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Logic, Fallacy, and Dobie Gillis

Brian Maso — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:11:45 +0000

Super-segue I’d like to take you on for no reason, other than to help you understand what its like to be me some times…

Just read “Programming and fallacies” on Michael Galpin’s blog.

Made me think of the very (very, very) old “Love is a Fallacy” humor writing by Dobie Gillis (book) author Max Shulman (– please read that some time, its such a riot). And when I say “old” I mean the original story was old when the old black-and-white Dobie Gillis TV show was on. In case you aren’t familiar, that was the show that launched the career of “Gilligan’s Island”’s Gilligan star Bob Denver before Gilligan.

But my segue-adled mind doesn’t stop there, because Dobie Gillis is no doubt the best example of modern humor a logical mind can ever read. And who defined modern humor? No shit: Freud. You probably didn’t know he wasn’t famous in his early career not for his mommy-mangled psycho-sexual theories — his PhD thesis in fact was the seminal text on laughter and humor.

That I know all those bizarrely ancient pop cultural references, and you don’t, means that

I am cooler than you;
I need more focused entertainment on Friday nights; and
you don’t need to worry about competing with me because my brain is constantly routed down these fruitless tracts.

Back by Popular Demand: Another Week of GWT 2.0 Training

Brian Maso — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:57:09 +0000

Response to last week’s GWT 2.0 training was pretty enthusiastic! So much so, that we’re running another week of training: 2.2.2010 through 2.5.2010. If anyone is interested in joining us in Irvine, for all or just part of the time, please contact me (@bmaso on twitter, or use the contact form). We can offer some pretty good prices for the remaining last-minute seats!

In addition to normal GWT, here’s the super cool topics we’ll be covering:

Code splitting — dynamically download different parts of the GWT app for efficiency
GWT integration with poplar toolkits (e.g., jQuery, ExtJS, etc.) through JSNI
Code generators and resource generators
Mashups and cool service integrations
Lots more!

This course is especially good for J2EE developers who don’t feel completely (or even at all) comfortable in JavaScript or the browser environment — you will end your time with us with some amazing “Browser Fu“!

Odersky Paper a Must Read to Master Scala

Brian Maso — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:51:45 +0000

Odersky’s Scalable Component Abstractions is an absolute must read for anyone planning on mastering Scala. The paper explains the purpose and use of three important Scala idioms you’d probably take a long time to figure out on your own:

Abstract Type Members. Prior to reading the paper, I figured abstract type members are just another way of expressing type parameters — that is, generic type params in Java. Not so! Abstract type members turn out to be an incredibly important way of promoting code re-use through subtype parameters.
Traits. “Module mix-in components” is the term used in the paper, but in Scala this means traits. The paper explains how traits promote code re-use through much more flexible composition than Java’s interfaces+single base class.
Explicit Selftypes. Not so mind expanding as abstract type members and traits, but definitely a concept that needs anchoring for someone coming from Java or similar OO languages.