Tales from the jar side: Nostalgic anniversaries, Parallel tests in JUnit 5, Assorted requiems, and the usual tweets and toots

Before I die I'm going to eat a whole bag of popcorn. That ought to make the cremation more entertaining.

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of May 26 - June 2, 2024. This week I taught a Deep Dive Into Spring course as an NFJS Virtual Workshop.

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Anniversaries and Reunions

I’m feeling mildly nostalgic this week, which I’m mostly blaming on fighting a cold. I still taught my full-day Deep Dive Into Spring course this week, because it would take more than a cold to keep me from doing that, but my energy level has been correspondingly low and I spent a lot of time dozing. How that ties into nostalgia isn’t obvious to me either, but it must be a side-effect somehow.

Another source of that nostalgia has been a couple of anniversaries that I knew about but didn’t give much thought to at the time. One is that last weekend was my 40 year (!) reunion from MIT. Yup, some members of the good old class of 1984 got together at the Institute for reunion activities.

I never really considered going, though I was curious about some of my classmates. Every couple of weeks the school sent out a page of updates from the alumni directory regarding people in my class, which were pretty impressive (MIT students tend to have solid careers), but would have been more persuasive if I’d recognized the names of anyone listed in the messages. Seriously, I don’t think I saw one single name in all those messages that I remembered. Wow. I know I tended to stay in my own living group (Desmond House, also known as New House 5), but nobody from there posted anything. That meant if I did go, I’d be reminiscing with a lot of people I never met at the time. That didn’t sound like fun.

I mean, I’m glad I went to MIT. It’s a wonderful place to be from — it’s just a lousy place to actually be. While you’re there, you’re constantly overwhelmed with problems you can’t solve and work you can never finish and you never feel like you’re doing well. Everything moves too fast. It’s a fascinating learning environment, but there’s no time to enjoy anything.

Probably the most significant thing I learned in my years there was how to deal with failure. The place takes kids who may never have gotten a B in their entire lives and shows them that grades below C are real and possible and hovering just over the horizon if you fall too far behind. I know I’ve talked here about my first failed exam as a freshman, and the time I scored 7 points out of total of 57 on a mid-term once, but just because you learn how to deal with those situations doesn’t make them fun. MIT students establish what I call a “minimum standard of excellence,” meaning they do well enough to considered successful, without committing too much time to any single project or assignment. There’s no time for that. You figure out where you fit relative to class ave, do your best to achieve what’s reasonable and practical relative to that, and move on. The accomplishments add up, but there’s very little joy involved.

At least, that’s how it was for me. Maybe it’s all different now. But it was my reunion the school was pushing, and I didn’t feel much motivation to relive those days.

The other reason I didn’t feel like going, of course, is because reunions are massive opportunities for the school to beg you for money. I have five degrees from three different universities (two BS’s from MIT, an MA and a Ph.D from Princeton, and an MS from RPI), and they all want me to contribute. I should be “grateful” for all they’ve done for me, as though my efforts had nothing to do with it and I haven’t already paid for it (or at least my parents did for MIT). But, as Gollem said:

It’s my birthday, and I wants it!

There are so many charities that I feel really need my money. I give to RIP Medical Debt (now renamed Undue Medical Debt), a shelter, trans rights activities (Happy Pride Month, btw), a couple of religious organizations, and I even support about a dozen creators on Patreon. I just don’t understand how universities whose endowments are measured in literally billions of dollars need my help, just because it’s my graduation anniversary and they wants it.

Yeah, no. But it did leave me feeling nostalgic.

I also got a message from Princeton congratulating me on my 35th anniversary of my Ph.D. That confused me, because my final defense was in October 1988, but technically my degree says January 1989, so yeah, I guess it has been 35 years. Honestly, I feel less connection to Princeton than I do to MIT, mostly because after my first two years, I spent all my time working on my thesis with my advisor, and he didn’t even get tenure. Again, I’m glad I went, and I learned a lot, but that was all a very long time ago and in a very different world.

For those keeping score at home, after Princeton I joined United Technologies Research Center, which brought me to Connecticut. I spent 10 years there as a Research Scientist before going back to school at night (on their dime, fortunately) at Rensselaer at Hartford as part of my career change to IT. It took two years of night classes to get my MS in computer science and leave in May 2000. Right on schedule, they sent me a fund-raising plea late this week, which I treated about the way you probably expect at this point.

So where does that leave me? In July I formally start my new job as a Professor at Trinity College in Hartford. I can only assume at some point they’ll ask me for money. I’ll try not to laugh, but I’m making no promises.

