I decided that my nick can no longer represent me, so I was left with the question how could I change it and its meaning but still be known (on opn too) so the best I could come up with that does reflect me is zenalot Therefore from now on I will be posting as zenalot, so I guess its time to say bye to "zealot", after all it was a spelling mistake that I only now realized the missing 'n' (not) (I'm also getting sick and tired of ppl asking whethere I play starcraft).

to be continued here zenalot

pointless maybe

If its one thing that I begin to realise more and more is that quick hacks have no place in commercial/open source code. Although the quick hack is cool it lapses in design but OTOH linux had no design from the beginning. I have become so accustomed to quickly throwing something together for it to just do the job and leave it alone only to be bitten on the arse later on. The quick hack does not have a place in OO code(java,c++,c#) and this stems from thinking about what your doing. Anything more than a few classes and a couple hundred lines becomes to much to not have a detailed plan/design. Without talking forever about code and design, this brings me to my question, how many open source projects out there follow some sort of design specification and what is the most popular?

Back to the quick hack, I believe this stems from my C background. I still place C on the top of my most preffered languages - why? - total control. To me, nothing still beats the command line compiler and [g]vim for development. btw I still stand by my statement that java layout managers suck. Java is a GUI joke.

java grudges

Here are a few of the syntactic/semantic constructs that I believe need to be fixed with java -

for(int i=0,int j=0;;)
instead of
int j;
for(int i;;)

and

return (int)(i==blah)?x:y;
which gives a stupid error, instead of 
return (int)( (i==blah)?x:y );

Btw, the layout managers in java are so seriously braindead that getting a GUI to look how you want it is like painting a dark and gloomy medieval painting using one hand with gentle strokes :P GridBagLayout is the only really useful layout manager but hideously complicated to get correct, FlowLayout should also go vertically - but of course.. you can create your own layout manager so I better stop complaining.. *sigh*

Someone from Oracle rang today and said something along the lines of "You've been browsing our site over the past few weeks, did you find the information you were looking for?" I thought hrmm lemme remember, err yeah just some info on oracle 9i. That was pretty much it but after a while it made me wonder - did he say that because I'm a subscriber to oracle magazine and just assumed that I would visit the site at least once a month? or are the big corporation bullies watching us more than what we think? Last but not least, how the hell did he get my phone number :-O and when I tick the box _don't send me updates about new products etc that includes not wasting time on the phone answering dumb questions and stop spying on me

Today absolutely r0cked! I spent the day at the honda indy down the Gold Coast, roughly 45mins south of Brisbane. I The power of those machines is absolutely awesome. I'm still trying to figure out how those guys walk away from crashes, on the main straight if you looked directly in front of you across the track all you saw was a blur and the sound of a car screaming past at roughly 300km/h.

Ic /. mentions the linux conference in my home town Brisbane in February. Cu there