Medieval Programming

Seems that I am a bit loaded with doing creative writing. Besides day2day work I am preparing

• A presentation about Optimizing Symfony Performance for the symfony camp, happening from 11th – 13th September. Luckily I got most of the slides already done and just need to polish and prepare the rest.
• A manuscript for a book I am planning to publish next year. At the moment I am discussing it with some publishers.
• A talk/review of Effective Java 2nd Edition, which will present the New and Noteworthy. I will hold it on our company Friday events. Later the material will also be published on our webpage.
• Material for a regular column in a german Java magazine. My part will be Web stuff.
• The symfony 1.2 release. Well actually no creative writing, but some planning, coordination and of course some programming as well.

But I am not complaining, I like being loaded with work. It makes relaxing a whole sunday even more interesting. But I thought it would be nice for you to know that I have less creative writing time for my blog at the moment.

Today I received a T-Shirt from Sun.

There was a marketing campaign in spring 2008 promising free T-Shirts for everybody doing a certification in a given timeframe. Well I did two.

Then in early June I received two separate shipments with one T-Shirt each. I really thought I blogged about this, because I thought its quite interesting to see how slow sometimes global business is. I was just not used to something taking 2 months to travel from USA to Germany. But perhaps I decided that in the end there was not much special about it.

But today it has changed. I received a T-Shirt, as said before. But well, I did two certifications, so why a third T-Shirt? It gets even more interesting, because the date on this was even before the other two ones i received. It took 4 Months for it to arrive in my mailbox. There is a stamp from German customs on it, unfortunately without a date. My best guess is that it arrived at the same time at customs as the other two, but has fallen behind a desk or something

But even in that case, how come sun sent me 3 shirts instead of two.

Bonus Question: The label says: “Here a free retake exam voucher, be sure to use it before June!”. Do I need to do time travel to use it?

Perhaps I need to create a category for mystery parcels?

… at least sometimes …
Today I had my “you forgot what you learned for the SCJP” moment.

long MSEC_PER_YEAR = 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;

Despite the fact that this is not not accurate, due to many things (leap year and seconds, possible adjustments to DST), this should match the milliseconds between to dates one year apart.

Well at least I thought so, but the computation is incorrect. I did figure this out after a while (and ended up rewriting it anyways), so I am pretty sure one of my readers can come up with a solution for this “puzzle”