Broken LEGO (myth)

My wife found a broken LEGO brick in our son's room this morning. My kids apparently managed to break a LEGO brick in half, and with it the associated myth (well, at least a belief I held) that the damned things are in fact unbreakable in a domestic environment.

Absolutely coincidentally, several hours later today, Slashdot's cover page is graced with an entry "How They Make LEGO Bricks" that actually links to a BusinesWeek article "The making of a... LEGO".

(Very Useless Fact of the Day: I keep my laptop (when it sits on my desk connected to an external display, keyboard, and mouse) sitting on 4 LEGO Duplo bricks I stole from kids to provide better airflow to it.)

Rhino relicensed under MPL/GPL

Mozilla Foundation decided to relicense the Rhino JavaScript interpreter to use the MPL/GPL dual-licensing instead of NPL/GPL dual licensing. The reason is primarily that Apache Software Foundation published a 3rd-party licensing policy recently, and NPL was listed as "Excluded Licenses" in it, therefore prohibiting several Apache projects (Coccon, Batik) to redistribute Rhino in the future. MPL, on the other hand falls into Apache's "Binary Licenses Only" group, which'll allow those projects to bundle Rhino binaries with their distributions. Also, Mozilla's lawyers concluded that Mozilla has the legal power to change the licensing from NPL/GPL to MPL/GPL easily, so it looks like the best solution for the time being.

I plan to release the latest stable branch as Rhino 1.6R5 soon. The binaries will be completely identical to 1.6R4, the only difference being that they'll be recompiled from relicensed source, thus the line number tables in classfiles will reflect the difference in length of the boilerplate license code on top of each source file. Apache folks can then include Rhino 1.6R5 instead of Rhino 1.6R4 binaries in their project distributions, or if they're impatient they can compile it themselves from the "Rhino1_6R3_PATCH" branch in the CVS. (Of course, CVS HEAD is now MPL as well.)

1 << 5

Today's the day when my life duration has doubled for the fifth time, relative to the last such event, (counting my first birthday as the 0th). (With bit of a luck, I'm in for yet another such event down the road.)

For those less math nerd folks out there: I turned 32 today.

I don't usually care too much about arbitrary milestones in the flow of time, my own birthday not really being an exception, yet last night I couldn't help thinking about it (not being able to fall asleep for about two hours after going to bed - I turned from good sleeper to quite erratic sleeper lately). When trying to assess what happened since the last birthday, it always seems life only brings gradual changes (the previous year carries a rather big exception, hopefully I'll be able to write about it sometime soon). However, on such a round number occasion (both %100000 and 0x20), it made me wonder about everything that happened or changed since I was half this age.

And I have to say, it's a hell of a lots of things. My 16-year old self was a quite blissfully unaware gymnasium student in Croatia whose biggest problem was how to skip history classes to go hack on the Apple-II machines in the school computer lab, as well as to write games and fractal generators for Commodore 64 or later for Atari ST. And girls. Were a problem too, that is.

Shortly thereafter, I endured one war and one exodus that completely uprooted me and my family, had to settle in a new country. A bit later found true love, then attended university, and over the passing years grew into several different roles, including that of a husband (for more than eight years now), of a father (for more than seven years now when my son Ákos was born, redoubled the role two years later with Zsuzsi), and of a (well, what at least feels like) reasonably respected IT industry professional. I'd really like to elaborate a bit on all of this here and now, but there are two big driving forces against it: (a) not wanting to bore you to death, and (b) the aforementioned three roles unfortunately don't leave me with much time at present to write sentimental weblog entries about myself.

All in all, the previous 16 years were probably the most dynamic period of my life, past and future. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the next 32 years; stay tuned for the "1 << 6"

Java Notes

When searching few days ago, Google accidentally turned up Java Notes, created by one Fred Swartz (who apparently teaches at University of Maryland Unversity College). Poked around it a bit, and I must say I was pretty impressed by the quality of those examples I looked at; it indeed looks like a nice teaching material for beginning Java programmers, one Mr. Swartz put into many hours to assemble. I mean, just look at the exhaustive discussion of the algorithm for finding the maximum element of an array!

What's an especially nice additional touch is that the author indeed donated all of this to public:

Many textbooks show useful code examples, but ironically copyright them so you can't legally use them! All Java code examples in Java Notes and Java Basics are placed in the public domain.