Dear Larry Ellison,

It has come to my attention that James Gosling now works for you. It is my recommendation that you remedy this situation immediately. As justification I present the following Java snippet:

Object obj = new Object(); 

// ...

if (obj != null) {

}

Do you really want someone working for you at Oracle who designs a language where you must use a binary operator to check whether a reference is null? Consider the obvious alternative:

Object obj = new Object();

//...

if (obj) {

}

Don't you agree that this is more Zen-like? Me, too. I'm so glad you're in charge now.

That is all.

Best wishes,

Jon

Salt Mazes

When I was a [nerdy] little kid, I would draw elaborate mazes over whatever size paper I was given. So, I dig this:

http://www.motoi.biz/english/e_top/e_top.html

JPEGs

1 out of 3 papers on computer forensics research seems to be about advanced techniques for carving fragmented jpegs from unallocated space.

I am sure that there have been cases where that one hard-to-reassemble jpeg was the key to cracking the case and sending the bad guy to jail for life. However, I feel equally sure that in the vast majority of cases, the problem is not how to recover that one screwy jpeg, but what to do with the hundreds of thousands of jpegs recovered with a simple header/footer search.

Trevor's work on C4P has probably done more for investigators than all the work done on fragmented jpeg carving combined. Of course, research is research, and there is nothing wrong with finding better ways to recover fragmented jpegs. There is something right, though, about applying research to solve pressing problems.

Path overflow

Speaking of linkedin, I came across this article today about the evils of MAX_PATH in eDiscovery:

http://rewcomputing.dyndns.org/REWBlog.nsf/d6plinks/RWEL-7ZVLQA

This article is spot-on for its audience. Practitioners honestly struggle with this in the eDiscovery industry. It'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic. In a day, a good programmer could write a tool to copy files around correctly and deal with long paths and timestamps, and then live off shareware sales for a year.

LinkedIn Lies

LinkedIn is fantastically useful and a great tool—making it easy to stay connected to colleagues, clients, and associates is a killer app. But, geez, the folks who abuse it for shameless self-promotion. I think it'd help if personal profile descriptions were length-limited, so they don't resemble press releases, and if the groups app had filtering and ranking abilities, to eliminate the incessant astroturfing. It'd be great if those of us on the cluetrain could tune out the senseless souls who haven't yet boarded.

Java

I hates it.

git rebase

A very nice introduction to git rebase:

http://book.git-scm.com/4_rebasing.html