Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

I’m considering buying one of those thar “MacBook Pros”:http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/, but at a base price of AU$3199, it’s a little pricy. Now, Apple has a long-standing reputation of charging premium prices, but seeing as how the MacBook is Intel-based, it should be possible to do some good price comparison.

Dell has released the new “Inspiron 9400″:http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_9400_au?c=au&l=en, which is also based on the Intel Core Duo chip. So, we can do a comparison that is better than Apples to Oranges on this.

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Catching up on my podcasts this week, I was listening to a presentation by “Ze Frank at PopTech 05″:http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html on the way home today.. Having listened to it, I’m convinced it should have come with a health warning: _”Warning: Listening to this presentation may cause uncontrollable laughter. Do not drive or operate heavy equipment while listening to this presentation”_

Martin Fowler just wrote an entry on “implicit interfaces”:http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImplicitInterfaceImplementation.html. This actually would be very useful, but I think I can see why language designers wouldn’t adopt it (at least, not outright).

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Purely as an experiment, I’m using “FeedBurner”:http://feedburner.com to keep track of the site usage.

You don’t have to change your RSS feed: I’m redirecting the old ones through to FeedBurner. As a matter of fact, I suggest you don’t change your feed – that way, if I drop FeedBurner, you will automatically switch back to the old direct link.

In addition: at this time, it’s only the main feed that’s been moved to FeedBurner. The category archives, which have a fairly large following of their own, are not going through FeedBurner – yet. :)

Joel’s busy complaining that teaching Java in comp-sci courses makes life too easy for people, because they don’t have to deal with pointers and recursion. News flash for you, Joel: the times have changed, and new tools are available.

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Tags: joel, programming

There’s a common idiom in Java for writing the @equals()@ method. Straight from the classic book, “Effective Java”, it looks like this:

bc[java]..
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
if (this ==== obj) { return true; }
if (obj instanceof ThisClass ==== false) { return false; }
ThisClass other = (ThisClass) obj;
return this.importantField1.equals(other.importantField1) && this.importantField2.equals(other.importantField2);
}

p. When using Hibernate, particularly with lazy proxy classes, it’s important that you stick to this idiom!

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