Critical Masses Technology, Inc.

Hi everybody! Today we would like to introduce you some of our new hints. This one is called Identical Comparisons and checks whether you use more strict identical comparison instead of simple equal comparison. If not it suggests you to change it to identical one.

If you don't know what is the difference between identical and equal comparisons, you can read it in official PHP manual.

And because we know, that sometimes there is a use case when you should use just equal comparison, this hint is row sensitive. It means that well known hint bulb will appear only if you are on the row with comparison. So no yellow warning triangle will scream on you ;) This hint just wants to help you :)

But there is just another advantage of this hint. It can change your "==" sign to "===" as you certainly expected, but it can detect the type of the right hand side variable and make a type cast for you too!

That's all for today and as usual, please test it and if you find something strange, don't hesitate to file a new issue (component php, subcomponent Editor). Thanks.

Ondrej Brejla

2011 was an exciting year in the Eclipse community.  From my corner of the Eclipse universe, he's what it looked like:


One book chapter, many thanks



I contributed a chapter on Eclipse to the Architecture of Open Source Applications in 2010 and the book was published in May 2011.  Thanks to Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, for their long hours editing and providing feedback to the authors of this book.  It's a great read!  When Greg first approached me about writing this chapter, my immediate thought was "How hard could it be? I live and breathe Eclipse all day".  It was much more difficult that I imagined but in the process I learned a tremendous amount and am a better committer for the experience.  Many thanks to DJ Houghton and John Arthorne for reviewing my drafts and providing valuable feedback. A special thanks to Jeff McAffer who I interviewed about the decision to switch to OSGi in 3.0 and Steve Northover for his suggestions to make the SWT section into something more pixel perfect.  Merci Olivier Thomann for answering my many compiler questions,  and Boris Bokowski and Paul Webster for their thorough discussions with me regarding the modelled workbench and dependency injection in 4.x.  Also, thanks to Mike Wilson to allow me the flexibility in my job to spend some time at work working on this chapter.  I'm excited to see that Amy and Greg are now editing a second volume of this book.

Six milestones, many release candidates, two service releases, and one coordinated release, four streams, thousands of builds, millions of tests
No rest for the committers.

143 bug fixes
I closed about 143 bugs in the releng bucket in the past year.  That doesn't seem like much really.  I'd have liked to solve more.  The largest issues implemented from a releng perspective were shared licenses, code coverage, and the largest work item, the Git migration.

42 Git repos 
The Equinox and Eclipse projects migrated all their repos to Git.  We now have about 42 Git repos.  This involved a tremendous amount of work on the part of the Eclipse team as a whole.  There were many whiteboard drawings and detailed discussions about the migration process with John, Paul and a Mr. Gheorghe.  There was no Ringo.  Thank you Paul for all the huge amount of testing, script writing, and migration of all the ui and e4 repos. Thanks John for your work many sage suggestions on our Git migration, as well as your suggestion to implement the git flow method to simplify our development and build processes.  Thanks Andrew Niefer for migrating many of the Equinox and PDE repos, Bogdan Gheorghe for your work with SWT, and Oliver Thomann for testing JDT Core repos.  Thanks Tom Watson for your Git advice, having already climbed the Git learning curve while working on the OSGi Alliance repositories.  To Dani Megert and Markus Keller, your always fine attention to detail and pointing out areas that could be improved is appreciated. Paul is giving a talk about our migration at EclipseCon 2012 called Let's Git this Party Started.  I'm sure it will be insightful and entertaining.

One EclipseCon, two talks, one castle, many great people
I was privileged to attend EclipseCon Europe in Ludwidsberg this past November and present two talks.  I thoroughly enjoyed preparing these talks, and even more presenting them.  On the Wednesday morning, I talked about our Git Migration, and that evening I gave a talk with John Kellerman about history of Eclipse over the past 10 years.  After the second talk, a few people came up to me and said that the talk was so good that it should have been a keynote.  That was very fantastic to hear because we really put a huge amount of effort into that presentation.  I also had a lot of fun talking to people at our booth where we had posted many pictures of the Eclipse family from over the years. The Saturday after the conference Simon Kaegi, Eric Moffatt and I visited Heidelberg castle.  Canada scores very low on the castle index so this was a treat.   


