bustard, blackbird and barbie w/added gig list

3rd Nov, 2003 at 4:40 PM

A few years short of bringing back the wolf, but permission has been granted to bring back the bustard. Go go Great Bustard! You will greatly improve the Salisbury Plain.

After my weekend of missing gigs (sorry Dickon, Mark, Ben ...) I decided it was time to buy some tickets -- Chicks on Speed this Wed, Electric Six next month. I did this at the weekend instead, among other stuff.

The neurotic blackbird (so traumatised by urban life he just sat on my neighbour's TV arial alarm-calling all day) has returned! I thought he had been eaten by one of the hordes of local cats, but perhaps he had just been on holiday, as I heard him the other day, tick-tick-tick-tick ... he even tried a little bit of song! A bit rushed and panicked, maybe, but definitely song. Best wishes to Blackbird.

I forgot a meeting this morning. But I remembered lunch. I'm a winner!

Barbie-themed object oriented programming lesson. "As discussed in class, it is not possible to create a Transvestite class that extends from both the Male and Female classes, rather, we have to make Male and Female into interfaces and have Transvestite implement both interfaces." Oh-kay ....

Current Mood:another f***ing migraine

Comments

( 13 worms — Feed the birds )

marstokyo

3rd Nov, 2003 12:14 (UTC)

Or Ken and Alan!--
http://marstokyo.com/kenalan.html

Link | Reply | Thread

cleanskies

3rd Nov, 2003 15:41 (UTC)

ah, those old dolls

are so much cuter than the heavy grown-up Ken of the 70s-80s or the brattish fashionplates of more recent years.

wouldn't you say?

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

marstokyo

3rd Nov, 2003 16:04 (UTC)

Re: ah, those old dolls

Jeez!!! THAT'S a Ken doll? What's with the button eyes? he looks like a cartoon character!

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

cleanskies

3rd Nov, 2003 16:12 (UTC)

no, no

though he is by Mattel. He's Sunshine Family Steve -- the Dad of the family, despite his boyish good looks and diminutive size (Ken dolls tower over him). Dates from the early 70s. I like the eyes -- they make him look sort of owlish. His wife (Steffie?) has blue eyes that look far creepier. I've passed up buying her from the market about five times now.

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

marstokyo

3rd Nov, 2003 16:26 (UTC)

Re: no, no

Psew!! well as long as they didn't change Ken into THAT. ;-)

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

thegreenman

4th Nov, 2003 02:23 (UTC)

Re: ah, those old dolls

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Sorry. Bit of a shock that was.

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

sparkymark

3rd Nov, 2003 13:45 (UTC)

You couldn't have a Transvestite extending Male and Female in Java, but you could in C++: the tutorial for C++ I learned from used Scaramanga's car as an example of a class extending both Car and Aeroplane, classes derived from a base class Vehicle.

Link | Reply | Thread

cleanskies

3rd Nov, 2003 15:42 (UTC)

ahh

I was wondering if this sort of thing was actually very ordinary.

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

sparkymark

3rd Nov, 2003 16:12 (UTC)

Re: ahh

I wouldn't say ordinary: most courses use boring things like "You can't have a new Shape that is a both a Circle and a Square". The Scaramanga example was the only funny in my course.

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

damiancugley

5th Nov, 2003 09:55 (UTC)

Brutally sexist *and* Java-specific

Notice that you can fail this lesson by refusing to pander to the teacher's sexist view of the world, which seems a bit harsh.

The restriction to single inheritence is allegedly a simplifying feature of the Java programming language. This bisexual doll thing illustrates nicely why the restriction actually makes programming more complicated.

Phrases like mostly copy and paste from your other classes is a strong indicator of future maintainability problems -- what happens when you change the implementation of Ken but forget to make the corresponding change to Pat?

There is also the interesting assumption that the set of transvestite behaviours is the sum of female behaviours and male behaviours (Pat both shops for shoes and watches sports). Is this plausible? Are they really claiming that men never buy shoes (and presumably go around barefoot) and women never watch TV?

It's a lot easier to express in Python:

class Woman(Person):
def glow(self):
pass

class Man(Person):
def perspire(self):
pass

class Hermaphrodite(Woman, Man):
pass

In other words, a Hermaphrodite can both perspire *and* glow!

Link | Reply | Thread

cleanskies

6th Nov, 2003 02:47 (UTC)

thanks

for that ;)

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

archontic

6th Nov, 2003 10:43 (UTC)

beooutifuuuuuuull blue

does it glitch out and do weird stuff? i love screenshots of computers having a funny moment.

Link | Reply | Thread

cleanskies

6th Nov, 2003 16:28 (UTC)

glitching out was about all it *could* do

what

mzdt neglected to mention when he was trying to push it onto all his friends was that the 2 was stuck in the down position, meaning you had to type very fast indeed to break through the 22222222222222222222 effect; also the escape key and several of the function keys were no longer strictly operational.

Also, that's

mzdt's TV it's plugged into.

One cool thing we got it to do was change the colour of the background and text. A completely blue screen! How we laughed. {:

Link | Reply | Parent | Thread

( 13 worms — Feed the birds )