Here are some of the more popular comics from my blog…or maybe not so popular, but some of my favorites:

• James Brings Closure to the Debate
• Java is the New COBOL
• Scala Will Do (this one pissed off a lot of people, beware…)
• Java Upgrade Hammer
• In the Zone
• Comic Tribute to Java Versus Ruby
• Wide Stanced Programming (my favorite)

All of my comics are tagged, also. You’ll have to keep clicking the Previous Entries link to see everything.

Least Successful Shirt Design

I would like to draw your attention to this comment from Matt. Well done!

I’ll do my best to bring the fun back.

*** UPDATE: that’s weird…Firefox isn’t scrolling to his comment when I click that link. Probably a mistake in my theme. Oh well, just scroll down and look for Matt’s comment.

*** UPDATE 2: It is fixed. See my explanation here.

Motivator lets you create your own motivational posters:

You can make fun of yourself, too:

I’m an equal opportunity mocker:

The Internet is a wonderful thing.

With the release of Google Stalker Buddy, they no longer even pretend to respect our privacy. Damn these guys are good: GPS, mapping, cellular triangulation…it’s so perfect.

2007 year in review…

• 2007 was not The Year of the Linux Desktop.
• 2007 was the year of Google. They released app upgrades at at astonishing rate, and the pace is accelerating.
• Phrase of the year: wide stanced.
• Actually, 2007 was the year of the taser. Don’t tase me, bro.
• 2007 brought us the most disgusting video in the history of the internet. That’s saying something. Recording people’s reactions to the video is a popular YouTube meme.
• Vista is about a year old. We have far more device drivers and stability is just fine. It is still a resource hog compared to XP, the bundled apps (Paint, Notepad, etc) still suck, and usability is hampered by constant popups (affectionately known as barkware, a term I learned from Brad Shuler). Overall impression? Meh.
• Apple didn’t tell us how they feel about Java.
• An astronaut wore a diaper and drove 900 miles to confront a romantic rival.
• Celebrities in the news: OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Lindsey Lohan.
• In 2007, the Zune finally caught up to iPod. The 2005 iPod.
• A never-ending list of Java 7 features are on everyone’s mind. Meanwhile, thousands of corporate IT departments still use 1.4.

That’s all I can think of right now.

I just received the best spam email of 2007:

Subject: “Drop up to 20 pounds in a day”
Sender: “colon cure”
Content: “America’s Favorite Colon Cleanse!”

America has a favorite colon cleanse? Uh…

I hear a similar ad on the radio all the time, describing the backup as “like spackle” on the walls of your intestines. Reminds me of the colon blow skit on SNL.

This is funny because somewhere out there, someone actually believes there is 20 POUNDS of shit backed up in their system. Better get your plunger ready.

Too bad the Google Chart API does not let me control foreground colors for pie charts…

UPDATE: Dang! Stupid me, I read (and apparently am confused by) the docs:

Only background fill is available for bar charts, pie charts, and Venn diagrams.

Jesse set me straight:

I won the Woot Monkey Prize over a month ago and received absolutely nothing. I sent them my mailing address as instructed.

What’s up with that? Is the monkey prize real?

Featuring anonymous code examples from a company like yours…

Snoop is versatile: PERL, Icon, MySQL, and PHP!

(for the record, very few programming languages start with “I”)

This last book gives “Search Inside” a whole new meaning…

Pictures link to the real books. Please, Wrox, don’t sue me.

Today is Saturday, at least here in the USA it is. (I think it’s Thursday south of the equator, right?) At any rate, here is your homework for Monday when you return to “work”:

Find the longest human-coded class in a Java application at your company. Also, find the longest human-coded method in a Java application. Post the results here.

This is Thanksgiving week here in the USA, so it’s not like any of you are actually working next week. This should be fun!

For “longest”, let’s just count the number of “\n” characters.

Bonus points to anyone who knows of a simple program that can produce these metrics by quickly scanning an entire directory tree. Counting lines of code in a class is easy with a bit of shell scripting mojo, I’m not so sure about counting lines of code in individual methods.

I suppose you might try to briefly explain the reason these classes and methods are so abnormally huge, without exposing anything proprietary. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone, after all.