You can't buy Eclipse magazines or giant pretzels at train stations in Canada either. I was impressed.



19 blog posts
I didn't have much time to write blogs posts this year.  The most popular one I wrote this year was about smashing open source stereotypes.




I'm never sure how popular a blog post will when I write them. It's always a surprise.  The comparison of Mozilla and Eclipse build infrastructure I wrote last year still holds the record for most popular (it ended up on reddit).


One marathon, many kilometers of training
How is running related to release engineering?  Running keeps me sane when release engineering gets crazy :-)  Preparing for the Ottawa marathon in May means that you have to start training at the end of January.  Running through snow, ice, wind and rain teaches you there isn't really anything you can't do when you are willing put in a lot of hard work to reach your goal.  And when you reach that goal, there's a lot of joy, because you know that you have conquered all the obstacles in your path and emerged victorious.

My sneakers after a 19K training run through deep slushOpen source is really a huge team effort and I had a lot of fun in the Eclipse community in 2011.

Who knows what 2012 will bring?

I received word this morning of the passing of legendary Grumman test pilot Robert "Bob" Smyth. Smyth, 84, was responsible for an extraordinary contribution to civil and military aeronautics and astronautics.
After leaving the US Navy as a pilot in the Grumman F8F Bearcat, Vought F4U Corsair and McDonnell F2H Banshee and de Havilland 112 Venom, Smyth joined Grumman Aircraft Engineering in 1955. Smyth served as assistant project pilot of the Gulfstream I, consulting pilot and astronaut liaison to NASA on the Lunar Excursion Module during the Apollo program.
Smyth was at the controls for the first flights of the Grumman A2F (later the A-6A Intruder) and captured the experience in 2001, writing:Now, the real purpose of a first flight is to make a successful landing. There is a tremendous level of interest at this point. Hundreds of people have worked long hours for months to reach this point; a large part of the company's future is tied to the airplane's success; and the customer is anxious to see what he's buying. All this creates a great deal of pressure on all concerned. One person has it within his power to bring instant relief to all hands: the lucky guy who gets to make the first flight.His career spanned an extraordinary variety of aircraft, being the first to fly the Gullfstream II and as chief Grumman test pilot, flew the F-14A for the first time in 1970. Smyth left Grumman and joined Gulfstream Aerospace in 1981 and retired as vice president of flight operations in 1993.
Smyth spoke to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in 2007, discussing his incredible career and his indelible contribution to aerospace in the video above.
Smyth passed away yesterday at his home in Florida and is survived by his wife, Sally, and two sons, Robert and Andy.

In November, I delivered the keynote presentation at Øredev 2011. It was the second and probably final presentation in the series I call Building Social Software for the Anti-Social.

I've spent almost four years thinking about the Q&A format, and these two presentations are the culmination of that line of thought. In them I present ten "scary ideas", ideas which are counterintuitive for most folks. These are the building blocks we used to construct Stack Overflow, and by extension, Server Fault, Super User, and the rest of the Stack Exchange network.

1. Radically lower the bar for participation.
2. Trusting (some of) your users.
3. Life is the world’s biggest MMORPG.
4. Bad stuff happens.
5. Love trumps money.
6. Rules can be fun and social.
7. All modern website design is game design.
8. Thoughtful game design creates sustainable communities.
9. The community isn’t always right.
10. Some moderation required.

It's not the same experience as attending the actual live presentation, of course, but you can certainly get the gist of it by viewing the slides for these two presentations online:

The Øredev organizers hired ImageThink to draw each presentation on a whiteboard live on stage as it was presented. I was skeptical that this would work, but the whiteboard visualizations came out great for all the presentations. Here's the two whiteboard drawings ImageThink created during my presentation. (Yes, they had two artists on stage "live whiteboarding", one on the left side, and one on the right side.)

