Not all that unexpected I guess, but in yesterday’s vote, the Kansas Board of Education actually approved the teaching of Intelligent Design in Kansas schools. Damn, I’m glad I live in California. Still, this is a blow against all sane people in this country. Looks like we are slowly going back in time towards the Dark Ages…
As much as I love the Flying Spaghetti Monster movement, this one poses some serious competition: Church of Reality. The website contains an abundance of very well thought out pages. A lot of it is sarcasm, but there seems to be some deeper and honest motivation as well. They have actually managed to be recognized as a charitable organization by the IRS. And if that’s not enough, the website contains several pictures of the Linux Penguin and is littered with fractals....
It sounds like a new book might need to be added to the list of must-have Ruby books: “Enterprise Integration with Ruby”, written by Maik Schmidt and published as a Pragmatic Bookshelf title, is currently in beta. As with all Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, you can purchase the beta PDF now and receive the full PDF or paper version of the book as soon as it comes out. The book covers a diverse range of integration topics, including databases, LDAP, XML, low level services like sockets, HTTP, and REST, high level services like XML-RPC and SOAP, and more....
One of the Java programming questions I like to ask in interviews is: “Is Java pass-by-value or pass-by-reference?” A surprising amount of Java developers get this wrong, generally because the variables you mostly deal with in Java (other than primitives) are actually references to objects, rather than containing the objects themselves. Most developers blurt out something like: “Objects are passed by reference, and primitives are passed by value.” This is of course completely incorrect....
I hadn’t kept up with the Flying Spaghetti Monster movement for a while. It really seems to be gaining a lot of traction. In addition to many downloadable wallpapers, they now have a whole bunch of printable brochures, flyers, posters, etc., many of which are quite well done. But the funniest happenings have to be some recent propaganda events: Keep up the good work. :)