There is something deeply embarrassing about the state of your nation, when the time to get a new apartment in a different city is not measured in weeks or months, but rather in seasons.

Once upon a time, while still in high school, I ran a BBS called OPOOP. This was a very mysterious name, and it meant “Organized Programmers against Object-Oriented Programming”. This was in the days when every program written in C++ suddenly became half a megabyte bigger than the C equivalent; and in those days, half a megabyte was a lot.

The best programs were written in assembler. Every line and every function handcrafted and fine-tuned. If you ever wrote a program bigger than 40 kilobytes, you were awesome!

A lot of things has happened since then. Computers got a few hundred times faster, a thousand times more memory to play with, and deadlines that require rapid application development.

I have since then become an avid enthusiast of object-oriented programming, finally seeing the light. I spend my time thinking about class design, reflection, composition and abstraction. Multiple inheritance is nothing I rack my brain over anymore; that concept is so 90’s.

It was with some shock and fascination that PHP forced me to improve my class design today. I had constructed a rudimentary persistence layer for writing and reading objects from a database. But because PHP’s inability to correctly identify inherited classes in static methods – PHP seems to lack virtual static methods – I was forced to improve my design and build on composition instead of inheritance.

The added effect was that I now could use POPO’s instead. POPO, for the uninitiated, is a twist on the Java POJO, meaning Plain Old Php/Java Objects. It means that the data objects don’t inherit from an abstract parent class, which – if they don’t – is Good Design.

And suddenly I realized that I had gone full circle. If I ever write a book about my software experiences, it will be called “Mats Gefvert: From OPOOP to POPO”.

I signed the contract on my new apartment today.

I am now – well, from the 15th of March actually – “owner” of an apartment in Skärhamn. Or at least I rent it on a first-hand contract. I met the landlord today and he seemed like a really nice guy; we sat down with the current tenant and signed contracts.

It is a really beautiful apartment. Older house, with about six tenants in it, and quite newly renovated, so it looks really beautiful. And it is the largest in the building, too. The bathroom and the kitchen is really classy; not just one notch up from my current place, it’s a couple of notches.

But no dishwasher. Please excuse the following rant, but I have to say it. What is up with that? This is the 21st Century. According to all the predictions (and I quote, among others, the TV series Jetsons as among my references) we should have had household robots by now, that swoop around the house, walk the dog, cook and clean, and that can answer the phone. And we don’t even have dishwashers? I feel cheated on my future.

Anyhow. It’s done now. I’m home.

This is the first time I’ve ever felt “home” in Stenungsund. This is my home now. Still I haven’t moved here; but this is the place I call home. I even dread going back to Skövde, I don’t even want to be there anymore. I’m done with that.

I walked around outside half an hour ago and proclaimed “Diese Stadt ist meine Stadt! Mein, mein und nur mein! Sie gehört mich! Mich allein!” (Yes, I speak German with myself. Don’t comment on the grammar.)

So there it is. It is done, finished. “From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.”

I’m home.

There are three magic numbers in mathematics that stand out above all else. The first one is π, the relationship between a circle and it’s diameter; there’s e, the natural logarithm that permeates so many areas of mathematics; and i, the square root of -1, which is an impossible and unthinkable number (for no number multiplied by itself can ever be negative).

These three numbers, e, i and π, have nothing to do with each other. They stand remote in meaning and effect from each other, all three of them deriving from different areas of mathematics and with long and different histories behind them. And yet, there is an equation that ties them together in a most astounding symmetry. It is:

e^iπ = -1

All of these magical numbers sort of, in their own special way, cancel each other out. Where there is no apparent symmetry, if you only combine them together like the final pieces of a huge puzzle, suddenly a remarkable symmetry appears: It’s minus one.

I’ve often thought about this minus one, too. It, too, represents a form of mathematics that is unusual. You can’t really measure -1. You can’t go -1 yards, you can’t measure -1 ounce of flour. It is a reflection of real numbers; negative, elusive, but not without its own agreeable symmetry and beauty.

Some people like to write the equation as

e^iπ + 1 = 0

This strikes me as enormously masculine, for some reason. The numbers are all positive; it’s all bright and sunny, on the positive side of things, and seems to say “hey, look what a nice, happy result we get if we tweak this equation a little. We’ve got i, e, π, 1 and 0, and a plus sign. It covers everything fundamental in mathematics.”

But I like the first way better; it seems more fundamentally feminine, in a way; almost a bit of Yin and Yang in a sense. The feminine side is not too concerned about shaping things right by force; it’s happy with accepting a minus one just on its own merits. It shows you that you don’t have to mangle everything to get a nice, round result from it; that things can end up with a negative one and still be beautiful in its own special way.

To me, the minus one is like a nymph in a secluded, enchanted forest, gazing lovingly down into a clear, dark pool of water at her own beautiful reflection; something that can not be touched, smelled, or sensed – just lovingly gazed at and admired from afar. And this is the ultimate beauty I see in the equation above: Three fundamental numbers in universe combined into one elusive, mystical reflection.

And they say math is boring.

I just got my new computer today, a brand new laptop with Centrino Duo, Bluetooth and the whole shebang. And, it came with Vista preinstalled.

My first impressions of Vista, however, is rather negative. I’ve spent the last four-five years getting Windows XP to work pretty much just the way I want it. I have it set up to the point where there are very few annoyances left. I have a personalized start menu, which allows me to find anything I want very, very quickly, with a superior overview.

Vista changes all that. It’s like they’ve tried to solve all my problems, which I have already solved, in a less efficient manner. And in the process, they’ve thrown in a lot more eye candy, which is neat, but mostly it just clutters the view. Semi-translucency is way cool, but it actually serves very little purpose and it actually distracts.

And beyond that, it’s just eye candy on top of Windows. My personal impression is that it’s just getting harder and harder to find what you want.

Then again, it’s all brand new, and it takes time to find your way in a new setting. Maybe I’ll get used to it, the same way I got used to Windows XP. But so far, the “Wow!” factor eludes me.

I have a song, sung by Lee Greenwood, that nearly makes me cry. After a long, hard day of work, I might put it on, and it opens so wonderfully with a class of schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. And then Lee starts to sing it.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands,
One nation, under God, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all…

I get this insane urge to stand up in my little cubicle, right then and there, lay my right hand on my heart and recite it myself. I pledge allegiance…

Hardly was there ever any more powerful pledge. It rings with freedom and liberty through the centuries; it quivers with the passion of free men standing up for their truth, their rights, their freedoms; it echoes with the cries of American soldiers shedding their blood for freedom’s sake on the beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal…

Passion for the flag. Passion for the ideals of the nation that was forged in the fires of heated conflict and the struggle of a million souls for their liberty… Freedom so big and powerful you could reach out your hand and touch it.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(Poem on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty)

I pledge allegiance, to the flag of the United States of America…

I brought a cat to work.

Of course it’s not a real cat, it’s a fake one. But it lies so silently and comfortably on my desk that when people pass by and see it, they jump out of surprise to see a cat there. And then they move closer, carefully reaching out and petting it, and then they quickly realize that it’s not alive.

It’s been the talk of the office for days now. Meine kleine Katze.

What’s the point of having makefiles if they don’t work?

Borland Developer Studio (formerly known as Delphi) builds nice little project group files, that look exactly like makefiles.

The problem is that if the projects included in the makefiles are in subfolders, the makefile doesn’t recurse into these directories, but runs dcc32 from the current folder. And then the compiler can’t find any files.

Why is that?