Today I decided to look a into a bug we encountered when using the Sun Java JRE 1.6 on certain distributions of Linux. When we first found the defect it became pretty clear that something somewhere had changed between JDK 1.5 and 1.6. In 1.5 everything worked like a charm. In 1.6, the best case was a hang and the worst case seemed to be the JVM exploding internally.
Either way my pronouncements that things worked just fine thankyouverymuch on the Mac weren’t going to cut it as far as getting the defect fixed.
So, in order to debug the issue I started installing a bunch of different Linux distros into virtual machines.
And then I sat around.
And waited.
And watched the progress bar.
And then finally complained on Twitter.
Thankfully my friend Mike took pity on my plight and replied back promising approximately two minute worth of diversion.
Boy was that two minutes well spent. His link led me to this blog post which contained this bit of YouTube powered awesomeness:
My reply Tweet to Mike pretty much sums it up:
Naturally this all got me thinking about how little gunpowder was needed to hurl this anvil into the air. That then led me of course to Wikipedia’s History of Gunpowder page. I knew that it had been invented by the Chinese a long time ago but I had no idea that it was probably done by some master alchemist who was searching for the “elixir of immortality.” (Boy did he miss on that one.)
In fact here is an artistic representation of the master right before he accidentally blew himself into smithereens.
I guess that’s why the original inventor of gunpowder is still somewhat anonymous. It must have been up to his surviving apprentice to be in charge of the story after his master blew up like a JDK 1.6 on Linux.
And we all know that the apprentice isn’t the one that specializes in blatant self promotion…
Have you seen the movie “Sweet Home Alabama” (Reese Witherspoon)? There is much to enjoy, including flying anvils.