The musical I’ve been writing has now reached “beta” stage. All the scenes are written, pretty much all the lines are written and it really just needs to be reviewed and cleaned up. Like developing software it’s hard to know exactly when to called it finished. I also have the feeling that I get at the end of most software projects: I know it’s not finished yet and I know things need to be improved, but I can’t quite put my finger on what to work on and how to improve it. Essentially, I don’t feel that the script is ready for prime time and while there are some things that I know still need work there’s a lot of stuff that I just feel that I want to improve but don’t know exactly how to go about it. Part of that feeling is actually not knowing exactly how to move from writing the script into actually starting production. Hopefully the same approach I take with software will work with musicals too: do everything that you can work out needs to be done, write done each new thing you find needs to be done as you find it and when you can’t think of anything left to be done, release it. In terms of starting production I think just arranging some auditions would be a good start – finding a venue is another task I know needs to be dealt with and will likely be difficult. I’m sure it will all fall into place.

It looks like I’ll be moving house at the start of July. Just went to check out the new place and it’s a big 5 bedroom house on top of a hill in Mt Gravatt. Almost 270 degree views out over the suburbs (the missing quarter is the city view) and the place is currently being renovated. Still no lease signed but the owner is apparently a friend of one of the guys I’ll be moving in with. The only real concern is that I haven’t actually met this guy, but he comes on the recommendation of my current house mate and that’s proved reliable in the past. Besides, I’m really sick of living in this tiny little unit with two cars and one garage.

JavaScript is one of those odd languages that noone really appreciates the full power of. Mostly that’s because it’s also an awful language that’s hard to get the full power out of, particularly when working with multiple browsers. Still, my work often calls for large amounts of JavaScript hacking.

Some interesting things I’ve learnt lately:

In Safari, if you use window.open(‘file:///Users/aj/file.html’, …) it will either not open the file at all or refuse to execute any JavaScript in the file in the first time the page is loaded (reloading the page causes the javascript to execute). However, if you use window.open(”, …) and then window.location = “file:///Users/aj/file.html”; it works perfectly. Go figure.

Hey, I’ve hit the number one spot on Google again. Ha! In your face Adrian Sutton!

That’s right, I need an instant family – give me the wife and 3 kids special thanks. Why you ask? I’m sick of paying crap loads of taxes so that the government can provide handouts to families. Having a baby? Here have $3000 as well. That’s in addition to the tax cuts. And the extra medicare cover. Now you might argue that families are an expensive proposition and battling families need all the help they can get. I’d agree. However, I’d disagree that the really rich families need a helping hand too – but they get one all the same. Besides, whatever happened to living within your means? I’m all for helping people who wind up in hard times because of things they couldn’t control or at least couldn’t be reasonably expected to control. I really hate being expected to feel sorry for the teenage Mum with a kid and how tough her life is trying to bring up the child alone. Yes it’s tough, yes I know a lot of single teenage mothers, yes they deserve a lot of respect and admiration and yes they deserve and get my help where I can. Yes it is also their fault that they’re in that situation. Unbelievably thousands of men and women, young and old manage to avoid starting a family before they can afford it – why should they be forced to support those people who failed to consider the implications of their actions? For all those people out there who have wound up in a tough situation because the plans you’d made didn’t work out or for those who are in a tough situation and aren’t winging for a government handout or are working to get out of the tough situation themselves: my hats off to you. I have a great deal of respect for that and wish you the best of luck in the future.

I went out to the Cleveland District State High School production of “Back To The 80s” tonight and absolutely loved it. The jokes are bad, the songs are bad, the story-line’s corny, the acting is hammed up and the costumes make every member of the cast look hideously unattractive. What more can you want in a musical about the 80s? I was invited along by Rochelle Wheater who played “Tiffany” the female lead and was particularly interested to see her performance as she’s interested in auditioning for a part in my upcoming musical. She certainly didn’t disappoint though I’d like to hear her sing songs that were better suited to her range, and definitely with a better sound engineer – for most of the musical she came across as a fairly weak voice, however in the final scenes of the musical they managed to find the volume knob and her voice shone through quite impressively. The show however was well and truly stolen by Ross Lambley in the role of “Feargal McFerrin III” – the school geek. Brilliant, just brilliant. The character plays a very minor role in the story line but Lambley’s dynamics and expressionism brought cheers from the audience in response to his every line. Particularly impressive was his bass voice (particularly in the second act). It was used to great affect in Video Killed the Radio Star and that number in particular kick started the audience in non-stop laughter. Other stand outs were the voices of Melissa Copson (“Cyndi”) and Tegan McErlain (unnamed singer number 2). Both girls have wonderful strong voices and really got into the spirit of the songs well. A big commendation must also go to Blake Miles (unnamed singer number 1) who sung very well despite being given songs with a range well beyond what should be expected of an adolescent male (Jitterbug in particular). It’s worth noting that he actually managed to hit the high notes quite accurately but was a little weak on them until the final verse of Jitterbug where he absolutely nailed “that high”. As is often the case in musicals the star of the show “Corey Palmer Jr” (played by Liam Flenady) doesn’t get much of a chance to really excel and is instead relegated to the thankless job of holding the story line together. Flenady did this extremely well and took what few opportunities he had to shine and produced enthusiastic responses from the audience. He was in fact the only actor who managed to actually elicit a groan from the audience at one of the particularly corny lines. You have to see it to see how brilliantly the audience was played. It would definitely be remiss of me not to mention how good the band sounded. It was fantastic to hear a full stage band again and they were extremely tight and sounded great. Overall, it’s one of the best nights out I’ve had in a long time. It is an amateur production, some notes are miss-pitched and at times the acting can seem a little stilted, but that all fits so well into the story line and general feel of the musical that I’d be willing to believe it was deliberate. You do tend to find yourself in shock for the first five or ten minutes as you get used to the style of the musical though but once you’re in the 80s groove and are prepared for the corny jokes, you’ll absolutely love this musical. Of course if you don’t like 80s music or corny jokes, this musical is your worst nightmare. Personally I’m a huge fan of both 80s music and corny jokes so I give it a big two thumbs up. Tomorrow night (Saturday 29 May) is the final performance, tickets are only $10 and are available at the door. If you’re anywhere near Brisbane “do yourself a favor” (to quote a legend of the 80s) and go see it. Heck, give me a yell and I’ll go with you.

