Quick Java Puzzler

September 14th, 2006

While I'm waiting for Eclipse to do an update: What's the one value you can pass to Math.abs(int) and get a negative value from?
Just ran into a bug caused because of it - fortunately it was picked up by the tests even before I checked in.

Setting Up A Fallback Font

September 14th, 2006

This seems to be the simplest description of setting up a fallback font I've found: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joconner/archive/2006/09/internationaliz.html

We occasionally come across clients with the problem of fonts not rendering correctly in the JRE so in future I'll be able to point them to this article. Fortunately, with Java 1.5 a pretty good fallback font is already provided so it's pretty rare that you need to do this these days.

Another Update, Another Broken Outlook

September 14th, 2006

It's reasonable enough I suppose, but annoying none the less. Everytime a new update comes down through Windows update, it breaks Office 2007 Beta 2 by "updating" some of its DLLs to older versions. Fortunately, the repair functionality in the office installer seems to fix it but it means waiting around for 15 minutes or so while it gets fixed. It would be nice if Windows Update checked that the file it is replacing is the one it expects to be replacing before going ahead - it would avoid all kinds of problems like this.

Sigh.