Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 5 - June 12, 2022. This week didn’t have any training courses, but I gave a presentation on my book Help Your Boss Help You to two different groups.
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Last week I announced that my latest book, Mockito Made Clear, is now available in beta from the Pragmatic Programmers publishing company.
PragmaticProgrammers@pragprog
If you’ve only ever run a few JUnit tests or injected stubs into classes to return preset values, it’s time to level up your #Java toolbox. Save time. Write better code. Mockito Made Clear now in beta
pragprog.com
Mockito Made Clear
2:37 PM · Jun 1, 2022
3 Reposts · 5 Likes
What I didn’t expect was to make the Top Five list at the Prags site:
(Please try to ignore the fact they spelled Mockito wrong in the text of the tweet. It’s the thought (and the sales) that counts.)
Three books on Clojure (another alternative language on the Java Virtual Machine), then the latest edition of their canonical Rails book (version 7; I remember buying version 1 back in the day), then my book.
If you follow the link, the list goes on for 27 titles. I was hoping to see my Help Your Boss Help You book, mostly because I did two talks this week on that topic, and one of the clients purchased a bunch of copies to give away. It’s likely, however, those numbers haven’t been taken into account yet. If so, maybe both my Prag books will show up in their Top Twenty or so next time the list is released.
That would be awesome, because I’ve never had even one of my books show up in any of my publishers Top Anything lists. I’ve come to believe that’s a function of picking the right topic at the right time, which apparently now I’ve finally accomplished. :)
As I mentioned, this week I gave talks based on my Help Your Boss Help You book to two separate groups on the same day. Both were remote, of course, making that possible. I’m not sure even Venkat Subramaniam can give talks to two separate countries on the same day, though I wouldn’t put it past him to prove me wrong.
The first was given for a group whose background was very different from mine: the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. The subset of that organization I was talking to represented employees at Ryerson University, currently being renamed to Toronto Metropolitan University.
You have no idea how tempted I was to make a whole series of Ned Ryerson jokes.
You remember him, right? From the IMDB quotes page for Groundhog Day:
I restrained myself, but it was a close thing.
The attendees were union members who were employees of the university, and that’s not my regular audience. I believe a lot of the advice I normally give in my talk (especially on how to push back against decisions you don’t like) was relevant. At least I hope so. The talk did seem to go over well.
In the evening, I gave a similar talk to the Gateway Java Users Group, which is based in St. Louis, MO. That group was more typical, and also smaller, but very active. I got a lot of questions and comments, which was fun.
I know if you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny, but I don’t want anyone to feel left out. The Fibonacci series is a sequence where each number is the sum of the previous two. So if you start from 0 and 1, the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ….
Ken Kousen@kenkousen
Reminds me of one of my favorite nerd jokes: This year's Fibonacci conference is going to be as good as the last two combined!
Brian Bilston @brian_bilston
Today’s poem illustrates the danger of structuring poems based upon mathematical sequences. https://t.co/MCTNASa8FZ
6:58 PM · Jun 11, 2022
1 Repost · 15 Likes
Hopefully that joke isn’t as bad as my last two put together.
jim rose circus@jimrosecircus1
Meet Sugar, she doesn't like to be ridden. If Sugar is approached with a saddle she lyes down and pretends to be asleep. Sugar refuses to open her eyes until the riders leave.
2:18 PM · Jun 12, 2022
11.4K Reposts · 134K Likes
Best excuse for a nap I’ve ever seen.
J. Miguel Medina@Morphinart
Ship in a klein bottle 😬⛵️ #cinema4d #python #mathart #kleinbottle
11:08 PM · Jan 28, 2022
1.01K Reposts · 5.75K Likes
In case you didn’t laugh right away, here’s the idea: a Möbius strip is a band that can be created by attaching the two ends of a strip of paper together with a half twist:
It’s a non-orientable surface, meaning it can’t distinguish clockwise from counterclockwise. That ultimately means there’s no inside or outside. If you keep going in a straight line and you’ll traverse both sides of the surface, which is seriously weird.
The two-dimensional equivalent is called a Klein bottle, which is hard to show in a drawing:
It’s also non-orientable, so it doesn’t distinguish between inside and outside, so the ship on the surface is “inside” the bottle. Ship in a bottle, get it? Ha, ha. :)
The best reply I saw was:
✨ Roosevelt Franklin ✨@NielsJensen51
@Morphinart @seanmcarroll @numberphile Is the Captain of that ship Mobius Dick?
But wait, the Captain of Melville’s novel was Ahab. Moby Dick was the whale. That leads down this meta path:
Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster, which was created and abandoned. Of course, that means that Frankenstein was the monster.
Oooh, great moments in pedantry. I like the sculpture, though, which basically contains the entire universe. Yay, math.
All I’m going to say about that is this tweet:
Tamara Lush@TamaraLush
I just messaged my dad and asked him if he was watching America’s Got Treason tonight and for a little while he thought that was actually a show 🥲
8:16 PM · Jun 9, 2022
426 Reposts · 5.3K Likes
Says it all, really.
You may have noticed I dropped the Steph Curry updates from the last newsletter. I could only carry that gag so far, and I probably already exceeded that limit. For the record, the Warriors lost badly in Game 3 of the finals, but then Steph had a game for the ages in Game 4, leading to a win and a tied series. It’s been both close, and ugly:
Law Murray 🛅@LawMurrayTheNU
Warriors leading Celtics 422-421 with NBA Finals tied at 2-2. Both teams have made exactly 64 3s. Warriors have one more offensive rebound (40-39) Warriors have one more takeaway (60-59) Celtics have made 7 more FTs, Warriors have made four more field goals overall
4:28 AM · Jun 11, 2022
263 Reposts · 907 Likes
So even though each game has been won by 10 points or more, the total score for both teams is separated by only one point (!). Game 5 is Monday night, Game 6 is Thursday, and, if necessary, Game 7 will be a week from today (Sunday, 6/19), at which point I’ll be pretty much a wreck, so if next week’s newsletter is late, you’ll know why.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
No classes. In the immortal words of Rodney Dangerfield in Back To School, “Call me when you have no class.”
Help Your Boss Help You, presentations for the St. Louis Java Users Group and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
This week:
Functional Programming in Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform