Useless Java Tools?
At work I've spent a couple of days this week writing a tool to compare the public interface of two independent code bases. Yes, they should both inherit from a common set of interfaces in the common case, but this is not possible here -- we have two separate codebases which need to look identical to objects which subclass the relevant objects, and cannot share any code.
It's quite cool if I do say so myself -- you can mark members as being specific to a particular codebase (so are ignored), and I've even got a sweet pygtk UI with icons, treeviews and suchlike. I'm thinking about GPLing it (my boss is OSS-friendly, we've contributed to several projects so far), but will anyone else out there use this tool? I'm not entirely sure.
In more GNOMEy news, the Fun Bug Of The Day is the inability to open dot files with the new GTK+ 2.4 file selector. Obviously I consider this rather urgent for 2.4.0... Apart from that the interface is pretty sweet -- great work jrb and federico.
NP: Dub Side Of The Moon, Easy Star All Stars. This is a great album.
Amusing Snow
Snow has made me laugh recently, in different ways.
This morning it had decided to snow, great huge fluffy flakes coming down into our garden. Totally unexpected (but I didn't look at the weather report last night), and it wasn't settling at all, but it did seem rather out of place. From inside it looked just a bit cold outside, and the ground wasn't really wet, so these massive flakes were coming down and having no effect whatsoever.
Of course, I get to MordorCroydon, and the snowing has
stopped and we're left with sub-Arctic winds instead. Joy.
The other snow was Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News. Four of the British Guantanamo Bay detainees were released last night without charges by the US goverment, yet deal they did with the British government was that they had to be treated as serious detainees on arrival. This meant the police had to drive a van into the aircraft so they could be taken into custody straight away, without the opportunity to wave to the surrounding journalists. This is because (quoting from Jon) "...the US still considers them guilty of whatever they haven't charged them with".
Wonderful. Two years in a camp, without actually being arrested, and no charges bought against them but they are still guilty. Of what? After two years you would think they'd have something on them.
Who knows, maybe they have something on them and are not telling anyone but our government, who now has them in custody. My guess is that they won't actually use the Terrorism Act 2000 and only keep them for a few days, rather than the full 14 days they can under the act. After all, everyone is now watching like a hawk.
NP: When It Falls, Zero 7