It's not a bad approximation of what was covered. If you're curious about live whiteboard visualizations, ImageThink posted a great set of links on their blog that I highly recommend.

After four years, we've mostly figured out what works and what doesn't work for our particular brand of low noise, high signal Q&A at Stack Exchange. But the title Social Software for the Anti-Social is only partially tongue in cheek. If you want to learn anything online, you have to design your software to refocus and redirect people's natural social group impulses, and that's what these presentations attempt to explain. I hope you enjoy them!

Update: Part II is now available as a full talk, with audio and video courtesy of GitHub. Watch it now!

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Between founding Stack Overflow (and later, running Stack Exchange) and having a child, I haven't had much time to blog about the holidays for a few years now. The last Gifts for Geeks I did was in 2008. Those recommendations are still as valid as ever, but I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to do it every year.

I've also come to realize, especially after having a child, that the goal in life is not to own a lot of "stuff", but rather, to free yourself from everything except that which is essential, and that which you love.

I'm still working on this, and I probably will be until I die. That said, there are a few essential things I think any self respecting geek should have, things I use all the time and I truly love – and I feel it's my responsibility to let my fellow geeks, and the spouses and significant others of geeks, know about them. Otherwise you might end up with yet another WiFi Detecting Shirt as a gift this year, and that'd just be … sad, for everyone involved. So consider this a public service, and feel free to share this post, lest you show up to work in January and find yourself and all your coworkers wearing Wifi Detecting Shirts.

As I wrote in What's On Your Utility Belt? I've been carrying LED flashlights since 2005, and just in that time the average LED flashlight has gone from bright, to very bright, to amazingly bright, to ridiculously blinding laser-like bright. You can thank Haitz's Law for that:

[Haitz's Law] states that every decade, the cost per lumen (unit of useful light emitted) falls by a factor of 10, the amount of light generated per LED package increases by a factor of 20, for a given wavelength (color) of light. It is considered the LED counterpart to Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors in a given integrated circuit doubles every 18 to 24 months. Both laws rely on the process optimization of the production of semiconductor devices.

Or, as I like to call it, "why you will be regularly blinded by flashlights for the rest of your natural life." But on the plus side, it also means that today even inexpensive LED flashlights are plenty bright for all but the most niche applications. You no longer have to pay a big premium to get one that's usefully bright. LED lights are so awesome, in fact, that I own and recommend no less than three form factors:

1. Fenix HL21 ($35)

   If you do any kind of DIY work at all, at some point you're going to want a focused light exactly where you are looking. If you can get over the "hey, I have this lamp strapped to my head and I look like a dork" factor, headlamps are ridiculously convenient. I had a much less bright (~40 lumens) headlamp and switching to this 90 lumen HL21 was a major improvement. I use this thing all the time. Looking cool is overrated.

2. Fenix E21 ($35)

   The E21 is much smaller than your typical full-size flashlight but it is every bit as bright as those giant police-baton like Maglites. It runs off two ubiquitous AA batteries, and has a pleasingly simple design, with an obvious switch in the rear and only two configurable light levels: low (48 lumens) and high (150 lumens). This is a flashlight you could buy your parents without baffling them. We own three, and each of our cars has one in the glove box. This is, in my opinion, what LED lights were meant to be.

3. Fenix LD01R4 ($40)

   The latest revision of the LD01 is the proverbial Every Day Carry; a compact single AAA flashlight. As long as you have your keys with you, you'll never without a reliable, bright enough light. Twist the cap to balance between runtime and light output; the three modes are 85 lumens for 1 hour, 28 lumens for 3.5 hours, and 9 lumens for 11 hours. Pretty incredible from a single AAA battery! Oh, and I recommend a lithium AAA battery because they run longer and are 1/3 lighter than other types of batteries. Normally I wouldn't care, but the reduced weight is surprisingly noticeable in something you'll have in your pocket all the time.

All these LED lights have one thing in common: batteries. It's unavoidable. Because you're a responsible geek, of course you use modern rechargeable battery technology. And as I wrote in Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries, sophisticated battery chargers are like geek catnip.

This is the LaCrosse BC1000 ($60), and it's a ton of fun to mess around with. Also, it recharges batteries. It might seem a little spendy, but it can do miraculous things like bring old nearly-dead rechargeable batteries back to life. And it comes with a bunch of actually useful accessories in the box:

• Nylon carrying bag
• 4 AA and 4 AAA rechargeable NiMH batteries
• 4 C size battery adapters
• 4 D size battery adapters

Yep, you can simulate C and D cells by putting the AA and AAA batteries inside the shells. The only battery type not represented here is the 9 volt. I own two of these LaCrosse chargers, and given the stupid number of AA and AAA powered devices in the house I'm thinking of buying a third. If you're a geek, you almost certainly have 99 battery problems, but armed with this baby, recharging ain't one. And don't forget the low self-discharge NiMH batteries, while you're at it.

Ah, the dremel. I think this Canadian forumgoer expressed it best:

It truly is hard for me to express the joy I feel when I am forced to break out the dremel; the last resort, the "Trojan Horse" of tools. In a dark place when all other tools abandon me and leave me heartbroken, the dremel always provides a loving shoulder to help complete my tasks. The dremel is a very selfless tool, he/she has no purpose to which they cling, yet is always willing to assist its fellow tools in completing theirs...

Drill strip a screw? The dremel can help... The jigsaw leave some nasty edges? dremel can restore them. I like to think of the dremel as the Jesus of tools.

They say Jesus performed many miracles and although it's not thoroughly documented, I believe his first miracle was, in fact, the dremel blueprint (he was a carpenter after all). The good Lord presented me with an image in a dream... I would like to share it.

If you don't own a dremel, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to turn in your geek card. The dremel is truly the swiss army knife of DIY projects. Any DIY project.

I use my Dremel about once every few months, mostly for things that I probably shouldn't even be attempting. But that's the beauty of the Dremel. It doesn't judge; it just helps you get s**t done, by any means necessary. I don't recommend buying a big Dremel kit to start, because it's hard to tell which accessories you'll actually want or need until you begin using this insanely versatile tool. I suggest starting with the entry-level high power Dremel kit ($90).

Finally, I have to put in a mention for an updated version of what is probably the most frequently used thing on my keychain, with the biggest bang for the gram other than my front door key -- the Leatherman Squirt PS4 ($24).

That's right, you no longer have to face the terrible existential conundrum of choosing between pliers or scissors. The new PS4 model now includes both pliers and scissors. This is nothing less than a Christmas miracle, people! (Oh yeah, and get this awesome tiny carabiner to attach it to your keychain so you can easily detach it when you need to bust it out.)

So that's it this year. Nothing extravagant. Nothing too expensive. No frills. Just essential stuff I love and use regularly. I hope you, or someone you love, will love them too.

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I put "debate" in quotes because this was more like a well-mannered talk show with two guests. Archived video on this site. Here's the significant point:

This was the first GOP debate of the four million we've had so far where the real winner was not Barack Obama. All the preceding debates have highlighted the very elements the Republican party would not like to bring into the general-election campaign: Fractiousness among the candidates; extreme, half-baked ("9-9-9"), or under-informed positions from many of them; sound-bite sloganeering from all of them; and barely any time to make a concerted case against Obama apart from saying that he's awful.

This time there were two informed-sounding adults talking in complete thought-sequences -- even to the point of dullness, which is not bad compared to the preceding craziness. And they offered thoughts that they simply could not have developed, or that would have been batted away with slogans, in the "normal" crowded-house debate with its 30- or 60-second segments. For instance, both of them explained why the defense budget really had to go down. Or the realities of what can be expected with Pakistan and Afghanistan. The ways in which China is both rival and partner, etc. Because they both knew they'd be able to make their points, there wasn't the desperation for air time that had made performers in all the other debates act as if they have to blurt out their attack-lines and applause-points whenever they have a chance.

I didn't agree with a lot of what I heard. Among other things: in this and the previous Republican debate, all the candidates have essentially said they would franchise out decision-making in the Middle East to the government of Israel, in a way that would seem bizarre if we were talking about delegating decisions to the UK or France in Europe, or to Japan or South Korea in East Asia. Still, this was the only debate that was overall a win for the Republicans.

On Newt Gingrich: Stephen Budiansky has a very penetrating assessment of why Gingrich sounds the way he does. To summarize, he talks the way people who know nothing about academics or intellectuals think academics and intellectuals would talk. Or, as Andrew Sullivan put it more bluntly, he sounds like "A Dumb Person's Idea of a Smart Person." When reading that item I couldn't help thinking about the Martin-Aykroyd "Wild and Crazy Guys" routines on SNL, showing what Eastern Europeans of the Communist era thought that hep-cats from the U.S. would sound like.



Congrats to Huntsman, Gingrich, the St. Anselm's organizers, and the Republican party on this event.

Eclipse has a nice location history navigation toolbar. By repeatedly clicking on the history toolbar buttons you can quickly navigate to the locations the cursor/focus was at in various editors that are open. Unfortunately, out of the box, the position of the history navigation toolbar buttons is not stable if you have files of varying types open in the editor area. That is because the toolbar contributed by various editors are shown and hidden as the focused editor changes. These editor contributed toolbars (shown in blue rectangle below), when shown, are inserted to the left of history navigation toolbar. The following two screenshots demonstrates the behavior.


Fortunately there is a way to fix this behavior. It is possible to to drag the editor toolbar to the right-most side of the toolbar strip like shown in the following screenshot:


With this adjustment the history navigation toolbar remains in same place making it easier to use.
You may have to unlock the toolbars to see the drag handles as shown in the screenshot below:

I think this should be the default location of editor toolbars in Eclipse. Just filed this enhancement.
Such small adjustments makes the tool more productive.

(See update below.) For an essay that says interesting things about America, and even more interesting ones about China, please check out a new dispatch at China Geeks. It is a translation, by Alec Ash, of a Chinese essay by Wu Yun called "Let's 'Occupy Chang'An Avenue.' " To get the joke you mainly need to know that Chang'An -- "Eternal Peace" -- Avenue runs between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City in Beijing, so it is shorthand for the Chinese locus of combined political/financial power.

More later on the background of the essay. A few highlights: Initially much of the Chinese media portrayed the Occupy movement as yet another sign of America's decadence and imminent collapse. The author disagrees:
Democracy clearly has its flaws, but OWS shows not the defects of democracy but its advantages. That protestors do not "go missing" [as they have this year in China] is thanks to the benefits of democracy, and the lack of violent conflict or loss of social order is an example of its accomplishments. The US government has not condemned nor suppressed, but rather sympathised* with the movement, nor have the crowds challenged the legitimacy of the government or the democratic system itself. Rather, OWS is happening precisely within that democratic framework.

In other words: we must change our perspective and see this demonstration as a rational expression of democracy, and the normal activity of a healthy society rather than the upheaval of it....
The essay even has an unexpected answer to the standard left critique that Obama economic policy went too soft on the bankers:
After the subprime mortgage crisis, the US government had no choice but to bail out the banks - if they hadn't, the consequences would have been even more disastrous. Some say the bailout was in collusion with financial oligarchs, but we have no cause for complacency because the Chinese economic stimulus cost us just as dear. The difference is: how much money we paid out and where and how it was used was not approved by Congress, let alone made accountable to the Chinese taxpayer. 
And, the world round, essays about foreign events are often platforms for talking about one's home country. Sure enough:
Just because China has no demonstrations like this, it doesn't mean it has no problems...

On Wall Street, angry young men protest the market monopoly of a few capitalist bigwigs, condemning these oligarchical as predators of the economy. Unfortunately, China's oligarchical establishment far outdoes America's. The state-owned enterprises that monopolise the Chinese market are for the most part controlled by so-called "princelings" and their relatives. Publicly-owned enterprises nominally belong to the people but in reality, besides raising consumer prices as they like, they have no connection with the people whatsoever....

