Neal Stephenson interviewed at /. I'm reading through The System of The World, after having finished the first two books in the Baroque Cycle from Neal Stephenson. Here's an interview with him on Slashdot. Makes for interesting reading.

Relevant bits of info:

• Neal likes Mac OS/X
  
• Neal presents an interesting line of discussion about whether hacking tools should be covered by the 2nd amendment (he suggests that that's a bad line of reasoning, the first amendment is your friend here)
  
• Don't be in a room that's also occupied by Neal, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson.

Go read it.  ¶ 11:22 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  GLUE 5.0.1 memory leak, and YourKit java profiler I'm doing a project that involves a web services layer using WebMethods GLUE 5.0.1. We're using GLUE basically as an RMI replacement, since we've got to go through a firewall. The client side is a long-lived java process, and we're finding that it eventually runs out of memory. Finding leaks in java code is a pain in the ***, but I came across a nifty tool called YourKit that helps.

It tracks object allocations in your code. You can periodically take snapshots of the heap, and then compare the snapshots over time. It indicates how many instances have been created (and how much memory is used) of each class that exists in the heap. It also reports how many instances (and how many bytes) have been GCed for each class in the heap. Lastly, for a given instance, you can track the chain of references back to the GC root objects, which is really really nice for tracking down leaks.

The only thing wrong with it is that doesn't currently support the Mac OS/X java runtime. ARRRGH! They indicate that although they're using hooks that are supposed to be a standard part of the JVM, they bring down the OS/X java environment hard. They're hoping that things get better with the 1.5 JDK on Mac OS, but that doesn't help me much today.

Nevertheless, on Windows and Linux, and (in beta) on solaris, it rocks. Highly recommended.

Oh - and the leak in GLUE?

It looks so far that when you call Registry.bind(someUrl, someClass), and then invoke a method on the reference that returns a java.util.List, some part of the WSDL schema gets cached forever and is never cleaned up. This appears to be a known bug, and appears to be fixed in GLUE 5.0.2. I'm testing the maintenance release now...  ¶ 1:09 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Fun as a contractor Why can't all of my customers be like this? I sent off an an email asking about whether a particular customer might be able to finish up their acceptance testing by the end of the year, since there's a payment contingent on acceptance and I'd like that to be part of my 2004 taxable income, and they said:


I'm positive we can get that to you this year.
...
And a final note. We want to keep you happy. I'm hoping our working relationship won't end with this payment.


Gotta like that. They're the customer here, and they want to keep me happy? I hope they find lots of work that they want me to do!
  ¶ 1:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  VB.NET funny "According to Microsoft's Paul Vick, Refactoring support in VB.net will
differ from that in C#. Terminology and structure of available features
will be simplified to cater for the less rigorous intellect of the VB
developer.

I cannot confirm that this image is legitimate. But it is reputedly the
first screen shot of the context menu available to VB programmers in
the Whidbey IDE. (see link for the image)."
  ¶ 11:47 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Thought-provoking article about the future of the music biz As someone who owns an iPod, as someone who's played music professionally (hey - ten bucks is ten bucks!), and as someone who's saddened by the state of copyright law, this was an interesting read.


  ¶ 10:29 PM 0 Comments Links to this post