Steven Yong's Weblog

Which are the coolest web-based (or Ajax-based) calendars, e-mail, spreadsheet, information managers, webtops and word processors? See here for the winners selected by Preston Gralla and Barbara Kransnoff. Are they Google's big fans? :-) Most likely I suppose.

Here is the selection:
Calendar Winner: Google Calendar
E-Mail Winner: Gmail
Information Managers Winner: Google Notebook
Spreadsheets Winner: Google Spreadsheets
Webtops Winners: Pageflakes and YouOS
Word Processors Winner: Zoho Writer

Recently had a question to make me to ponder: After a person has died, who does he hand over everything on the Internet to?
Several days ago I viewed a friend's picture on a social website where the person is no longer with us, then suddenly this question came up to my mind. A person passed away, if does not have the will to stay behind, the right of own and use of all of his properties can legally be handed over to family member's hand, perhaps is the parents, perhaps is the companion. But his so-called "properties" on the net for instance the domain name, important documents in his mailbox, massive pictures and video recordings and so on, would have to wait till being automatically deleted? The person often accesses the net which to said that, his picture, the document, each kind of secret believed would put on the net, then he passed away, whether meant all things ended up wtihout an owner?

I went to PIKOM PC Fair yesterday with my friend and bought a new Logitech mini optical mouse. The sales girls were very nice and friendly (yes, girls, all together 3 sales girls were serving me for that little MYR59 thing), we talked a lot, from PS2 to USB to credit card to cash-and-win lucky draw. It looks like I've made a right choice because the mouse is good looking and I like the cord-wrap feature allows me to wind the cord neatly into the mouse for easy packing. More important, it's worth to get the mouse with aforementioned price while it actually costs USD 19.99. If you're interested in Logitech's products, read this news about the Windows Vista's ready new peripherals.

Gary came and asked me why the text replacement fails when he was actually passing in the correct arguments and using correct version of JDK (replaceAll appears since JDK 1.4). Here's how he wrote initially:

String name = "hello world";
name.replaceAll("hello", "world");

Obviously he didn't carefully read the API doc, which saying that the end result will be returned and no modification will be made to the object (in this case the object is String). So, the correct way to replace the string is:

name = name.replaceAll("hello", "world");

Controversially, people would just use the first approach to replace any characters in the String. I didn't manage to tell him what's wrong when he's describing his problem to me until I literally see the code. Since the method is a member method of class String (by which I mean it is not static), I think it should mutate the object's state instead. There's more about this API which confuse people and eventually produce subtle bugs in your programs, we'll discuss about that next time.

Read more about String.replaceAll API here.

We got an email from the office admin this morning, reads:

Hi all,

Kindly be informed that, we have a First Aid Box with

1) Panadols - Relieves fever or headaches
2) Clarinase - Relieves blocked or flu
3) Actal - Relieves gastric pain, heartburn or stomach
4) Panadols Actifast - Relieves fever or headaches
5) Medicated oil - Relieves stomachaches
6) Plasters

and more.

Please take note. Thank you.

Good to know that finally we will be having such thing in our office, but it turns out that nobody knows where is the box located after reading the email.

For a while I was puzzled by why there're so many products using codename before they are officially released, like Chicago (Windows 95), Tiger (for both J2SE 5.0 and Mac OS X v10.4), Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation) and so on. Until I've came across several "official" corrections on product's naming such as Java Platform and Internet Explorer 7 (from IE7 to IE7+ to IE7), I finally understand why people use codename.

There's been a lot of debates out there recently about how useful is the method reference (or function pointer) in programming or scripting languages such as JavaScript, C# and J++. It looks like Java turns out to be the loser in this debate because it doesn't have anything called bound method reference and the only way it can accomplish the same task is using inner class with Interface. Of course, Sun did not watch the show silently, instead they claimed that method references are unnecessary because another design alternative, inner classes, provides equal or superior functionality. However, the most interesting question I find in the debate was "Can Your Programming Language Do This?".

Mistakes on naming were made. Even Sun's employee is confused by the change of official acronym for the Java Platform. However, corrections of mistakes should be taken as earlier as possible.