Random Thinking

I am not really a TV person. I am probably the only person in America who has never seen an episode of Friends. But recently I started watching a series on USA Network called Touching Evil.

The show is based on a series from British TV (but then isn’t this true for all the best shows). The premise is that a detective, David Creegan, was shot in the head and has recovered from the wound but it has left him oddly changed from the brain injury. The catch phrase of the show is, what didn’t kill him, made him stranger.

The cases that he and his partner investigate aren’t particularly different than the cases you see on other shows but the entire approach of the show is unique and interesting. If you haven’t seen it, it is definitely worth checking out.

Today we are packing up all our accumulated stuff so that we can move to our new cubicles. Our new space is in a room affectionately called “the closet”. The room is a bit dark, has no windows, and gets hot in the summer. There are about 15 cubicles in there so it also tends to get a little noisy sometimes. But at least we will all be together instead of spread out across the floor. And the cubicles in the closet are a lot bigger than the ones we have now.

The worst part of moving is the packing and unpacking. Fortunately, I am not a pack rat so I don’t have too much to move. But the big question will be, will the phones and network connections be working Monday morning. I do have a wireless card so even if the network connections don’t work I can still access everything I need. In fact, since I have everything packed away including my docking station, I am working on my wireless card now.

Anyway, Monday morning I will be unpacking and getting set up in my new home. But I have a feeling we will be moving again. Our new director has hinted that she wants to get all of her staff (which is currently spread out across two buildings) into the same area. I guess I shouldn’t get too comfortable. With any luck we’ll move before the hottest part of the summer.

Even if you have never had the opportunity to work with regular expressions in any language, even if “regular expressions” means nothing to you, this book will make you an expert very quickly. The entire book is less than 250 pages and yet the book gives almost perfect coverage of the java.util.regex package.

The best part of this book is that it serves both as a tutorial for anyone who the topic is new to, and as a reference for anyone who is already familiar with regular expressions in Java. It is that rare tutorial that you can keep by your desk even after you mastered the material.

I should add a couple of statements. First, Max and I are both moderators at JavaRanch. Second, Max is an expert at martial arts and I am fairly certain that he could beat the hell out of me without having to break a sweat. But neither of those things affected my review. I have been kidding Max because it took so long to finish this book but it was well worth the wait. Great job, Max!

You can see the full official Amazon review here.

My daughter has finally found a sport that she likes. She had tried soccer, track, and softball and none of them held Beth’s interest. Schools around here start volleyball in the fifth grade with the fifth and sixth graders combined in one team that competes against other schools. Last year, when Beth was in the fifth grade her school had to cancel volleyball because they couldn’t get enough girls interested. Keep in mind that it only takes six girls to make a team!

This year the school had ten girls so they were able to form a team. The only problem is that on most of the teams that Beth’s team has been competing against at least half of the players are sixth graders who competed last year. This has put Beth’s team at a distinct disadvantage but they have still played hard in every match.

Last night was their seventh match. When we got to the school where the match was being held we found out that only six girls on Beth’s team were showing up so Beth and her five teammates would have to play the entire match without a substitution. The other team had twenty girls. I figured that the other school must take their volleyball very seriously and didn’t think Beth’s team had a chance.

The first game was hard fought and finished at 29-27 to the other team. Beth’s team never looked back. They won the next two games to take the match. This was the first match they had won. The girls were exhausted and excited. I overheard the other coach talking about Beth and her teammates. “What a plucky group of girls,” she said. That’s my daughter… plucky!

The Anthropic Principle is actually quite an interesting theory. The reason the Universe exists the way it does is because if it existed any other way then we couldn’t be here to ask why the Universe is the way it is. For example, if the gravitational constant was a bit stronger then stars would collapse into black holes before they could ignite. If the electromagnetic force was a little weaker then electrons would stream off from protons and atoms could never form. If the strong force was a little stronger then nuclear reactions would be impossible and stars would never light up.

There are, in fact, many possibilites associated with the Anthropic Principle. The first is that there are an infinite number of universes and we evolved in this one because this one happened to have the right combination of constants. Another, far more daring theory, is that the Universe needs a quantum observer in order to actually exist.

All this is in way of introduction to my review of the book, The Constants of Nature. This could have been a very good book as it discusses a lot of the ideas around the Anthropic Principle and associates it with the constants of nature, including the fine structure constant. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t do a convincing job nor does he go deep enough to make the book a very interesting read.

Some of the errors in the book are comical. For example, he states (although I am sure he doesn’t mean to) that solar eclipses are caused by the Earth’s shadow falling on the Sun. But others are more subtle. For example, he discards the quantum observer theory by claiming that any observer, even a photographic plate, would serve the role of an observer. However, a quantum physicist might tell you that until someone actually develops and views the plate that what is on the plate is still only a quantum probability.

The book isn’t all bad and parts are actually quite fascinating especially if the topic is unfamiliar but overall there must be better books out there that cover similar topics.

You can see the full review here.

When I was in college I was a physics major. I have always loved physics and for a while after college I tried to keep up with the new theories but I found myself concentrating on so many other things that I fell behind. Recently, I saw a Nova special on Superstrings and my interest in physics was re-ignited. I decided to pick up a couple of books to catch up on what is going on in the world of physics. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku is one of those books.

Kaku takes exceedingly complex topics and makes them understandable which is no mean feat. The book does tend to wander around a bit and there is a fair amount of topic drift but most of the drifts are worth reading. He does an “up close and personal” look at a few people in math and physics that aren’t household names and makes them interesting. Overall this is a good back that holds up in spite of being written ten years ago.

You can see the full review here.

I want to salute the programmers who have worked on open source projects. Looking at the accomplishments of the open source community I am amazed. I have been working on an open source project for JavaRanch and I have discovered how hard it is to be dedicated to an open source project. First, there are so many other things you can do with your spare time that it is very easy to develop a “I’ll do it tomorrow” attitude. Second, because people come and go, it is very easy to lose your focus as the development team changes around you. There is also a feeling of pessimism that can set in as you see a lot of people express interest and then never provide a line of code. Finally, there is a general sense that it’s not a big deal because if you don’t do it then maybe someone else will.

I can understand why so many open source projects die on the vine. The fact that we have so many successful open source projects testifies to the dedication of those programmers who have participated in them.

I have a fish tank. I have had the tank for a little over a year and what I have mostly done with the fish is kill them. I could never figure out why, though. I changed the water on a regular basis, kept the filter clean, cleaned the algae out of the tank, etc. I worked hard to make the tank a pristine environment for my fish and all I got was cloudy water and dead fish.

So I got lazy. The fish were dying all the time so I started to lose interest in them. I let the tank go. I stopped cleaning it as much, just giving the filter a rinse every once in awhile. I kept my eye on the pH but other than that I didn’t do much. I even cut way back on how much I fed the fish. And guess what? The fish thrived! I haven’t had a dead fish in months. The water has been crystal clean even though all the plants are covered in algae. What was going on?

I did some reading and I discovered that my cleanliness was killing all the good bacteria in the tank that break down the bad poisons that the fish produce. In other words, my poor fish were swimming in a sewer of their own excrement and I was killing the organisms that could break down that excrement into harmless materials. Combined with overfeeding I was creating the worst possible environment for my poor fish. My recent laziness has allowed the good bacteria to take hold and keep the tank spotless.

I’m a big Dave Barry fan. I read his column religiously. Without Dave Barry we would never have known that there was a Talk Like a Pirate Day and then imagine how less interesting our lives would be every September 19th. Dave’s column on Saturday talked about the phenomenon of over cleaning. He wrote about some research by a scientist named Chuck Gerba (no, really, the guy is a scientist at the University of Arizona). [Side note: Prof. Gerba is famous for his bathroom research.] Prof. Gerba discovered that the kitchens that looked the cleanest were actually the dirtiest. The cleanest kitchens were those of bachelors! How could this be, you ask? Simple, the act of cleaning is a failure at killing bacteria so all those clean people are doing is smearing bacteria all over their kitchens. Those who don’t clean leave the bacteria where it is, mostly in the pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

So here we have proof postive in two cases that cleaning is a generally bad idea. So the next time your wife or girlfriend complains about the mess, just tell her you are protecting her from bacteria.

I just received the new issue of JDJ in the mail and the article that almost immediately caught my attention was JSF: The Ulitmate in Flexibility? Or Complexity by Steve Benfield. Benfield’s article expressed my own frustration with J2EE. The basic question is, why is J2EE so complex? Starting with JSP and Sun’s apparent desire to create a Java technology just like Microsoft’s ASP, J2EE has gone in the direction of creating such an incredible amount of flexibility that even doing the simplest things becomes difficult. At some point someone needs to shout that the Emperor has no clothes. JSF reminds me more of ASP.NET than it does anthing I want to work with. Why can’t someone at Sun concentrate on what real developers doing real applications really need? Why can’t we have a way to create web applications that is clean and simple? Why is that we need to look outside of J2EE to frameworks like Struts and Velocity to find even a hint of simplification?

Every week at JavaRanch we have a book promotion where an author visits us, answers questions, and at the end of the week we give away four copies of the author’s book. The book promotions are very popular as they provide two great opportunities:

1. You get to ask an author a lot of questions
2. You might win a free book

The books are provided to us by the publishers so since I run the book promotions I get to work with the promoters from many of the publishers. They work hard to promote the technical books that their companies publish. In spite of the enourmous pressure they must be under during these tough times for IT books they are universally very nice people and are an absolute pleasure to work with. I deal with Kerry Guiliano at Addison-Wesley the most so I want to give her a special thanks but all of the people on this list make my job at JavaRanch easy and I want to thank all of them. I apologize to anyone I may have left off.

A very special thanks to:

• Kerry Guiliano - Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Heather Fox - Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Heather Mullane - Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Ann Sellers - Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Bettina Faltermeier - McGraw-Hill
• Helen Trimes - Manning
• Eric Holmgren - Wiley/Wrox
• Judy Taylor - Murach
• Ruth Boyer - O’Reilly
• Hollie Fischer - APress
• Doris Wong - APress

And even though she isn’t a publicist, I would also like to thank Merrikay Lee, the president of MC Press for being a strong supporter of our book promotions.