Parallel Tests in JUnit 5

I’m in the process of rethinking the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel. I’ve become convinced that in it’s present form its growth potential is limited. The channel started with my statement, “if you don’t feel like reading my newsletter, that’s fine, I’ll read it to you,” but has always included far more technical videos than that. Now I think the newsletter videos aren’t really going anywhere. It’s been suggested that instead of talking about the newsletter, I should focus on those other videos, and try to focus a bit more on a couple of related areas. I may be trying that, starting this week.

As part of my training class this week I showed a JUnit test that accessed a REST web service from Spring using their HTTP exchange interfaces. I pretty much live on that these days, especially whenever I’m working with the various AI tools. One thing I decided to show was how JUnit has an experimental mechanism that allows you to run tests in parallel.

As the docs say:

You set the property junit.jupiter.execution.parallel.enabled to true, and then ask for parallel execution in one of a couple ways, and everything works from there. It’s remarkably effective. I haven’t talked about it much because it’s still considered experimental — or, rather, I thought it was still experimental. Now that I look at it, I don’t see that anywhere. Maybe I missed an announcement.

Anyway, I’m going to try to do a video about it this week for the YouTube channel. If so, I’ll mention it in next week’s newsletter.

Requia

… or should that be Requiems? What’s the plural of that?

According to Wikipedia, a requiem is a mass for the dead, and the plural is requiems. All I know is that there are three that I love, and one I got to attend this weekend. Let me be clear — no one died so I could hear a requiem, thank goodness.

There are three requiems I know to the point of having them practically memorized:

• John Rutter’s Requiem, which was the first one where I got to perform in our church choir, back in the 90s.

• The Fauré Requiem, likewise, where I even got to do the baritone solo, again in the 90s.

• The Mozart Requiem, which I was hired to perform as the tenor soloist, yet again back in the 90s, for a group called the Plainville Choral Society. This is also the featured piece is the fantastic (and wildly a-historical) movie Amadeus, which is how most people know it.

Here is a fantastic YouTube video of the best scene in the movie, which we know never happened but how cool would it be if it did:

I love the way the person who made the video wove the moving score into the scene so you could see and hear the whole Confutatis movement.

Keep in mind that the movie Amadeus has about as much connection to the real life of Mozart as the Disney’s Hercules has to the myth of Hercules, or the Will Smith movie I, Robot has to any of Asimov’s robot stories, or even most of Hollywood has to most of actual reality, but the performances are so wonderful I’ve always loved that scene, as well as the rest of the movie.

Mozart (Tom Hulce): How would you translate that?
Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): Consigned to flames of woe.
Mozart: Do you believe it? A burning fire that never ends, for all eternity?
Salieri: (Knowing what he’s done the whole movie) Oh yes.

Wonderful. The way it depicts the talented professional confronted with a genius beyond anything he can reach, and his resulting descent into self-destructive jealousy, bitterness, and evil, is amazing. The music is pretty good, too. 🎶

As for this week, on Friday my wife and I attended a performance by the Hartford Chorale. In honor of the 100th anniversary of his death, they performed a concert called J’adore Fauré, which included, among other pieces, his Requiem.

There’s nothing like a full choir projecting a great piece of music at the top of their lungs. We really enjoyed it. I’m also at the age now where I can relax and enjoy the music and not wish I was up there performing some role or other.

Old gag:

Q. How many tenors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Three. One to do it, and two to say how they could have done it better.

Besides, they don’t even have a tenor solo in the Requiem, and the baritone they hired was excellent. His Libera me was magnificient.

Here’s a link to a performance by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, in case you want to hear a good one now.

Tweets and Toots

The Kindness of Bill Walton

Here’s a direct link. Breen’s story about the kindness of Bill Walton is so touching.

Best AI analogy ever

“Firing your chefs because microwave dinners are cheaper” is just the perfect way to describe replacing real employees with AI. I’m totally using that in the future.

On the other hand:

Women’s work

That description works well enough to be truly uncomfortable. Wow. Nicely done.

Given the other musical entries

Oh well. I guess I’m a robot.

Happy Pride Month

Let’s be clear — we’re supposed to be beyond this by now. It’s maddening that we’re still fighting battles that were won years ago. But fight them we must, and we’ll win. Again.

Wait, what?

No kink-shaming here

That would explain so much.

And finally,

Think about it

Devilishly difficult, right?

Have a great week, everybody!

Last week:

• Deep Dive Into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop

This week:

• Latest Features in Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop