This weeks amusing IT stories is a bit Christmassy but not that much and it's still tinged with 80's tastic flavourshttp://amusingitstories.blogspot.com/2006/12/amusing-it-stories-9th .html I hope you all enjoy this on friday

This weeks edition of Amusing IT Stories includes Karate Kid facts, Aha Video, some cartoons.  It has quite an Xmas theme to it this week and shows some bad Christmas cards and morale lifting Christmas decorations.Here's the linkhttp://amusingitstories.blogspot.com/2006/12/amusing-it-stories-8th-edi tion-if-you.htmlIt is also has a...

It's Friday so it's Amusing IT Blog release day, yiippeeeee it's a biggie today.  This week (big breath) we have pictures of clogs and space cakes and my is that cake spacey, if it got any more spacy I would call it Kevin.  I have Ferris Bueller quotes, loads of pictures, cartoons and doodles.  We have boring blogs,...

I have been using MySQL this week which is my first foray into the MySQL world and I'm happy to say it has been a nice easy ride.  I haven't done anything fancy with it, in fact I have really only be using it to create two very basic tables but basically I needed a database and MySql is free so it was a good choice. The download...

I read a good description of this today, it said defensive programming is like defensive driving, you take responsibility for protecting yourself even if it's the other drivers fault. It's always a bit of conundrum for me, how defensive should I program my methods, classes because it's likely that I am the only person for quite a...

It's friday so it's time for a new edition of Amusing IT Stories.This week you learn Tiger  Woods real name, some  Borat links,  a few work doodles and a cartoon a long with the old satirical favourites and not forgetting some true stories.so click the link and have a chuckle this friday lunch time, go on, you have earned...

A friend of mine sent me an email today pointing me towards Stroustrup's web page, for those of you who don't know he is the person who invented C++.   Here is his homepage http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ and it's quite interesting (even for a Java person)   of course because he invented C++ he is bombarded with...

I read this article last week but didn't have time to blog about it, I found this on the BBC and this isn't the first time I have read an article in this vain, the title is Computer industry 'faces crisis' The article is about the number of students studying computers at university has dropped dramitically.It's quite an...

Date is depreciated - Calander is King This week I had been working with dates which is sure sign of a lot of tricky nitpicking code and lots of little methods each testing certain bits of the code. The first thing that got me annoyed was the Date class is basically all depreciated except for just creating a date. This is fine and the reason...

It's a day early but here is this weeks Amusing IT StoriesHere's the Link Amusing IT Stories - 5th Edition - giving the internet an atomic wedgieThis weeks edition is a good mix of IT stories, links and cartoons and even has an Christmas idea on - the beer belly - stealth drinking vessel.  Power of Paint is pretty good this week...

Yesterday I blogged about The Average wage for Java Developers and the page where I got this information also had some interesting statistics regarding what other skills job adverts had when the word Java was mentioned.  The original source of that data can be found here. Below is are the IT skills that are mentioned in the same advert as...

I saw this fact today, which shows you that being certified doesn't guarantee you a higher pay rise, although it doesn't really seem to indicate what the wages were just that the percentage increase wasn't as high. I suppose I hope getting certified will increase my wage but I think the real benefit is the learning needed to obtain...

I found this very good link to a Generics and Collections tutorial for people studying for their SCJP Java 5 exam. I think Generics and collections can be quite difficult due to the number of tricky facts you have to learn. Generics in particular is quite difficult because it is quite different from the normal Java code and firstly puts in the...

 I was tempted to check for null the other day in a method and then I thought that you could really check for nulls in all of my methods. So I thought this must be a bad idea because otherwise it would be more common and what can you do if you find one.I thought about catching the null -- no if someone has passed in null it's their...

I read this blog again today Things you Should Never do, Part 1It reminded me of a chat I had with another developer the other day, he was discussing some legacy code and he came to the conclusion that we should really refactor all of these classes. I have to admit that I wasn't so keen. I enjoy refactoring, watching the code transform is...