doc.java.sun.com (the javadoc website designed for communal collaborative translation) is finally back up again after a couple of days being dead. It took so long because (tragically) I have a Real Job. It went down because of a small bug, which I then componded by having a guess about what was wrong, that turned out to be totally incorrect. I was once again reminded by brutal reality of one of the most important principles of debugging:

If you don't see the bug where you're looking, perhaps you're looking in the wrong place

Long story, all boring. One silver lining is that some nice indexing improvements contributed by Charles Liu got incorporated into the production server. Thanks!

 

 

Danger & the fire marshal

Tom Andrews asked ":-( I always really liked the T-shirt hurling. If real software people make their own hardware, really serious software people make their own potentially dangerous hardware. Tell us Jim - did the fire regs finally get too strict? Have they banned indoor rockets?".

The fire regs have been pretty constant. They've squashed some really good entries. Last year we had an entrant using a chain saw which got squashed at the last moment because the fire marshal wouldn't accept the engine exhaust, so an electric chain saw had to be substituted: just not the same. In a previous year one proposal that I fought ahrd for was for a traditional Indonesian cannon used at festivals to shoot confetti into crowds. It was made of bamboo and fueled with kerosene. Totally wonderful, but it freaked the fire marshal.

The issue really was just timing. I was out for too long. I guarantee that there will be no shortage of potentially dangerous hardware :-) at JavaOne this year. The schedule is jammed.