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2002 aug 7

<- 2002 august ->

existentialism

on the bus to work i've been reading mary warnock's existentialism. it's been a real pleasure - i'm now considering re-reading anne cohen-solal's biography of sartre, as i feel i understand a whole lot more.

perhaps the best thing about the book (and there are many other good things - it's short, clear, easy to understand) is warnock's authorial voice. i find that, when i read passages that are written in the first person i question what is being said (maybe it's just that i'm an argumentative old sod). and i'm sure that this is her intention, since existentialist writings are (apparently) largely aimed at drawing the user into a deeper awareness of their world.

it's also refreshing to see her trying to make sense of philosophers who clearly don't make a lot of sense. for example: [...] however many attempts are made to relate heidegger's philosophy to something more readily recognisable under that name, there will still remain a fairly hard core of sheer verbiage [...] or [need to insert a much better quote about relying on bluster when logic fails, once i find it again].

(mary warnock's top 10 books)

ps can't help thinking that sartre would have had a field day with the sci-fi series that featured a "shape shifter" that was rejected by his home "ooze" (maybe it's warnock's emphasis, but sartre seems to have had quite a complex about gooey stuff, and then there's the whol idea of being forced to live a solitary existence....)

java 1.4

this weekend i played a round a little with java 1.4. it's a definite improvement on 1.3, with features that make a lot of sense (logging, preferences). it's a pity, however, that instead of making threads so cheap that they can be used to solve serious problems they add support for polling, non-blocking sockets and all the rest of the ugly mess that exists in c.

( this article covers the new io stuff, but is (of course - it's on sun's site) wildly uncritical)

on the other hand, there's also a lot of crud kicking around in the java libraries. this article calls for a cleaned up version.