It was actually pretty good. We finished cleaning the baby toys, I played a bit more with DV Video, started having a look at x264 (although I haven't managed to get FFmpeg compile with x264 yet -- not to mention it's not clear which decoder over than VLC can decode it.)

Most important I finally started having a look at Java 5.0 and the latest Eclipse 3.1.1 which totally rocks imho. It helps that installing Java 5.0 on Debian is quite a piece of cake.

Speaking of Java, I think it's time Sun stops the marketing insanity with version numbers. "Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition" with Java 1.4 or "Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0" with Java 1.5. This is so freaking annoying. Can't they do version 1 and then version 2 like everyone else? OK maybe with a version 1.1 thrown in the middle like our friends in Redmond. Would it hurt them to match the platform revision number with the language revision number since they are so much tied? Yeah, surely, people might start understanding what Java is all about. Hopefully developers will get brain damage first whilst trying to get a grasp of the acronyms in use: J2SE, J2EE, J2ME, SWT, JAXP, Struts, Swing, etc.

Anyway, it's unfair to make fun of Sun as it's too easy. Kinda like Apple and their horde of brain damaged fans that will now go berserk explaining to the rest of the world how hype it is to watch a webcam-quality movie on a screen smaller than my watch for $2 a piece. They probably need that now that they can't credibly explain any more why one-button mice are vastly superior.

Anyway Java 5.0 is pretty cool. Annotations and templatized types are always good to have. I still can't quite find the syntax for closures, although I'm being told there's an incoming Groovy patch for that.

Speaking of closures, I had the unfortunate "luck" to discover what probably everybody else found with closures in Javascript: closures created in a for-loop are not bound as one would think they should be.
This post explains it perfectly so I don't have to: A huge gotcha with Javascript closures and loops.
Really I think this sucks and smells as a "bug in the spec". A good semantic would be "var f = new function() { ... }". I'm not sure why one can't do that if functions are first-class citizen objects?

I had another cool thing to blog about yet I forgot it. Oh well. I feel like the Bear with Very Little Brain, namely Winnie the Pooh which original book I have been reading lately (along with Applied Cryptography.) Somehow the former is easier to read, although Schneier is quite interesting to read too.

Oh yeah so that cool thing to blog about. Well it's not much but it goes this way: I've been having a look at the various dev projects listed on [Izumi|WhatIsIzumi] and most especially the plans with dates which are all listed indirectly via the Project List. My point was that if you look at the project pages, my projects barely advance. They literally stagnate. And sure they actually do. Not that I'm quite lazy (well I am lazy but that's not my point), it's more like I have only a limited amount of free time and recently coding hasn't been the priority (getting a life was.) Plus it doesn't really matter. I keep my creativity and energy for work (I mean it like the real work place, where they pay me to do exactly that) and I home I can relax and spend time on whatever or with whom is fun (such as significant others.) Coding is still a lot of fun. One day it's PHP, the next day it's Java and some other day it would be planning and thinking about stuff rather than actually implement it.

Such it's life and I'm having quite a good time :-)

By the way, there's one more project plan page for [rig2j|RigTwoPlan].

Outch. I actually ate too much chocolate cake tonight.