~pperalta

Last Thursday Jim Moore gave a well attended session on dynamic programming with Java at OJUG. Although Java is a statically compiled (to some extent) strongly typed language, the reflection API provides opportunities for dynamic programming that scripting languages are famous for, albeit with a clunkier interface. He went through some of the scripting languages that are available for the JVM, including Groovy, Jython, JRuby, and Bean Shell.

The subject of closures came up, as Java has been taking a beating lately over the lack of closures. Bloggers are talking more about this topic since there is a proposal floating about that would add closures to Java 1.7.

In this months issue of Men’s Health, they rank 100 cities for angriness. The criteria includes the following:

• percentage of men with high blood pressure
• rates of aggravated assaults
• numbers on workplace deaths from assaults and other violence
• traffic-congestion
• speeding citations

And the winner of the angry city sweepstakes? None other than Orlando, FL!

This ranking prompted an article in the Orlando Sentinel, as well as lots of commentary on the Sentinel blog. A quote from the Sentinel article:

“How can they say that of a city as beautiful as ours?” Salvagio asked. “Haven’t these people been to New York City?”

New York ranked 57 in this list, to the disbelief of many. I have not lived in NY for many years, but I do visit often. I don’t believe that New Yorkers are angry people (with the exception of most token booth clerks); I think that they are impatient. If you can adjust to the pace of life (or in some cases thrive on it) I think that you can do quite well there. Many people do, and they could not see themselves living anywhere else. Many don’t, and thus either can’t wait to get out or already have and have no intention of ever going back. That being said, New Yorkers can be quite helpful and courteous; in fact it ranked number one among world class cities in courtesy in this Reader’s Digest test.

Orlando seems to have a mix of both extremes. On the one hand, you have people that are impatient, especially while driving. They are easy to spot; those are the people that change lanes every few seconds to gain a few inches, run red lights, and tailgate. At the other extreme are those that drive on the left lane at the speed limit or below regardless of the traffic situation, and those that take 5 seconds to notice that the traffic light changed. So what we have is a mix of impatient, clueless, elderly (no offence to older people but their reflexes and eyesight aren’t what they used to be) and lost tourists all sharing the same road. There is no real public transportation to speak of so you must drive. All of this can lead to a bad driving experience. People are also not themselves behind the wheel of a car. It is much easier to flip the bird when you’re in your own car rather than doing it in someone’s face who you’re sharing a sidewalk or subway car with.

Something else that may have contributed to this ranking: crime. If you think that Orlando is safer than New York, think again!.

Monday was my first time attending the Orlando Ruby Users Group. I saw some familiar faces from OJUG, including Mike, Dominic, and Gregg, who runs the show at ORUG. He gave a great recap of the meeting on the ORUG site. There were two presentations, one by Nathan Bibler about a Rails i18n plugin, and the other by Robert Depmsey on project management for really small (as in one person) development project management. He introduced us to Basecamp, a hosted service by 37signals to collaborate with end users, as well as FreshBooks which is hosted invoicing software.

One of the coolest things that was mentioned was hackfest. This is where a bunch of developers get together and hack out some software in a day. Think of it as a lan party, except that you get to code instead of frag. The last hackfest resulted in a Google maps mashup, even though no participants had ever done one before. The next one is on September 9th, and they will attempt to create the rails version of PHPbb.

I have to say that I’m impressed with the group so far. This is a true grassroots organization, and the attendees are very bright and enthusiastic. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to learn some more Ruby so that I can keep up with them!