The first time this happened, perhaps 15 or so years ago, I started looking into other careers. I guess not surprisingly there wasn't a whole lot that appealed to me. As it happened I found the book Hackers by Steven Levy. I have no idea why but the book was entirely inspiring. I noticed that I was interested in coding again, in building things again. I found myself again seeking elegance in my creations instead of typing in whatever crap might work. It was a relief to realize that I wasn't going to be a sales guy, or a marketing droid or some other equally near death creature.

Anyway, I've been in a geek funk recently. I'm coming out of it now. I pulled out my copy of Hackers with it's browned, dog eared pages, each one nearly sucked dry of inspiration. But it helped. Free flow of information, as a principle, never seems to grow old. When I was putting Hackers back up on the shelf my eyes brushed across Alexanders The Timeless Way of Building. I simply love this book. It's eloquent valuation of the beauty of creations (not creation) nearly brings tears to my eyes.

I bought a Powerbook. One of the new ones. I'm sorry but I just love OSX. I've used I don't know how many machines and OS's, C-64, Apple II, SunOS, VMS, MVS, Xenix, SunOS, Solaris, Linux, DOS, Win32 in many stripes and, without question, my Mac is the finest box I've used in 20 years. It is absolutely beautiful. My previous laptop, a Thinkpad, ran linux. Linux is nice, largely because it's Unix and if you write code then Unix has the tools you want to wield as you chip away at whatever your sculpture of the moment happens to be. But it's really a pain in the ass. I didn't get sound working for a while, dealing with wireless was sort of a bitch, and wrestling with package dependencies...I'm looking for some scotch as I type this.

Finally, and just in the last 2 weeks, I broke out the big guns. I wasn't actually conscious doing this to de-funk, it just sort of happened. I started writing some code that uses Jini. It's a stupid little thing that processes batch requests for generating sets of data. I was on the couch one night, kids in bed, with my ever so nice Powerbook, using the most excellent IntelliJ, more or less absently minded typing. I wasn't quite sure where I was going, but I was moving. So out of the blue, like a fever broke, I got excited.

See, I love Jini. It's just so, what, eloquent? There's not a lot to it really. I mean the number of interfaces in the Jini spec is pretty small. But the ideas these relatively few interfaces embody are just so, pretty. I really don't have the words. Of course Jini also happens to talk right to my soft spot. I'm incredibly enthralled with building systems that run by themselves, that are tolerant of inevitable human error. Jini seems custom built for that. As I was typing along Jini was forcing me to catch exceptions it throws. For a few minutes I was frustrated. Code I write for a living smothers exceptions, or they're undeclared. That's sort of nice in some ways and, given the philosophy of that system, it makes sense (not really, but I don't get to make those decisions, so I tell my front brain things are fine so I don't go crazy). But I realized that the exceptions I was catching in this Jini code were actually useful. They were suggestions to me that said "this might happen, and you should probably deal with it if you don't want things to go boom". Nice.

try {
   ...
} catch( Throwable ) {
}

new ComponentUpdateThread( comp ) {
    public Object construct() {
        try {
            ...data = remote call to get data...
            ...sort list or otherwise...
            return data;
        } catch( Exception ex ) { // Catch everything
            reportException(ex);
        }
        return null;
    }
    public void finished() {
        try {
            ...data = (cast)getValue();
        } finally {
            super.finished();
        }
    }
}.start();

public void run() {
    while( !done ) {
        try {
            doProcessing();
        } catch( Throwable ex ) {
            reportException(ex);
        }
    }
}
 
private void doProcessing() throws ... {
}