Probability of Rain

My neighbor Greg Johnson at work put together a graph of the probability of rain for any given week in Portland.

Java De-Compilers

Yesterday I was working on some code and did a cvs merge and lost some of my code during a conflict. So I used a Java decompiler to get the source code for my last build.

It had all of the code that I had lost so I could just copy the correct code back over. What was interesting was the type of optimizations the compiler made. It was either the compiler or the decompiler misreading the bytecode (I figure it's the compiler.)

My original code had a while loop like this:

while (iter.hasNext())
{
SummaryObject obj = (SummaryObject) iter.next();
SummaryObject newObj = obj.newInstance();
newObj.setGroup(currGroup);
newSummaryObjs.add(newObj);
}


While the decompiled code was:

SummaryObject newObj;
for(; iter.hasNext(); newSummaryObjs.add(newObj))
{
SummaryObject obj = (SummaryObject)iter.next();
newObj = obj.newInstance();
newObj.setGroup(currGroup);
}


It looked like all while loops were turned into for loops. Interesting to see how the compiler would optimize things.

Joke for the day

I was looking over at meish.org, having a look see and came across her bus sketch Kinda funny.

Microsoft sucks again

So I ran Outlook Express earlier in the week to try and figure out some SMTP settings for an account I'm using. I hadn't used it before and once I was done I wanted to get rid of it. Lo and behold, you can't directly uninstall it. After 2 hours using search engines, I find out which dlls to remove and what registry keys to delete. I still can't delete the folder that Outlook is in, but that's ok. Every time I'd delete the program, Windows would put the program back. WTF?

Eventually everything was settled, except for the login screen, which was telling me how many emails I had unread. I came across this post that shows how to get rid of that dumb reminder.

It's enough to make you switch to Macs.

Airports

While checking around at java.com to see what's new, I saw a link for this page passur. From their page you can view certain airports in quasi-realtime, watching as planes take off or land (it's delayed 10 minutes for security.) You can look at different ranges, from 4 miles to 90 miles, and see all the airplanes in the area, their height and type of aircraft. They even have a "replay" button that shows past days worth of flights.

Ice!

We got some rain last night and it froze all over the place. Tonight on the way home from the bus I picked up the big chunks of ice and tossed them onto the ground to hear the large cracking sounds. I'm sure people in their houses appreciated it. I tried to take some pictures of the snow and stuff, but it's a little dark and I didn't remember my tripod, but here goes:

Ship of Gold

I was at the gym, getting in my 30 mile jog and was watching the TV. They had a commercial for gold coins from the Gold Rush of the 1850s. It turns out it was the gold from the Central America, the steamer that went down in the 1800s written about in Ship Of Gold.
I just started rereading Ship Of Gold. It was interesting to see the gold for sale on TV. They had a website for the gold at shipofgoldinfo.com (doesn't seem to be currently working.)