're easily offended, or prone to being a disagreeable knave in blog comments, please stop reading now. Before we begin the story, let's get some conceptual gunk out of the way. The Garbage Overfloweth All Java people love "use cases", so let's begin with a use case: namely, taking out the garbage. As in, "Johnny, take out that garbage! It's overflowing!" If you're a normal, everyday, garden-variety, English-speaking person, and you're asked to describe t

Sometimes people ask me how I find time to go learn new stuff. Here's the answer: you make time. Nobody ever likes that kind of answer, but we all know it's the real one. My brother Dave put on some pretty serious weight after he graduated from high school. He'd gone from playing varsity football to working two jobs and going to college full time. It didn't help that one of his jobs was pizza delivery, and the other was waiting tables. Soon he was a fat, fat kid. Went from a buck-eighty to a deuce and a half, at least, maybe a deuce sixty. One day he saw a truck with a bumper sticker on it that said: "Lose weight now, ask me how!" So he pulled up next to the truck at the next stoplight, and said to the two cowboy-types in it: "How do I lose weight?" They yelled back: "Just lose weight, ya fat pig! Haw haw haw HAW HAW HAW HAW!" and then drove off. Dave was sad about this advice for a brief while, but eventually he brightened up, bec

Warning: the title of this blog entry is very slightly misleading. It really ought to be called "The Partial (At Best) and In Any Case Utterly Biased So-Called 'Truth' About Certain Restricted Kinds of Technical Interviewing By a Complete Bigoted Snobby Jerk Who Doesn't Know What He's Talking About Becuz PHP r00lZ And You Don't Need To Know Anything Else!!!!" However, that was a wee bit too long, so I shortened it. But consider yourself warned. (And yes, I like the longer title better too!) Anyhoo... An anonymous coward commented on one of my blogs: In regards to the interview chronicles regarding how someone was aweful or saved themselves during job interviews, I'd have to say you're a bit of snob aren't you? Granted the people you plan to hire will be paid substantial amounts of money to do good solid work, I think you're the kind of interviewer who tends to mold the people who work under him into little clones of him. "You must k

I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann . I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it. Conventional Wisdom Doesn't Add Up First: programmers don't think they need to know math. I hear that so often; I hardly know anyone who disagrees. Even programmers who were math majors tell me they don't really use math all that much! They say it's better to know about design patterns, object-oriented methodologies, software tools, interface design, stuff like that. And you know what? They're absolutely right. You can be a good, solid, professional programmer without knowing much math. But hey, you don't really need to know how to program, either. Let's face it: there are a lot of professional programmers out there who realize they're not very good at

I hate blogs. It's not that I hate them, really; I just don't like the "diary" format. It doesn't suit my needs very well. However, I have this day job, you know, just like you probably do. And that takes up most of my time. If there's any time left, I'd like to spend some amount of it actually blogging, as opposed to dicking around endlessly with software and configuration just to enable me to blog the way I want to. If I'm going to dick around with coding stuff, I'd rather do something other than that. But I hate blogs. The format's not right. Chronological ordering of my posts just plain sucks. It forces you to dig around through monthly archives, wondering if there's anything good in all the crap I spew out. What I want is closer to my own personal Reddit, or Digg, or something like that (but not quite like them, either). I don't want you to come to my site and see what I've posted most recently. RSS can take care of t