Books

John Resigs new book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja

Music

The Depeche Mode koncert in Horsens in February. Depeche Mode AND Nitzer Ebb in one evening…wow! It’ll be the soundtrack of my youth….only 15 years to late!

Software

Better late than never! At work we’ll be switching to WebSphere Application Server 7.0 which means that I’ll finally start using Java 6.0, which the rest of the world has been using since 2006, hurrah!

Hardware

The new iPhone which I hope we’ll see in the summer of 2010.

Other

Watching our children grow older, Tour de France and Paris Roubaix (of course), Toy Story 3.

I’ve probably forgot a lot, but I’ll continue updating the list over the coming weeks.

Happy new year!

So…yeah…I’m not dead and I can’t even use the “I’ve been busy at work” excuse, because I haven’t, not more than normally at least.

So how are things then?

Good, more or less. We’ve entered the winter term, which means that our kids are running from one cold to another. We’ve just spent the better part of two weeks being sick with H1N1 flu all of us. It’s frustrating when you have to stay home from work with a sick child for the third time in a month, but that’s just parenting I guess.

In other news, our son has startet walking now and our daughter is turning five years soon. Our kids are getting big now, which on one hand is nice, but on the other hand it’s a bit sad to know that they’re just getting older and more and more detached from us.

At work things are going so so, I feel that we’re standing still at the moment, spending all our time trying to nail production problems instead of adding new features and releasing new versions.

Finally , I’ve read a couple of great programming books lately. I hope to write more about them in separate posts soon(ish).

Anyhow, that’s it, just a quick ping to assure all my dedicated readers that this blogger is still alive and kicking.

But then what happens?

Comments start to arrive and you start thinking “My God, has anybody actually read what I wrote? I should have paid more attention to my spelling then!” But then you read these comments and are reassured that nobody actually gives a toss about your thoughts, because nine out of ten times these comments are…..spam.

After having read some of those spam comments you might start to think….why?

Allow me to illustrate. I’ve collected some examples of the various spam comments that I’ve received for my recent entry.

Example 1

This is an example of a spam post that does make some sense to me. A spammer wants viewers of his posts to click the link to visit his site where he sells various goods.

The spammer has at least tried to camouflage his evil deeds as a comment as can be seen below:

Name: xxxx
Email: yyy
Url: http://www.eurotablets.eu/
Comment: Thank you! You often write very interesting articles. You improved my mood.

Why thank you, glad to hear that my post about a Groovy error message improved your mood

Here’s another example of this type of spam comments, this one is my favorite!

Name: same as before actually
Email: ditto
Url: http://www.une-pharmacie.eu/
Comment: Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.

OK what gave me away? Yes, I admit, I am a professional journalist, I’m aiming for a Pulitzer Price, or, failing that, the Danish Cavlingpris!

Example 2

This is where I start to wonder:

Name: zzz
Email: www
Url: http://xpaemfijofzq.com/
Comment: A4xJZI usywshetpeyb, [url=http://miuicrcwoonx.com/]miuicrcwoonx[/url], [link=http://jsyikajwggja.com/]jsyikajwggja[/link], http://mufyuyavfnnk.com/

What’s the point? Link that points to nowhere? Why? Is this just some sort of grafitti? See how many blogs I can fill with nonsense! I really don’t get it. If anybody out there know what the purpose of these spam comments is, please let me know.

OK, enough of me. I really hope that anybody out there has an answer, and wants to share it.

Since this post is dedicated to spam comments, I’ll approve all spam comments that I receive for this post (and this post only). Gentlemen, start your spambots!

