23 Jan 2006
I blogged a month or so back about failing in an attempt to buy a La-Z boy recliner and a new television.
Well things changed a few weeks back with a fortunate call from the local La-Z dealer saying that they found a chair similar to what I was looking at earlier and I wouldn’t have to wait 12-odd weeks for delivery. The recliner did arrive with a punctured side panel but supposedly there’s a part on order and when it arrives a guy will be sent over to repair it.
I live in a pretty small apartment but whats a nice recliner without a decent tv to watch. 27″ crt just wasn’t doing it, so in order to rectify the situation I decided on a 42″ plasma. So far I’ve got no complaints, although I still haven’t had time to pickup an HDTV box. Standard definition isn’t terrible, but HD is just so much nicer.
In order to satisfy my buddy Glenn, I’ve uploaded a couple pictures to flickr.
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15 Jan 2006
Saw this on Slashdot originally, but the Washington Post is reporting that its taking Microsoft 25% longer (now ~135 days) to get critical patches out the door. This number falls to ~45 (from 71 days in 2003 and 55 days in 2004) when dealing with fully disclosed issues.
The company also seems to have done a better job convincing security researchers to give it time to develop a patch before going public with their vulnerability findings. In 2003, Microsoft learned of at least eight critical Windows vulnerabilities through full disclosure. Last year, this happened half as many times.
It looks like Microsoft is taking more time to verify and rigorously test the patches before they go out the door. When dealing with Security, QA is not something that should be neglected regardless of what the purported threat level may be. I don’t particularily have a problem with this and I’m sure that if the issue was deemed (by whom?) of critical enough importance that resources could be allocated to significantly reduce that 45 days. In fact we saw this happen earlier this year with MS patching a 0day exploit within 10 days.
Caveat of this post is that Windows is not actually my primary operating system. Sure I’ve got a Windows partition on my laptop but day to day, and much of the past decade, I’ve been a Linux user. Unfortunately, it’s going to take more than Security improvements to see me moving my development back to Windows.
12 Jan 2006
This has been written about by others but I’m going to comment on it as I did run into it tonight.
I’ll start by saying that I sit on the fence with regards to the use of autoboxing in java5. Normally I think it’s alright but I did run into a situation this evening where the transitivity properties of equality didn’t hold as I expected (well I expected them to behave as they did, but it did run slightly counter to the definition of transitivity depending on how the code was written).
Code:
<br />
public class Test {</p>
<p>public static void main(String[] args)<br />
{<br />
Long int1 = new Long(1);<br />
long int2 = new Long(1);<br />
Long int3 = new Long(1);</p>
<p> System.out.println(int1 == int2);<br />
System.out.println(int2 == int3);<br />
System.out.println(int1 == int3);<br />
}</p>
<p>}
Output:
<br />
true<br />
true<br />
false<br />
However, if we swap 1L in for ‘new Long(1)’, than transitivity holds and A == B && B == C && A == C.
Nothing more than food for thought.
It’s almost too easy to unconsciously make use of autoboxing so we should weigh the benefits of simplicity with the potential for some unexpected results.