Mathieu Fenniak's Weblog

Lately I seem to have pushed a large number of important projects to the side to make room for some smaller personal projects. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately that’s kinda nifty:

• I gave notice of resignation to my employer earlier this week. October 8th is my final work day. I’ll be free for a few months to persue some contract work that I’ve got waiting in the wings, and then I’m into a new job in the new year. I’ll be working as the head of software development at a small start-up company. Exciting!

• I built a new photo gallery system. This one builds on a number of features in flickr. It has tag based image catagorizing, EXIF photo information, and a small number of different image sizes that can be viewed. You can see it in action on my pictures page.

• A new version of Java was released today. Java 1.5, Tiger, contains a number of boring features: autoboxing (saves some typing), a new for/in loop (saves some typing), and generics (saves some typing – may find some ClassCastExceptions waiting to happen at compile time). These seem to be the features everyone thinks are cool, but I think they’re pretty lame.

  That said, there are a couple of features that are cool. Java 1.5 adds the ability to change a function’s return type when it is being overridden. You can only change it to a subclass of the original type, but this makes a lot of sense. When you really think about it… it turns out that all it does is save you some typing. In any situation where you’d actually use this, you’d be doing some casting that you wouldn’t have to do anymore.

  Hmmm… so… what does it have that’s cool? Variable length argument lists… I’ve never missed these in Java before. Annotations look pretty cool, but if you think about the pretty static applications they have unless you recode your own compiler, they seem to be pretty much just a couple nice builtin features and a new way to add documentation. So… static imports? Yeah, that’s nice. Yay!

  I really wanted to be impressed with Java 1.5’s new features, since I’m doing a lot of Java development these days. But I can just type faster, and I’ll still retain backwards compatibility with people using Java 1.4.

• I added HTTP Digest authentication into my Twisted based weblog aggregator. This allows me to view LiveJournal RSS feeds with a logged in user, and hence getting links to protected LiveJournal entries that m yuser can see. I submitted a small patch to urllib2 to make it work with those same LiveJournal feeds, and I may add real authentication support to twisted.web.client rather than the hacked support I’m currently using. Maybe this weekend, if I have the inclination.