Sun

What is Sun up to now? All I wanted to do was download the JDK for 1.4.2, instead I get the option of downloading J2EE with the JDK or a co-bundle of Netbeans and the JDK. I don't want Netbeans and I don't want J2EE. I just wanted the JDK.

I was using Eclipse today. I had to parse out a messy Excel Spreadsheet and reorder it into something useful to go into a database. I used POI to do the parsing of the spreadsheet. Since it was a small task I decided to do in Eclipse which I have never really used. I do most development in Emacs and Bash/Cygwin but thought it might be easier to do run the small program from within the IDE.

Eclipse seemed ok. I did it on a 19inch monitor, I would hate to have to use it on my 1024x768 laptop screen though. Emacs is far better for small screens. I also got stuck in the debugging screen until I worked out that "perspectives" was how to change from debugging to development again. Eclipse didn't really get in my way, it seemed quite usable. I can understand why people like it. One the major differences I found was that since I use jdee for emacs, the eclipse source code beautifier wasn't as colourful as I was used to.

Office Outlook

I changed my location in the Virginia office this week. Previously I had a separate office to down one of the hallways. Now I am in a cube. One might think in corporate culture this is a demotion except the space if 5x5 metres and two of the walls are hip to roof windows. I am currently basking in natural light rather than the mushroom shed of an office I used to work in.

Myself and another fellow moved ourselves forward in the office (He wanted a place to put his XM radio where it could get a signal). We rearranged a couple of dormant cubes to get the outlay we wanted. One aspect of this is just how much office crap, paper, stationary and garbage can be crammed into one tiny cube space. I recall when the attacks on the trade center occurred how much paper was falling from the sky. This is why, if there were 80,000 people in those buildings then there were 80,000 cubes and offices with 200 pounds of paper crammed into them.

After going through the documents and paper garbage in those cubes, only about 0.05% of it was worth keeping and only because it had something to with a contract. The rest of it went into the garbage. I think Sun's idea of roaming office space is a good idea as it keeps down this proliferation of meaningless, obsolete and obsessive paper hoarding. Considering the cost of the cube and office furniture, having an open floor-plan with access to natural light and separate area's for conference calls would be ideal.

There is one caveat though, there should be group firing capability for the loud assholes that listen to their voice-mail on speaker-phone. In an open floor-plan there should be the capability to vote someone of the island anonymously, or at the least send them to the "cone of silence". That would be cool make them sit in a bubble in the middle of the room as penance. The bubble should have "loud asshole" written across it in big red letters.

Underworld

What an awesome film! Will have to buy that one on DVD. For a comic book movie the plot had a lot of depth and twists. The information came at a good pace such that it made the battle/action scenes largely irrelevant. It was such a strong plot driven movie that they could have cut the two gratuitous battle scenes at the end. It was pretty Matrix like in parts, especially some of the metallic sounds. The all black leather styles also paid homage to the Matrix style. It is the Matrix for vampires, except done a million times better and with an actual plot.

I liked the twist about Lucien and how the Lycanthropes were originally the slaves or daylight watchers for the vampires. When the war between the species was reshaped as Viktor's vendetta about keeping the bloodlines pure, the vampires went from being the victims of Lycan animal brutality to the aggressors. Especially as Lucien was punished for marrying a vampire (and Viktors daughter).

The movie also left the possibility for a sequel with Markos(sp?) having blood dripped on him in the last scene of the movie. I am looking forward to it. It also seemed from all the accents in the film that it was a British film.

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