Alex Miller has a really interesting blog post up today. In LBQ + GC = slow, he shows how LinkedBlockingQueue can leave a chain of references from tenured dead objects to live young objects.  That sounds really dirty, but it actually means something to Java programmers. Something bad. The effect here is a subtle interaction between the code and the mostly hidden, yet omnipresent, garbage collector. This interaction just happens to hit a known sore spot for the generational garbage collector.

Like a geocache, this is another post meant to help somebody who stumbles across it in a future Google search. (Or as an external reminder for me, when I forget how I did this six months from now.) I've liked here-documents since the days of shell programming. Ruby has good support for here docs with variable interpolation. For example, if I want to construct a SQL query, I can do this:

O'Reilly has released "Beautiful Architecture," a compilation of essays by software and system architects. I'm happy to announce that I have a chapter in this book. The finished book is shipping now, and available through Safari. I think the whole thing has turned out amazingly well, both instructive and interesting. One of the editors, Diomidas Spinellis, has posted an excellent description and summary.

This is off the beaten path today, maybe even off the whole reservation. Still, I searched for some code to do this, and couldn't find it. Maybe this will help somebody else trying to do the same thing. I'm currently prototyping a desktop utility using Ruby and wxRuby. The combination actually makes Windows desktop programming palatable, which is a very pleasant surprise. Part of what I'm doing involves showing messages with Snarl.

At the conclusion of the modulating bridge, we expect to be in the contrasting key of C minor. Instead, the bridge concludes in the distantly related key of F sharp major... Instead of resolving to the tonic, the cadence concludes with two isolated E pitches. They are completely ambiguous. They could belong to E minor, the tonic for this movement. They could be part of E major, which we've just heard peeking out from behind the minor mode curtains.

We missed the point when we adopted "patterns" in the software world. Instead of an organic whole, we got a bag of tricks. The commonly accepted definition of a pattern is "a solution to a problem in a context." This is true, but limiting. This definition loses an essential characteristic of patterns: Patterns relate to other patterns. We talk about the context of a problem. "Context" is a mental shorthand. If we unpack the context it means many things: constraints, capabilities, style, requirements, and so on.