12 Mar 2005
So I’ve spent the majority of today travelling from Victoria BC to Washington DC for the Human Proteome Organization conference.
After 2 days of exhibiting I’m off to Cambridge, Boston to visit a customer. Anyone have suggestions on what I should do in Cambridge/Boston?
The travelling was actually not as bad as I expected. Seatac was rather efficient and I didn’t even have time to make it worthwhile getting wireless net a
ccess. I did sign up for T Mobile wireless access in the Hyatt I’m staying at and it seems to be working alright.
Regan International on the other hand looks like one big mess (IMHO). It’ll be an interesting experience when I go to leave for Boston on Tuesday.
Anyways, I’m sitting in a Hyatt near regan interational. It’s saturday night and there is absolutely nothing to do in “Crystal City”. Talked to the fron
t desk, no go. I imagine (and I’m hoping) that Cambridge, being a college town and all, will be a little bit more exciting.
I pre-loaded my zen micro with all kinds of podcasts to listen to on the flight over. Turns out we had a 100mph tailwind and we got here almost an hour ea
rlier so I couldn’t fit everything in. I flew Alaska and rented one of their $10 personal dvd players. I’d recommend it to anyone, ended up watching Wal
l Street and half of the incredibles. I’ll rent it again on the way home and watch the rest of the incredibles and maybe something else.
Trade show doesn’t start until Monday but we have to setup our display booth tomorrow and attend the opening schmooze. I don’t know how I got manipulated
into doing this trade show appearance but I had to go to Boston anyways so it was convienent I guess.
27 Feb 2005
Although I’ve been an IBM PC owner/user since the age of 3, I can respect what Jef Raskin, a human computer interaction expert amongst other things, did f
or the industry through his invovlement in the development of what was to become the Mac.
Jef Raskin was the 31st employee of Apple and passed away today of cancer at the age of 61. No one should argue the impacts that the early Mac had on real
ly driving and improving human computer interaction.
From abcnews:
*While best known in the computer industry, Raskin also pursued other interests. He conducted the San Francisco Chamber Opera Society and played three i
nstruments. His artwork was displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also received a patent for airplane wing construction.
He was an accomplished archer, target shooter and occasional race car driver, friends said.
“He believed in having fun, too,” Burstein said. “The people who worked with him at Apple talk about how important were the toys and the games and the sens
e of joy that he demanded.”
news.com
The Register
26 Feb 2005
There was a post here that advocates using the ReflectiveToStringBuilder from commons-lang t
o generate your toString()’s.
I must admit that I too have thought about doing this. In particular after looking at the common-lang usage in some Matt Raible’s code. It’s a neat idea
but I think its practicality is determined by the architecture and environment you’re working in. I first attempted to use it in my hibernate-backed appli
cation as a way to get debug information out of the value objects. Potential problem #1, executing a reflective toString() on an object with lazily loaded
collections, you could possibly recursively load a lot more data than you anticipated and even create an infinite loop depending on how your data model is
mapped. Couple this with the lack of tweakability and possibility of security-related exceptions make this a practice I wouldn’t encourage.
Rumour has it IDEA has a toString() generator that you can tweak, I should look for something equivalent in an Eclipse plug-in.