Why then no blog entry from yours truly ? Umm, I've been busy! You know, working on a seamless transition, ensuring IBM continues to deliver the best performing, highest quality, Java runtimes on the planet :)
As Mark just announced we are working on the OpenJDK community bylaws - a draft soon to be posted. The goal is to create an environment that enables an open vibrant OpenJDK community. It's a project IBM is joining so we spent time understanding how the project works today and tried to build on the existing model. Any changes were evaluated in the spirit of ensuring an open, transparent, and meritocratic project that can be run in a lightweight and efficient manner. We want to be inclusive and hope contributors feel comfortable joining the project.
In terms of OpenJDK, IBM will be bringing much to the table. Years of deep experience in Java runtimes, and we support a wide range of HW platforms, so we'll be taking our skills and work on earning our commit rights so we can get to it directly in the OpenJDK codebase. I expect our joint efforts will strengthen the Java community, accelerate innovation in the overall Java ecosystem as well as give a boost to the floundering blogging community currently suffering from a lack of things to write about :)
In OpenJDK, if we do it right, we'll see innovation from more than just the big players, and that will make the overall ecosystem richer. In the end, it will be our customers who benefit, from innovation, and a multi-vendor platform they can build their business on.
That said, while we will cooperate on the platform, we're still going to compete like mad on the implementations (delivering performance leadership :)), and if you haven't noticed, we're also gonna have some fun trash talking too.
"Give it a shot. It might work." Made me laugh. An optimistic caveat delivered by CTV when browsed via Chrome (turns out it does work). Of course, they don't actually give you the opportunity to not "give it a shot" as the modal dialog prevents all other choices.
So, I mock it a little, but personally I think it's better than many of the checks we see for browser compatibility. Some web sites, are very specific and annoyingly refuse if the browser is not exactly the one they tested with. So, good on ya, you optimistic Silverlight developers ! but next time you can try out our long running VM team phrasing - "totally bogus, never been tested, should work" as a positive alternative.
You take your most precious things, and you put em on some cheap slippery plastic and hurl them down snow covered hills until they scream with joy (and then beg you do it again and again). You only stop after two face plants, one noggin with ice chunk collision and a busted sled from a near miss between a 200 lb man and a 5 year old boy.
Don't worry, it's a "mom approved" activity but if the moms were not actually there, dad would have sent them all down the steep side. (which is great ! btw)
Happens to every phone I've ever owned, eventually the charger slot requires manual intervention to support charging. It's those darn custom super small charger plugs which can't withstand the eternal plug-unplug cycle. I suspect they are designed to fail during the holiday season when getting a new phone is the last thing I want to go out and do.
Meanwhile, MacGyver lent me some rubber bands and suggested I skip the fruits and go robot.
Google thinks I've been blogging for 173 years. I know this because on a regular basis, the google bot fetches blog entries from far past and future dates. The Google bot is slowly working it's way through time, month by month (Google is just being very thorough).
I noticed this in my web server logs (you don't scan your logs once in a while ?). I found multiple entries generated by fetches by the google bot. I saw a bunch that looked like this.
"GET /?month=11&year=2039 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /?month=12&year=2039 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /?month=1&year=2040 HTTP/1.1"
The earliest year was 1926 and I was about to break into the Y2.1K on the high end. I was amused at the time, Google was proactively fetching future blog entries in eager anticipation of their high quality and entertainment value. I fetched one of the future date pages and sure enough, a valid page is returned with no errors displayed and the calendar shows the correct future month and a link to previous and the next month as well. Ok, that explains why google is crawling forward in time - my silly blog software is publishing future links. I checked my front page and was surprised to see the link to the future date was not there - apparently the software is intelligent enough to not link into a future month if you were on the current month. It's just not smart enough to not link to future dates if you happen to fetch a future month. Sounds like a simple fix to me.
But we do have a mystery - how did google get that first link into the future if it's not published on my main page ? I first assumed that google was smart enough to know how to manipulate patterns like "year=2009" and do an increment to "year=2010" and walk through the entries that way but that's just asking for bad links so I doubt it. I think it's more likely that was is a timing window - daylight savings time or possibly when I moved from the old server HW to the new server, that a date mismatch caused a future link to be generated which started google on the path forward (and backwards). It does make you wonder, what do these guys do ? They generate future links from year to year and I suspect they (and many other calendar web pages) will have Google and other sites fetching pages through time.
So, Google follows these links into next month and prev month and by the time I caught up with it, 173 years of blogging had passed. For reference, in the full log set (6 months worth), there were 5300 GET's with past or future dates.
I decided instead of waiting to see "year=3001" in my blogs at some point, I should fix the code. Should be easy right ? Well, yes it was it was so easy I fixed it three times. I check the main page and see a juicy looking "calendar.js" script reference so I grab that file. Take a couple peeks and I notice the code has a check for the current date and doesn't insert a future link if you are in the current month (m==currentMonth && y==currentYear). Clearly only excluding the current month is bogus. I tack on the obvious (y > currentYear) and think to myself "that was easy". Time to test - and of course the change has no effect. I futz with it a few times and nope, the changes have no effect. I hack in some obvious visible changes "December" -> "HACK DECEMBER" so I could see it and know I was in the right file. Nope, this code is not running.
So, grep around (again) and voila ! find a *second* file that looks "calendar like" but not called calendar (hidden code crafty!) and again - I find the exact same code, apply same changes and retest. Nope - no effect. This is getting silly. So, first - to prove the files are the real ones, I use the old trick - rename the two files, lets be sure they are being used at all, rerun the tests - nope - deleting the files has no effect. Obi-wan speaks to me These are not the files you're looking for.
Grep around some more, and hey, even more calendar code ! (must have been a 3 for one sale), and voila!, the same code there too, with a incorrect comment that says "prevent future dates from being displayed" and of course the exact same bogus code. ()
Third times a charm, and the link into the future is gone, so next time Google grabs the last cached link, it will stop the eternal march into the future (and it did). I also fixed the eternal past links, choosing an arbitrary cutoff so that Google doesn't march it's way down to 1/1/0001 or something since those old blog entries are soooooo embarassing.
This morning, two things appeared on my screen (at different times). The first, a progress bar declaring that the download was NaN% complete (funny). The second, probably the NaNth time (ahem) I've seen the blue screen of dead in the past month - indicating that my laptop is more than umm, NaN% dead (not funny).
(does anyone still get blue screens of death ?) Today's entry brought to you by the non-number NaN