Financial supervision may be weak in America, but at least the public can protest and Obama can do something about it. In China, the bad debts of banks and levels of corruption among regulators and executives are so dreadful that we daren't make them public. The inequality gap may be large in America but it pales in comparison to China's. [JF: Surprising to most people outside China, but true. As is the next sentence.] America may have scant social security but China has virtually no social security at all.
A view in China and America of protest as a sign of social health would be encouraging about both countries and about their ability to deal with each other. For the opposite view by Chinese officialdom, as I saw it earlier this year in Beijing, see this article. But check out this new one.
__
* Update: A Chinese reader wrote to correct to an earlier version of this translated sentence. Previously it said "has not condemned, suppressed, nor sympathised with the movement."

We focus on commercial programs, but occasionally a non-commercial aerospace story comes along  that is fascinating. The video from Iran appears to show a US made UAV that its says it captured. Indeed the language they used is that an Iranian military “electronic warfare unit” brought down the aircraft on December 4. What NATO has admitted is that it lost a UAV, but they have not admitted what type of UAV.

While looking at the Iranian TV footage, we have a short conversation with G2Solution’s Research Director and UAV expert Ron Streans. The conversation by definition is speculative, but it is educated speculation. Have the Iranian’s managed to crack the US’ UAV control systems? Is this really what it seems? If it is what the Iranians say, then we are dealing with a serious situation.

Play the podcast.

I was just reading the account of yet another victim of identity theft, whose GMail account was broken into. It's tragic, and preventable. If you have a smartphone, you really ought to set up GMail's two-factor authentication right now. It works very well for me.

Update And encourage your GMail-using friends to do the same!

(author unknown)

Watch this great movie (made me want to download immediately and begin creating some 3D games) by clicking the image of the jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK:

Details: http://netbeans.dzone.com/announcements/jmonkeyengine-3-beta-released

Geertjan

In the batch of new JSRs in the Java EE realm, here's a new one: JSR 352: Batch Applications for the Java Platform. It is submitted by IBM with Chris Vignola as the specification lead.

The goal is to provide a standardized programming model to implement batch applications and an API to submit jobs. The JSR proposal defines the domain area with batch job, step, application, executor, and job manager. It is meant to work with both Java SE and Java EE with additional qualities of service with the latter option (transactions, CDI, ...).

The schedule is quite aggressive with a final version due out by mid 2012. No inclusion in Java EE is planned for the time being.

alexismp

Our son was born March 12th, 2009. He's a little over two and a half years old. Now, I am the wussiest wuss to ever wuss up the joint, so take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt – but choosing to become a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done. By far. Everything else pales in comparison.

My feelings on this matter are complex. I made a graph. You know, for the children.

That one percent makes all the difference.

It's difficult to explain children to people who don't yet have children, because becoming a parent is an intensely personal experience. Every child is different. Every parent is different. Every culture has their own way of doing things. The experience is fundamentally different for every new parent in the world, yet children are the one universally shared thing that binds our giant collective chain letter of human beings together, regardless of nationality and language. How do you explain the unexplainable?

Well, having children changes you. Jonathan Coulton likens it to becoming a vampire.

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling – I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

Maybe tongue in cheek, but not that far from the truth, honestly. Your children, they ruin everything in the nicest way.

Before Henry was born, I remembered Scott Hanselman writing this odd blurb about being a parent:

You think you love you wife when you marry her. Then you have a baby and you realize you'd throw your wife yourself under a bus to save your baby. You can't love something more.

Nuts to that, I thought. Hanselman's crazy. Well, obviously he doesn't love his wife as much as I love mine. Sniff. Babies, whatever, sure, they're super cute on calendars, just like puppies and kittens. Then I had a baby. And by God, he was right. I wouldn't just throw myself under a bus for my baby, I'd happily throw my wife under that bus too – without the slightest hesitation. What the hell just happened to me?

