Cold differentiation, fusion and stuff.

[Crazy Eddie]

Ok, see, Cac, this is where you failed to bore me .... why on *earth* would only passwords beginning with "a" work? Layman's terms, please (wink).

If 'a' is the first character, nothing in the password gets changed and the password checks out. That ranks up there with one of the weirder problems I've heard about. I'd love to know what was causing that little beauty.

I'd also love to know why the geniuses at Sun went two whole versions with a debugger API that lets you get the bytecodes to individual methods but not the constant pool that actually has the items you're probably looking for (like the names of everything the method refers to) that the method bytecodes are simply pointing to, or maybe, just maybe, let you see the whole classfile? You still can't get the whole classfile through JDI! Or really, any reliable means at all other than through a native agent (a DLL!) that registers a ClassFileLoadHook and then caches everything that comes to it. What were those guys smoking?

But the JDI does let you give it a whole new classfile. Without letting you see the old one. But the structure still has to match up with the old one that you can't use as a template because you can't see it. Gee, thanks.

Oh well, if it was all straightforward, there'd be a lot more people qualified to do it and I'd have to find some other way to make good money. A few more wrinkles in the puzzle is a good way to keep me busy.

I don't want to know the nitty-gritty specifics of how you execute your job on a daily basis. I couldn't possibly understand it because I haven't your training and decade of experience. And I'm not really technically oriented. Trying to talk to me in specifics is indeed pointless. What I'm looking to find out how *you* are. How are you doing? I have to wait for you to break out with a cold sore to know that you're feeling stressed about something. You can tell me that you're concerned about a major upgrade or installation of new equipment without going into technicaly specifics and I can listen to your concerns and support you.

Hmmm. That seems like a short conversation when you can't get into what you're laughing at or frustrated about. But sometimes inspiration does strike and I can make something about the day into a good story. Sometimes I can't. But one should regularly give the ol' right brain a good workout anyway and keep it humming, since one can't dance in any form without it.

I will at times poke fun at certain ideas, but if someone comes to me in all seriousness, I will listen to what they say and given my counterpoint in a logical manner. I DON'T think people who believe in UFOs are stupid. I DO think that many of the people who do believe have been duped by others who present their case in a sophisticated way. On its surface, there is no reason to think that those doing the duping are liars. But unfortunately many of them are.

It's a big universe. There's bound to be some funny-looking people out there somewhere. And maybe a couple of them come out here to the boonies and look around just for the hell of it. Probably members of a species whose females are wired to find alpha-geeks utterly irresistible. A species whose females are turned on hearing someone like cac4 go into technical detail even if they can't follow it, much the way that human females like to watch human males perform physical feats they can't match. A species in which chromosphere's brain would cause women to throw themselves at him regularly and he'd have a good shot at having dozens of illegitimate children out there somewhere building spaceships, getting laid like rock stars, and breeding like rabbits. Unfortunately, here on Earth Newton was a virgin when he died, a disturbing fraction of our best minds today don't do much better, and we're stuck with groundcars a full hundred years after the Wright Brothers' achievement and we're burning the same fuel that John D. Rockefeller got rich off of.