Tales from the jar side: Groovy Podcast, Android training, and very mixed Meme Watch involving Martians and vacations
The latest Martian rover reminds me that Hollywood spent over $900 billion rescuing Matt Damon (The Martian, Interstellar, Saving Private Ryan, Elysium, Courage Under Fire, Titan AE, Syriana, ...)
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of February 14 - 21, 2021. This week I taught a Basic Android course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and finally recorded another episode of the Groovy Podcast.
Groovin’, on a Tuesday afternoon
As readers of this newsletter probably know, along with Baruch Sadogursky I am the co-host of the Groovy Podcast, which is about “news and views from the Groovy programming language ecosystem.” We used to produce a podcast roughly every two weeks, but the pace of change slowed and we adjusted to every three weeks. Then we both got busy and the podcasts became once a month, and then last year fell off entirely.
We did get a request for one late last week, however, and it was finally time to get our act together. The result can be found on YouTube here:
You never know when the recording is going to snap that picture. Sigh.
The audio-only version is hosted at Podbean here, or you can listen on any regular podcast player. The RSS feed is found at this URL.
We do have a nice logo:
My friend John Swanson designed it for us. It’s based on the original Java Duke. We added the cape, the headphones, the mic, and the Groovy logo. I still think it looks awesome.
The show notes can be found here. This episode covered a few interesting topics:
Bruce Eckel’s blog post called The Problem with Gradle, and Cédric Champeau’s response to it (The problem with Gradle: really?).
The controversial decision by JFrog to discontinue their JCenter and Bintray services
The fifth anniversary of Groovy as a top-level Apache project
and many more topics. Listen or watch if you’re interested, and you can check the show notes to help you decide.
One other Groovy-related activity I participated in was the GR8Conf Friday Bar:
Most of the attendees were in Europe, though there were a few of us from the U.S. Most notable, however, was that the amazing Paul King was there. He’s the de facto head of the Groovy project, which is cool, but more significantly the Zoom call occurred at about 2:30 am where he lives in Brisbane, Australia. Somehow he seemed more awake than the rest of us. Go figure.
A good time was had by all.
Android Training Materials
Last week I mentioned that I was working through a series of Google codelabs on Android. Shortly after that newsletter was released, Google added a news item to the front page of the main Android site about training materials for Android:
That shows a list of slide presentations on Android topics, each of which is followed by one of those codelabs. I showed a few to my students in the Basic Android course this week, but I have a feeling that — like everything in Android — they got too complicated too quickly. Still, I’m working my way through them and may try to use them in any future training courses I have.
I find it notable that parts are already dated, and they don’t all represent Google’s own recommendations (like, many of them do not use the Android-KTX Kotlin extension libraries created to simplify Android code), but still, it’s nice to have something definitive.
Meme Watch: Ted Fled, and Another Mars Rover
As everyone probably knows by now (and definitely knows if you were freezing in Texas this week), Senator Ted Cruz couldn’t think of any productive way to help his constituents, so instead he and his family ran away to Mexico. I don’t need to say anything else — that statement speaks for itself. It did, however, lead to a few funny posts:
Or this one, hearkening back to a simpler time:
Or this one, trying to resolve a dilemma:
And even this one, which mixes two memes:
Speaking of mixing memes, we also got this:
Ugh. Enough of that. Fortunately some good things happened this week, foremost of which was the landing of the Mars Perseverance rover.
That’s the rover suspended from its “jetpack” just before its wheels touched down. Seriously cool.
The rover is called Perseverance, or Percy for short, which means the helicopter it brought along, called Ingenuity, needs to be called Ginny. :)
I liked this response:
I’ve been in New England for about 30 years, and my wife even longer, and we can verify that Laurie is quite correct.
This was probably inevitable:
Oh, and there are already signs of life:
Just a reminder: the full Looney Tunes collection, including the classic Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, is available on HBO Max.
This week was significant for another astronomical body, Pluto. I had always learned that Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh of the Lowell Observatory on March 13, 1930, using a blink comparator.
I liked that date, because it’s so close to my birthday. Apparently, however, Tombaugh first discussed the discovery on February 18, making the anniversary this week. I’m going with it, because it led to this wonderful tweet:
Speaking of mixing memes:
Finally, I just have to include this one:
That reminds me of this old gag:
(Cop pulls over a car for speeding)
Cop: Do you know how fast you were going?
Heisenberg: No, but I know exactly where I am. (rimshot)Cop: You were going 90 miles an hour!
Heisenberg: Great! Now I’m lost! (rimshot again)Cop (checking trunk): Hey, there’s a dead cat back here!
Schrödinger (in passenger seat): Yeah, now! (rimshot one more time)
Feel free to reuse any or all of that.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Basic Android, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Groovy Podcast episode 81, S05E01
This week:
Spring MVC Fundamentals, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Kotlin Fundamentals, same
Deep Dive Into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop