Andy Chase

To quote a friend's recent weblog entry,

"Humans are animals."

This was not said in, nor am I quoting it in, a breathless, moralistic context... I'm just an observer who's spent more of my life watching people's little social games than participating in them.

The other day, I was in downtown Northampton. At the main intersection they have replaced all of the pedestrian walk signal buttons with these optical doodads that you trip with your thumb instead of pushing a button. (Clever; nothing mechanical to wear out after getting pushed hundreds of times a day.)

This is mentioned in the Velocity User Guide, but not very explicitly: If you need to perform an arithmetic operation on a Velocity variable, that variable must have been created as an integer.

What this means if you're passing a HashMap of parameters to the Velocity engine is that you need to pass in an instance of the Integer class. Otherwise, the expression will evaluate to null and the variable will remain unchanged.

If I had to guess how much time I've put into this tenor banjo, it would not actually be very much compared to the number of weeks that have passed... maybe 15 hours altogether. Today was the first time in about a month that I've managed to find a number of consecutive hours to work on it, and I got a tremendous amount done.