Out of Cheese

All caught up now. I skipped a few blogs that either aren’t timely any more or would be extremely annoying to rewrite from the clipboard into HTML, but life will have to go on.

Someone on java-dev mentioned today that Sun has a set of coding conventions for Java. I’m rarely a fan of strict coding conventions, since in my experience it’s easier to write and maintain legible code than to change my thinking to conform to a style that feels and reads as if it’s unnatural. In this case, though, Sun’s guidelines are flexible, providing reasonable options for most situations, and where they’re strict they’re being sensible. I’m quite impressed.

The Java conventions are probably a big part of why I liked Java from the first time I used it. The common coding style seemed natural, so I didn’t feel like I was being forced to conform to it.

I didn’t realize how the Metadata hack at MacHack might have worked until I saw a pointer to The Active Extension Processor from Mac OS X Hints tonight. Interesting….

Back home and back to my blog. Unfortunately, my computer with Radio on it was asleep the entire time I was away, so I couldn’t post anything from Michigan. The quick summary: The conference was a lot of fun, my talk went well, and JNib, though it was booed as much as I expected, was intriguing to a number of people who I talked to after the Hack Show. And as with WWDC, meeting people in the Mac programming world is always enjoyable.

More later after some real work and catching up on sleep.

A few days back, Radio ate my last week of blogs — I had Radio’s main page open in OmniWeb, showing all of them, then flipped over Radio, and over to the actual blog, and they were missing. I reloaded the main page, and it didn’t have the blogs. I’m obviously rather annoyed about this. While I’ve traded email with UserLand support people, they haven’t seemed particularly concerned about the problem. I find that somewhat disconcerting. Crashes are one thing — and it’s disturbingly easy to get Radio to crash — but data loss is inexcusable.

I still have the main page open that last displayed the right blogs, so I’m going to restore some of those entries now. They had better not disappear again.

My outline’s mostly done for MacHack. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how fast I can write PowerPoint slides, and figuring out just how much time I’ll have to talk about JDirect. I’m beginning to wonder if I have enough time to finish my hack, though. We’ll see.

Bo Cowgill writes about Condoleeza Rice’s commencement speech at Stanford today, saying this: “Disappointing and unsubstantial. Plenty of ‘advice to the graduates,’ also known as forgettable cliches. I was hoping she would outline a new political stance or policy initiatives.”

As much as some might have wanted a policy speech, that’s not what graduates typically want to hear. It’s their day, after all, not the speaker’s, and the speaker should be talking to them rather than to the TV cameras. Tom Brokaw got that wrong when he gave Stanford’s commencement address four years ago, giving a speech about Monica Lewinsky that he could have given at any event, graduation or not. The speakers of the following three years — Robert Pinsky, Kofi Annan, and Carly Fiorina — all gave interesting talks that spoke directly to the graduates. I’m glad that Condi decided to do the same, and I’m inclined to think that most of the students who graduated from Stanford today would agree.

A side note on java-dev mentioned that IBM, SGI, and HP have licensed Java 3D. In fact, they all did so a few years ago. That’s quite interesting, since it makes it tougher for Apple to make its argument that it can’t ship Java 3D due to licensing issues. Presumably none of those three Java licensees paid much for their license, since Java 3D isn’t likely to bring much revenue to any of those platforms except perhaps IRIX. And maybe Sun has tougher licensing terms for Apple than for the others because Apple’s market is much larger. That’s not clear.

Of course, the entire idea of licensing Java API extensions is an awful precedent for the Java platform in the first place. That’s a topic worthy of a full rant, though, and one which I won’t write now. Suffice to say that if the precedent set by requiring a license for extensions is Apple’s reason for not licensing Java 3D, I have to support Apple’s decision.

It’s been a very busy week, and it’ll be a busy weekend as well leading up to MacHack. Here’s hoping I can come up with something interesting to talk about. My hack’s likely to be booed off the stage as being useful, though. That’s fine; it *is* useful. But it’s still a hack….

The June newsletter of the OED contains an article about J.R.R. Tolkien’s association with the OED and includes some pictures of Tolkien’s notes from his days as an OED editor. Looking at the notes, you can see exactly where Tengwar letters came from — they’re rather close to Tolkien’s handwriting. I can’t believe someone would write like that — it’s incredibly artistic.