In related news, JetBrains recently open-sourced IntelliJ itself. Tomer’s work is still worth while, simply because there is no other tool we know of that does what it does – however the code there might use some refactoring now that he can simply use portions of the IntelliJ codebase. If you want to help, go on to the project homepage.

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There is some overlap between different sites, but most sites I’ve seen are original and useful. The owner/s of one SE site have been nice enough to post links to other SE sites, including Draw3Cards, at the top of their homepage!

Today I convinced a friend at work to open his own website, and I think you should to – before all the good ones are taken. Come and join us, it’s really that easy.

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• The (already-profiting) site on World of Warcraft (and site has barely been online for 2 weeks!)
• AskSci, in which I’ve been made moderator, but has been rather desolate since
• And MathOverflow, which seem to be already useful

I decided to try and open my own site, about Magic: The Gathering. The setup itself was rather easy. I:

• Bought a domain and set it up, with some help
• Seeded the site with some questions and answers
• Tweaked the color scheme, logo and favicon (thanks Eran)
• Got some friends to help out (though so far they’ve only posted answers, not questions)
• Setup Google Analytics, and noticed incoming search traffic only stayed for 42 seconds on the site
• Opened a small AdWords campaign, paying 1.5$ a day to test the water.
• Post the site on this blog, of course.

Now what remains to be seen is whether the site can accumulate the needed critical mass. For now, the site is in beta, meaning I don’t have to pay anything to keep it running (except time and effort). When the beta is over, the cost will be $129 a month, which is quite challenging to make using adsense.

Keep your fingers crossed for me

P.S.

Just got a $100 coupon for AdWords by visiting Google Webmasters Tools – how cool is that? In a second look, it appears the coupon was lying in my Webmasters Tools inbox for two months now, just waiting for the perfect opportunity.

I also forgot to mention opening a uservoice forum (+ adding the widget to my site).

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StackOverflow’s flood gates are open, and there are many new sites based on the stackoverflow engine.

One of those that I think has great potential is Ask Science, though at the moment it’s rather desolate:

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LockHunter (a 64-bit Unlocker equivalent) wasn’t able to unlock the folder (though it did well on folders locked by other processes). The problem seemed to go away after a reboot of the build agent, but then came back to haunt me. I tried asking this on SuperUser (StackOverflow’s colorful twin), but to no avail.

Well, last night I finally found the problem – my own computer had an open explorer window on one of the folders in the build server. I believe this window persisted even after an agent reboot. Closing it solved the problem, and achieved world peace.

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You can add a requirement for a system property “system.teamcity.agent.cpuBenchmark” to be high enough, in order to avoid builds running on weaker computers.

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What do I mean by that is that in C# things are usually done for you, behind the scenes, magically, while Java is much more explicit in the toolset it provides. For example, take thread-local storage. The concept is identical in both langauges – there is often a need for a copy of a member variable that’s unique to the current thread, so it can be used without any locks or fear of concurrency problems.

The implementation in C# is based on attributes. You basically take a static field, annotate it with [ThreadStatic], and that’s it:

[ThreadStatic]
private static ThreadUnsafeClass foo = null;
 
private ThreadUnsafeClass Foo
{
  get
  {
    if (foo != null)
      foo = new ThreadUnsafeClass(...);
 
    // no other thread will have access to this copy of foo
    // note - foo is still static, so it will be shared between instances of this class.
    return foo;
  }
}

How does it work? Magic. Sure, one can find the implementation if he digs deep enough, but the first time I encountered it I just had to try it to make sure it actually works, because it seemed too mysterious.

Let’s take a look at Java’s equivalent, ThreadLocal. This is how it works (amusingly enough, from a documentation bug report):

public class SerialNum {
     // The next serial number to be assigned
     private static int nextSerialNum = 0;
 
     private static ThreadLocal<Integer> serialNum = new ThreadLocal<Integer>() {
         protected synchronized Integer initialValue() {
             return new Integer(nextSerialNum++);
         }
     };
 
     public static int get() {
         return serialNum.get();
     }
 }

No magic is involved here – get() gets the value from a map, stored on the calling Thread object (source code here, but the real beauty is that’s it’s available from inside your IDE without any special effort to install it).

Let’s look at another example – closures.

In C#, you can write this useful piece of code:

var list = new List<int>();
...
// find an element larger than 10
list.Find(x => x > 10);

You can also make this mistake:

var printers = new List<Action>();
...
foreach (var item in list)
{
  printers.Add(() => Console.WriteLine(item));
}
Parallel.Foreach(printers, p => p())

An innocent reader might think this prints all the items in list, but actually this only prints the last items list.Count times. This is how closures work. This happens because the item referred to in the closure is not a new copy of item, it’s actually the same item that’s being modified by the loop. A workaround is to add a new temporary variable like this:

foreach (var item in list)
{
  int tempItem = item;
  printers.add(() => Console.WriteLine(tempItem));
}

And in Java? Instead of closures, one uses anonymous classes. In fact, this is how they are implemented under the hood in C#. Here the same example, in Java:

for (Integer item : list)
{
  final int tempItem = item;
  printers.add(new Action(){
    public void doAction()
    {
      // can't reference item here because it's not final.
      // this would have been a compilation error
      // system.out.println(item);
      System.out.println(tempItem);
    });
}
...

Notice it’s impossible to make the mistake and capture the loop variable instead of a copy of it, because Java requires it to be final. So … less powerful perhaps than C#, but more predictable. As a side note, Resharper catches the ill-advised capturing of local variables and warns about it.

I myself rather prefer the magic of C#, because it does save a lot of the trouble. Lambdas, properties, auto-typing variables… all these are so convenient it’s addictive. But I have to give Java a bit of credit, as the explicit way of doing stuff sometimes teaches you things that you just wouldn’t have learn cruising away in C# land.

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