PS. When reading the title of this post, please do so in a “Monty-Python-tea-lady-like” voice

org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed,
/.../Error.groovy: 1: Invalid duplicate class definition of class Error :

An example might come handy:
I create a new file called Error.groovy, containing this:

class Error{
	def fail(){
		println 'hello'
	}
}

Error error = new Error()
error.fail()

When trying to run this, instead of a line saying hello, you’ll receive this heartwarming message:

org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed,
/.../Error.groovy: 1: Invalid duplicate class definition of class Error :
The source /.../Error.groovy contains at least two defintions of the
class Error.
One of the classes is a explicit generated class using the class statement,
the other is a class generated from the script body based on the file name.
Solutions are to change the file name or to change the class name.
 @ line 1, column 1.
   class Error{
   ^

1 error

After some general wondering I found this blog post explaining very nicely what the problem is.

If you’re busy I’ll tell you what the problem is, so you don’t have to click the link, just remember, this is not something that I discovered, all credit goes to the original blog poster.

OK, the problem is that I try to create a new instance of the Error class outside of any classes. Groovy will treat this as a script. Behind the scenes Groovy will create a class to store the script code in. This class will be named like the file in which it is used. In my case the file is called Error.groovy, so Groovy will try to create a new class called Error…..however, this class allready exists in the file and so Groovy get’s all moody and refuses any further cooperation.

The solution in my case would be to either:

1. Create a public static void main method in my Error class and call the Error code from there
2. Rename my class to something other than Error

Either way, it’ll work.
Hope this is of any usage to you.

Ruby

Ruby has been around for quite some time, but as far as I can tell, it wasn’t until the release of Ruby on Rails that Ruby really took of.
Reasons to learn Ruby:

1. It’s used for Ruby on Rails which I’ve been foolin’ around with, but sometimes without knowing exactly what I did. For instance, why did I had to type what I just typed like that
2. It’s 100% OO
3. It can be used for scripting, something I’d like to look more into as I think it could help me automate things and thereby make everyday tasks easier

JavaScript

Now, there are some people out there, especially “real” programmers who don’t like JavaScript and I think that this is a shame, because JavaScript is really a great language, it just got at stupid name, meaning that people think that JavaScript == Java….which it certainly isn’t!
I know a bit of JavaScript (who doesn’t?), but when we start talking

• Closures
• OO in JavaScript
• Anonymous functions
• …and so on

I’m nowhere near safe ground. Therefore advanced JavaScript would be great to learn. I’m really looking forward to this book by John Resig.

Clojure

To tell you the truth, I don’t know that much about Clojure. People say functional programming and Lisp and that is enough to wake my attention.

Groovy

Groovy is, and I quote: “a flexible, highly productive, agile, dynamic language that runs on the rich framework of the Java platform”….wow eh!
Reasons to learn Groovy

1. Groovy is close to Java, meaning that the learning curve is not so steep.
2. It is possible to use Groovy for scripting
3. As with Ruby on Rails, there exists Grails, a web framework based on Groovy. This means that one could create web applications in Java land, but with the ease of Ruby on Rails (at least that’s what I think)

And the winner is…

I think I’m gonna go with Groovy for now. It sounds really cool and easy to get a hang of.
Furthermore afterwords one could go on to learn Grails and experiment with web applications in Java without using JSF, just to try something else than what I spend my entire day doing

• Homebuild Intel Core 2 Duo based PC armed with a Ubuntu/Windows XP dual boot
• Linksys something router with 802.11n network
• Sony Ericsson z530 mobile phone
• 80gb iPod classic

Today my kit contains these parts:

• MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.5.6
• Apple Airport Extreme
• 16gb iPhone
• 80gb iPod classic
• Synology DS207+ NAS server

Man I’ve put a lot of money into Apple products, haven’t I? What a brainwashed, narrowminded, naive idiot I am eh? (this is where you tell me: No, you are right, Apple make great products)

Things are starting to cool down now (I hope). As said, version 1.0 of our framework is out and the days are now spent fixing Jira issues and preparing version 1.1 (with portal support) which will be released in a few months. This means not so much pressure and lots and lots of debugging, which is great fun if you ask me.

Therefore I hope there’ll be more time for pointless blogging about this and that, read by no one but myself (but commented by pointless spammers!)

Oh, and I’ve beome the very happy ovner of an iPhone, fantastic, perhaps more on that in another blog post.