Tales from the jar side: JChampions Conference, a Traitorous James Bond, JWST full deployment, the best Wordle starting word, and more
OH: When one door closes, another opens. Other than that, it's a pretty good car.
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 26 - January 2, 2021.
If you wish to become a jarhead, subscribe using this button:
I should also mention that when my newsletter becomes too long for email, you can see the full version online. If you ever miss an issue, the entire archive is there as well, and everything is free.
The last couple of weeks have been heavy on technical content, so this week I’ll skip all that and just go to the articles, events, and tweets.
Java Champions Conference
For those who might be interested, the JChampions Conference is a free, online conference where all the speakers are Java Champions:
Here is the schedule for all four days:
The nice thing about online conferences is that they can be spread out over two different weeks, as here.
If you look, you’ll see that my talk, entitled Functional Programming in Java, Kotlin, and Groovy, is scheduled for January 20 at 15:00 EST, which is some time around 3pm, assuming I did the math properly.
If you attend and you’re a jarhead, please say hi during the talk. Apparently I’ll have a moderator, but I plan to keep an eye on the comments anyway.
Evil Bond, James Bond
This is a long-ish article, but worth it. The story is from the Hollywood Reporter, and is called Beverly Hills Spy: How a WWII-Era James Bond Betrayed the Allies. The subtitle is just as good:
To his glamorous friends in Hollywood, Frederick Rutland was a dashing British war hero and a fixture of L.A. high society. To his Japanese handlers, he was Agent Shinkawa, an asset who provided critical intelligence in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor.
Wow. Basically, Major Rutland was a thrill seeker, known for being the first pilot to launch an aircraft from a ship (in 1916, during the Battle of Jutland in WWI, no less). Look for appearances in the article by Charlie Chaplin and Boris Karloff, as well as the fact he was paid to spy for Japan by Eisuke Ono, whose daughter Yoko made history in a completely different way.
I can’t believe this isn’t already a movie, but it’s probably coming.
Amusing Tweets
We had a significant snow storm this week. It was supposed to give us about 6 inches, but many areas around the state got as much as a foot or more of very fluffy, good snowperson snow.
It also gave me an excuse to post this tweet, which I also used a few years ago:
That picture always makes me smile. To give you an idea of how much snow we actually got, I took this picture:
A friend of mine replied with:
I immediately replied “Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage, innit?” and I was fully prepared to go through the entire Dead Parrot sketch, redone as a Frozen Bird sketch, but he didn’t follow up. For the record:
Speaking of movies that are over 40 years old (spoiler):
The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. My brother and sister saw it in the theater before I did, and they claimed that I actually predicted this twist (the dad thing, not the jeans money), though I don’t remember doing that. I know I was as shocked as anybody in the theater.
Deus ex Machina Airlines
For another movie reference, we finally got the definitive answer to one of the biggest questions from the Lord of the Rings:
MVP
In the IT world, we have a concept of an MVP: Minimum Viable Product. The idea is to create the simplest system that works at all, and then make it better over time. Here’s one of the greatest examples of an MVP I’ve ever seen:
Wordle Word
If you’ve started playing the game Wordle, here’s a tip on the best starting word:
The starting word is in the next tweet in the thread. I didn’t want to ruin his stats by saying it here. (I’ll probably include it in next week’s newsletter.)
January 6 Anniversary
I try not to get into politics too often in this newsletter. I’m not entirely sure what people read it for, but I know it’s not that. Still, the anniversary of the 1/6 insurrection at the Capitol hit me pretty hard. I’ll let one of the authors I follow, John Scalzi, summarize how I feel about things:
He says it way better than I could. A somewhat lighter-hearted version of the events is given by this, based on the musical Rent, appeared on the Stephen Colbert show:
JWST Fully Deployed
On a happier note, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues its journey to L2. This week NASA broadcast a YouTube livestream showing the deployment of the primary and secondary mirrors. I left the broadcast on in the background while I was working.
While I loved it, and everything went wonderfully, I have to say it reminded me yet again why I didn’t go into that field. Like so many kids in my generation, I was a child of Apollo, the NASA space program that sent astronauts to the Moon. Of course I wanted to go to space or work on the space program. Unfortunately, however, NASA retrenched in the early 1970s due to major funding cuts, and getting funding for anything significant in space has been like pulling teeth ever since. I couldn’t bear the idea of spending my whole career working on a space probe, only to have it fail at launch or run into a problem a few billion miles away. Worse, the idea that a mistake of mine would cost us a space probe still makes me shudder, and I’m not even in the field.
I watched the deployment this week on NASA’s YouTube channel, though I made sure to keep it in the background in order to deal with the stress. I mean, if anything had gone wrong I would have been devastated.
So far, it’s all good. Whew.
The current location, status, and temperature of the JWST is always available on the Where Is Webb page. The part of that web page that I find amusing is:
I know it’s an age check, but does anybody else remember the McDonald’s McDLT commercial whose slogan was, “Keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool”? Maybe it’s just me. At any rate, good job, sunshield.
Scalzi probably had the best tweet about the JWST deployment:
That also reminds me of the excellent life advice found on the side of a mayonnaise jar: “Keep cool but don’t freeze.” Of course, they probably didn’t mean Kelvin temperatures.
Have a great week, everybody.
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:
Work on my Mockito-related project.
Work on Intro Java materials for a private client.
This week:
Latest Features In Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Functional Programming In Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Work on my Mockito-related project.
Work on Intro Java materials for a private client.