BangBits

I think it's only in order to congratulate the USA for what has happened. While oddly 47% of Americans still haven't noticed, the last 8 years of an illiterate republican doctrine "if you're not with us, you're against us" has hurt their country incredibly much. As evident right from the beginning to most of us, Bush will go over in history as the worst president of all time - only elected for his second term I suppose due to that fuzzy term called "American patriotism". The only sad part will be missing someone to laugh at when watching Letterman, The Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Ah for a while at least, we'll always have Gucci Palin. ;) Best of luck Obama, you sure have your work cut out for you! The future just got a lot brighter in the prospect of regaining an America so many of us used to admire once! With a new dawn near and a fresh breeze blowing from the west, let the healing begin.

NetBeans Pretty Much Unusable If you care about NetBeans and its performance, an interesting development occurred over the last 24h on the nbusers mailinglist. It seems the upcoming 6.5 release sparked a debate claiming that it's pretty much unusable . While I wouldn't go that far, there is actually some truth to the matter as experienced by my colleagues and I. A little bit of history I've been back and forth between various IDE's over the years, coming from Visual Studio (VB/C/C#) I've been rather spoiled in regard to syntax highlighting, code completion and debugging. In fact I remember back in 2001 how I was convinced into doing a college project in Java, primarily because of the assistance offered by Visual Studio J++. At that time, no tool provided these kind of features (although Forte and JBuilder tried). In this day and age, things looks quite different of course. SUN finally realized that it's worth having great tools (some would argue they have to sol...

Ok so its time to admit to something. I'm deeply in love with Java's Enum! In my opinion it was the best part of Java 5 and I still wonder why it took Sun 10 years to add this powerful static modeling construct. The power of the Enum Although there certainly are known limitations of the Enum, i.e. how you can't extend it , I have never run into a practical limitation myself. Until now that is. The issue I want to raise is that of Enum forward referencing . The great Alan Turing taught us that at the end of the day, everything can be modeled by a Turing Machine and finite automata. We may not often consciously operate at this level, but many things still makes sense to model this way being it a regular expression matcher, navigation rules or similar. The Java Enum appears to be a perfectly simple, fast and type-safe way of modeling this... or does it? State machine with an Enum Since the Java Enum effectively is just a group of static class instances, it allows us to attach...

Friday I was suppose to go to Montreal, the usual route over London Heathrow. Slightly concerned with the recent mishaps of the new Terminal 5, I actually managed to get to the good old Terminal 4 without much trouble. Little did I know, my trouble were just about to start. Canceled flight Yup, just 1 min. after entering Terminal 4 I learned that BA95 to Montreal was canceled. Inquiring at the help desk I experienced the deja-vu of being told that I had to go fetch my luggage, contact the ticket office and expect a layover. I had experienced another layover about 2 years ago so I pretty much knew what has coming... or so I though anyway. Heathrow, JFK or Newark My luggage was nowhere to be found, so I proceeded to the ticket counter and when it was my time to be served I was presented with the option og taking the same flight tomorrow, go to JFK in New York and a very short layover involving an early flight or go to Newark in New York and a longer layover involving a later flight. I t...