I’m about to block IE6 completely from my website. If you’re on IE 6 and read my blog, now is your time to scream. Note that RSS readers which don’t report their user-agent of IE 6 would still be allowed, so if you are on IE6 and want to keep reading this blog, I’d suggest getting yourself a good RSS reader.

For reasons on why to do that, check out Stopping blog spam or Why I started to block Internet Explorer 6. It was shared to me by a comment on this blog from the post For Those Using Internet Explorer 6: Please Stop.

Plus, I’m with Matt’s comment on that post: the only way we’re going to get people to stop using IE6 is if we marginalize it to the point where people complain to their bosses or their nephews or whoever controls whether or not they upgrade.

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[Edit: Some documentation has been added to clarify this issue -- see Groovy's Extended Guide to Method Signatures on the wiki. And now that I've read through the documentation and grok the way that Groovy is intending to work, I actually like it. At first, though, it was a bit of a nasty shock.]

Running this in the groovyConsole:

void custom(Class cls, Map args) { println cls.name + " " + args }
custom(Integer.class, foo:"Bar!")

Explodes like this:

groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of
method: Script3.custom() is applicable for argument
types: (java.util.LinkedHashMap, java.lang.Class)
values: {[foo:Bar!], class java.lang.Integer}
at Script3.run(Script3:5)

I expect the explosion, but it looks like the types of my arguments are getting swapped around before it explodes. In fact, if I swap the order of the arguments around at the call site…

void custom2(Map args, Class cls) { println cls.name + " " + args }
custom2(Integer.class, foo:"Bar!")

…the code runs without a hitch.

It turns out that Groovy intentionally reorganizes arguments passed into a method for you, beginning with the naked map, then normal arguments, then varargs.

More at my (closed, “Not a Bug” JIRA ticket): GROOVY-3006. See also Groovy-3009 for more issues with method reordering.

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In the hopes of spreading some of the love for my posts, I’ve upped the recent post and popular post widget size in the sidebar of the blog.
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So, Chia’s blog post on reality got me to jell this post, which is kind of sort of an answer to Chia’s post.

If you ask me what authors had the largest influence on my philosophy, I’d have to answer with three: Carl Sagan (Cosmos, Contact), Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminati Trilogy, Shroedinger’s Cat), and Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions), . At which point, if you’ve read any two of them, you’d be inclined to ask the follow up questions of what am I smoking, and why aren’t I sharing? Carl Sagan and Robert Anton Wilson had a decades long feud, both calling the other out in their books. And both would have almost certainly looked down on the “fuzzy headed new ager” Richard Bach, had either noticed or cared. Reconciling any two of the three would seem, on the surface, to be impossible.

And yet, all three are, in a very real sense, true. The resolution comes when you realize that all three are talking about different realities, with different rules. And that the statements they are making are only true in one reality, and not necessarily true, probably even nonsensical, when applied to a different reality.

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Anyone who has seen “The Matrix” knows that determining what is “real” is a lot trickier than it seems at first:

“The Matrix” demonstrates that our intuitive identification of “real” is easily fooled. Even that conception of “real” where you get people together and see what you can all agree on — called “intersubjective varifiability” — is a faulty and limited definition of “real”. So what out there is “real”, and how do we know? Phrased differently: how do we know what we know? That question is the driving query behind the vast philosophical field of “epistemology”, but that question has some interesting, approachable, and practical insights.
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