Tonights news headlines includes “Terrorist Suspect Granted Bail”. I have no idea about the merits of the case or even what the guy is actually charged with, but I think it’s relieving that people charged with being a terrorist are still eligible for bail in Australia. They don’t seem to be in the US anymore.

Eclipse M9 was recently released and I’ve been using it all day today. It seems to work well though it reset a lot of my preferences which I didn’t think previous versions had done. Perhaps they were stored outside of the workspace somewhere… The most noticeable new feature is the code folding which generally I’m not a fan of until I realized it could automatically hide all the import statements at the top of the file. I’ve always hated having to scroll past a screenful of import statements to get to the meaningful code so it’s good not to have to. The other really noticeable change I saw was the ability to have calls to abstract methods shown in a different font/color as well as references to static variable, class variables. While this seemed like a really useful feature when I first saw it, turning it on made my source code overly colorful and really quite difficult to read. I’ve left it off for now though it’s probably possible to be more selective about which things are highlighted and in what colors. I’m not sure it’s really going to be a particularly big productivity gain though. I also noticed somewhat by accident that a little icon appears in the sidebar when a method overrides a super class’s method. That’s really useful to me. I spend vast amounts of time extending classes and overriding methods, mostly to add improvements or fix bugs in features that come with the JRE. It’s very nice to not only see that you’ve got the signature of the method right and that it really is overriding something but also have a very quick way of getting to the super implementation to make sure you’re taking care of all the things the method is supposed to. I’m just now reading the release notes and the mark occurrences feature looks very useful – particularly with it’s ability to highlight exit points of a function. We have a number of complex functions that have multiple exit points but that wind up being much harder to understand when broken up into smaller methods. For performance reasons though (and yes we’ve profiled and know that it’s required) the functions exit as soon as possible and thus have multiple exit points (refactoring to use a single exit point while maintaining performance just complicates the code). Having the exit points show up clearly should help a lot in these cases, particularly since it appears to also highlights points where an exception may be thrown and cause the method to exit. Back to the imports related features. The new ability to keep track of required imports when copying and pasting code looks really cool. Not that I’d ever copy and paste code….. Anyway, lots of cool new stuff to play with in Eclipse M9. The project is really coming a long way – I haven’t tested its speed on OS X yet but I’m hoping it will continue the trend of optimizations there and if my new RAM ever arrives maybe it will even be usable.

The lack of entries around here lately has been mostly due to my discovery of City of Heros. Great game – very addictive. Anyway, but get back to it – I’m hoping to reach level 12 tonight….

I really hate computer hardware. My PC started to randomly freeze every so often a month of two ago. It’s been totally out of action for a few weeks now and I’ve finally gotten around to trying to get it up and running again. After replacing the motherboard, RAM and CPU I can boot linux again and it seems stable if lacking a lot of features. It doesn’t seem to have support the ethernet card, sound card and has some issues with the hard drive controller. Windows on the other hand blue screens on startup – even in safe mode. I’m now trying to backup all the document from the windows hard drive to the linux hard drive and there’s this awful clicking noise. Somehow I think I’ll be replacing the hard drive too. Sigh.

I got involved in a long argument last night centering around different language paradigms and how the perl language fits into them. My “worth adversary” argued that perl could be considered a functional language at least in some ways because it supported function language constructs. In particular the example was given: map { freq $_ } @list The particular point being made here was that perl supported passing code into functions as parameters and that was a principle construct of functional languages. In Java you’d need to use an object to pass the function in as data thus it’s object-oriented and not functional. Now that I’m home and have access to my text books, I can safely put this argument to rest too. From Programming Language Essentials by Henri E. Bal and Dick Grune and published by Addison-Wesley:

The word of the day (and it’s a cool word so probably the word of tomorrow as well) is:

gynotikolobomassophilia The love of biting a female's earlobes. It's just wrong when the definition of a word is about the same length of the word itself…. Still, cool word.