Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Responding to blog suggestions

So yesterday I was given some suggestions on what to blog about. Let’s just get some of these out of the way, shall we?

1) How my husband keeps putting holes in his pants does not merit 365 words. It is likely because he, like many men, stuffs his wallet into his pants pocket and before long there is the outline of the wallet, followed by worn edges and small holes. He also has holes in his shorts and his shirts – which I suspect is simply due to the fact that several of these items of clothing are older than most 5th graders.

10) I do not know what to say about ‘whether a Java object is considered reachable by the garbage collector before its constructor is finished’ since I do not understand the statement. I do know that it is in reference to work my husband does, but that I do not understand either.

My daughter says that Daddy’s work is “pushing buttons” so, building on her insight, I will guess that the Java object’s reach-ability or collection or whatever could be considered dependent upon what buttons are pushed. Miya also knows that garbage collectors are men who drive around in big trucks every week - so perhaps Java objects should simply be left out on the curb.

16) I absolutely agree that yesterweek should be added to the common vocabulary. It already has been in our house.

17) I have found no evidence that beavers eat their young. They are exclusively herbivores and live in extended family units with monogamous mate-for-life parents. (D is invited to provide evidence for his alleged argument that beavers do in fact eat their young. I am sceptical.)

20) I will not quit this competition half-way through – although there are plenty of nights when I have been more than tempted and I’m sure there will be many more. I’m still not convinced of the value of this exercise beyond proving that I can make good on one of my impulsive ideas, but I do resolve to see this one through to the end. I already have enough examples of abandoned half-baked projects (i.e. a 30 foot scarf anyone?).

1 comment:

  1. For closure on #10: The object is in fact not reachable until the constructor completes, because even though it is allocated on the heap, it is not linked to either a root object or a stack object (unless it's something weird like a class definition or a JNI object, but those are best not thought about). Thus a weak reference to the object that is created within the object's constructor runs the risk of being nulled out immediately if the GC runs concurrent with object construction.

    Trust me, it is super-annoying.

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