Cold Blood

This monday's memory exercise is an excerpt from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, something I've been carrying with me for some time now.

There is a race of man that don't fit in
A race that can't stay still
So they break the hearts of kith and kin
And they roam the world at will

They range the fields and they rove the floods
They climb the mountain's crest
Theirs is the curse of the Gipsy blood
And they don't know how to rest

If they just went straight they might go far
They are strong and brave and true
But they are always tired of the things that are
And they want the strange and new

Import or not important?

I am now positively convinced any Java source code example should explicitly reference imports at package level.

Consider the JSF code snippet below extracted from here.

package com.mycompany.expense.ui;

import javax.faces.event.ActionListener;

public class ReportHandler implements ActionListener {
  ...
  public void processAction(ActionEvent e) throws AbortProcessingException {
    ...
  }
}

Even a seasoned Java developer (ahem) could accidentally import java.awt.event.ActionEvent (by force of habit, maybe?) instead of javax.faces.event.ActionEvent. Having done that, it's 'good luck, sucker!' trying to find the silly mistake from the cryptic JSF exception stacktrace.

And why is there an explicit import of javax.faces.event.ActionListener but not one of javax.faces.event.ActionEvent?

[Update]:
Cryptic (or absent) JSF errors revisited.

The Lily

Been thinking that my memory must be clogged with tech blurb from the books, blogs, and programming languages I deal with daily. As a way to kind of balance that (yeah, in my head this makes sense), I will try to memorize something non-techie every now and then.
This week's candidate is a short poem by William Blake (I'm aiming low to begin with)

The modest rose puts forth a thorn
The humble sheep a threatening horn
While the lily white shall in love delight
Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright

My way

My world, as of half-way through 2005


What about yours?