As an adult, you may think you've roughly mapped the continent of love and relationships. You've loved your parents, a few of your friends, eventually a significant other. You have some tentative cartography to work with from your explorations. You form ideas about what love is, its borders and boundaries. Then you have a child, look up to the sky, and suddenly understand that those bright dots in the sky are whole other galaxies.

You can't possibly know the enormity of the feelings you will have for your children. It is absolutely fucking terrifying.

When I am holding Henry and I tickle him, I can feel him laughing all the way to his toes. And I realize, my God, I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten how unbelievably, inexplicably wonderful it is that any of us exist at all. Here I am with this tiny, warm body so close to me, breathing so fast he can barely catch up, sharing his newfound joy of simply being alive with me. The sublime joy of this moment, and all the other milestones – the first smile, the first laugh, the first "dada" or "mama", the first kiss, the first time you hold hands. The highs are so incredibly high that you'll get vertigo and wonder if you can ever reach that feeling again. But you peak ever higher and higher, with dizzying regularity. Being a new parent is both terrifying and exhilarating, a constant rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows.

It's also a history lesson. The first four years of your life. Do you remember them? What's your earliest memory? It is fascinating watching your child claw their way up the developmental ladder from baby to toddler to child. All this stuff we take for granted, but your baby will painstakingly work their way through trial and error: eating, moving, walking, talking. Arms and legs, how the hell do they work? Turns out, we human beings are kind of amazing animals. There's no better way to understand just how amazing humans are than the front row seat a child gives you to observe it all unfold from scratch each and every day, from literal square zero. Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

I wasn't sure how to explain meeting new people to Henry, so I decided to just tell him we've met a new "friend" every time. Now, understand that this is not at all the way I view the world. I'm extremely wary of strangers, and of new people in general with their agendas and biases and opinions. I've been burned too many times. But Henry is open to every person he meets by default. Each new person is worth greeting, worth meeting as a new experience, as a fellow human being. Henry taught me, without even trying to, that I've been doing it all wrong. I realized that I'm afraid of other people, and it's only my own fear preventing me from opening up, even a little, to new people that I meet. I really should view every new person I meet as a potential friend. I'm not quite there yet; it's still a work in progress. But with Henry's help, I think I can. I had absolutely no idea my child would end up teaching me as much as I'm teaching him.

Having a child is a lot like running a marathon. An incredible challenge, but a worthwhile and transformative experience. It leaves you feeling like you truly accomplished something for all that effort. After all, you've created something kind of amazing: a person.

Bob: It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.

Charlotte: It's scary.

Bob: The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.

Charlotte: Nobody ever tells you that.

Bob: Your life, as you know it... is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.

It's scary and it's wonderful in equal measure. So why not have another baby? Or so we thought.

Turns out, we're having two babies. Both are girls, due in mid-February 2012.

I've been told several times that you should never be crazy enough to let the children outnumber you. I hope to ultimately win the War of the Lady Babies, but when it comes to children, I think all anyone can ever realistically hope for is a peaceful surrender.

[advertisement] What's your next career move? Stack Overflow Careers has the best job listings from great companies, whether you're looking for opportunities at a startup or Fortune 500. You can search our job listings or create a profile and let employers find you.

(author unknown)

If you use development build, you probably noticed that NetBeans editor added Rectangular Selection action. I don't need this functionality every day, but it can be helpful in some case. One of such case is when you need to delete line numbers in a text  or code copied from  a tutorial. Like on the picture below.

You can select the rectangle after pressing Rectangular Selection toggle button in the editor toolbar or pressing CTRL+SHIFT+R shortcut. 

The selection can be easily done with mouse or keyboard. When you use keyboard, just place the caret on a corner, keep down SHIFT  and with the arrows keys you select what you need. 

When the selection is done, you can easily delete all the line numbers with pressing DELETE key. Then you have to exit from the rectangle selection mode (CTRL+SHIFT+R or toggle button in the editor toolbar).

If you write a text , then the text is placed on every line in the selected area. This can be useful for example for changing access modifiers of more fields in a class at once. 

Do you use the rectangular selection? For which cases? 

Petr