Category: thoughts
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Teenage Knife Crime in London
An unfortunately pessimistic, yet topical, post this time. You only have to walk past the news stands any given day to see the topic of the month. Knife crime is increasing, with the victims typically being teenagers. What were a couple of isolated incidents now appear to be accelerating into a sustained trend. Anyone who has read…
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The Long Tail of Java Tools
I went to an awesome session yesterday evening that did a rapid fire listing of small tools that you should know about if you are working with Java. The breakdown is on the Dublin JUG site.
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Dynamic Language Smackdown
I just came out of a session comparing scripting (but probably better described as dynamic) languages. Groovy, Ruby, Python and Scala went head to head in three rounds; desktop app, web app and freestyle. Whatever language you follow, the possibilities for use are awesome with excellent features in each language ecosystem. While each compile down…
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Keynote Trends
Keynote was great. These things are really about getting excitement about the technology going, and it certainly succeeded. The big news really is JavaFX at the moment. The runtime will start to be distributed via the Java 6 Update 10 (J6u10 from here) formerly spoken of as the consumer JRE. Having given Flex a good…
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Twittering JavaOne
If anyone’s interested, you can follow my exploits on via Twitter on jakekorab.
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Heard on United 955 to SFO
Pilot: “Passengers on the left hand side of the plane, if you take a look out the window you will see a great view of the Golden Gate bridge and the Bay Area. Passengers on the right hand side of the plane, thank you for flying with United Airlines.”
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Slapped in a Dark Tunnel at an Interview
The interview cycle is in full swing. I came across a post on Contractor UK about tricky questions posed by interviewers, which I think are just jaw-dropping. Someone needs to have a reality check and stop taking themselves so seriously. I have nothing against difficult, even impossible, questions in an interview situations. Most of the…
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On the crapness of classical philosophy
Paul Graham has written an interesting essay where he proposes that classical philosophy has failed in its purpose because of its approach. Rather than playing mental word games hoping to come to general truths, a la Aristotle, we should start with small truths and and make them more general. Best of all anyone can do…