To save explaining a hundred times over how I proposed to Beth, I've decided to put it in a blog post, much easier that way. For those of you that aren't aware, I proposed to Beth, my girlfriend of 15 months, on Saturday, and she said yes.

So, about a month ago, my Mum phoned me while I was at Beth's place. I answered the phone and put it on speaker, and Mum told me she wanted to have a late family celebration for my birthday, saying that she and Dad would be in Sydney on the 6th of December. She said she had found a really nice restaurant just out of Lithgow, and that she had to book and pay several weeks in advance. She asked Beth and I if we were free, which we were, and so we put it in our diaries. Little did Beth know, but this was all a ploy so that she wouldn't suspect anything when I drove her up the Blue Mountains.

So, I picked Beth up at 10am from her place in Castle Hill, and we started driving towards Lithgow, taking Bells Line of Road. About 10 minutes past Bilpin, I got a really bad cramp in my leg. You know how annoying that is when you're driving? It was so bad, I had to pull over and stretch. We pulled over at a pretty ordinary place on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.

After doing some stretches, I said to Beth "Hey, it looks like there's a nice view here, why don't you get out." So she did. As we were walking around, we noticed an unusual small pile of rocks. Being an immature guy, I decided to kick it over. She also decided to kick it, and then we noticed a very old looking piece of paper underneath. We picked it up, and it turned out to be a letter, dated 1851. The writing on it was very old fashioned, I'll scan it in sometime maybe and attach a picture of it to this post, but for now, here's the transcript. The letter was by someone who had "something", and was being pursued for it. This thing was too heavy, and he had to hide it. The letter contained instructions on how to find it.

We weren't sure how the letter got there, but thinking that there was a slight possibility that the letter had never reached its recipient, we decided to search for the treasure. We found the landscape exactly as the letter described, and soon we were at the entrance of a small overhang. There was a cross etched into the wall, and nearby we found a very old rusty shovel. So, I started digging, and before long, the shovel hit something hard. It was a treasure chest. I dug up the treasure chest, and opened it. Inside was a ring and two roses, lying in a bed of sand. As soon as I opened it, I picked up the ring, got down on one knee, and recited a poem that I wrote, which ended in "Will you marry me?". I won't attach the poem here, but if you really want to know what it said, ask me.

Beth burst into tears (this was my aim) and said yes. After that we headed back out of the valley, up to a high rock with a very nice view, where I had a picnic basket and esky with French champagne, cheese, Caesar salad, fruit and chocolate, and we had a picnic lunch.

As one last surprise for Beth, I took her out for dinner that night, telling her it was a dinner for two, but when we got there both sets of parents were there.

If you're interested in the logistics of the day, I'd been planning for about 6 months, though I didn't have a date 6 months ago, I knew that what I wanted to do would take a lot of work, so I started preparing it so that when I did decide to propose, I would already be half ready. I got up at 5:15am on the morning, drove up to the spot and planted the chest with 2 friends. I then went back to Sydney to pick up Beth while they waited up in the area. I phoned them when we were half an hour off and they went and planted the letter, and then waited for us to get there. 5 minutes off I pranked them, and they left.

Here's some more photos:

Close up of the treasure chest.

The ring.

The way down to the treasure chest was very steep and rough.

Where the chest was buried.

Many thanks to Mum, for setting up the decoy event and for writing out the letter, to Aaron and Denise, for helping me set everything up and waiting so patiently for me to pick Beth up, to Beth's parents, for arranging dinner that night and help keeping Beth completely unsuspecting of the event, to Leon Milch, for helping me design and making a beautiful engagement ring, and finally to Beth, for being the most amazing fiancée a guy could ever hope for.

I hate compiler warnings showing in my IDE. It's messy, and it usually indicates that something is bad. But not always. Sometimes, when working with third party libraries, you can't avoid warnings like unchecked assignments. These are easy to get around though, by using the @SuppressWarnings annotation. The unchecked assignment warning is a standard Java compiler warning. A quick Google will reveal that the name of the unchecked assignment warning to pass to @SuppressWarnings is "unchecked".

IDE's however tend to flag warnings for much more than what the Java compiler flags warnings for. An example that I encountered today is in unit tests, if you have no assertions in your unit test, IDEA will flag a warning telling you so. In my case however, I was using mockito, and my assertions were in the form of verify calls. IDEA does not yet understand mockito, so I am faced with compiler warnings in my code, which, as I said before, I hate. Surely I can use @SuppressWarnings to suppress this warning, but what's its name? Google didn't help me at all here, so I decided to do a little investigation.

After writing a quick shell script that unpacked IDEAs jar files and grepped for the description of the warning, I found that the code that generates these warnings is an IDEA plugin called InspectionGadgets. I found that each warning was checked for by sub classes of com.siyeh.ig.BaseInspection, and that the name of the warning, and its description, can be obtained by instantiating each sub class, and calling methods on them. In the case of my test method with no assertions warning, the class that flagged this was com.siyeh.ig.junit.TestMethodWithoutAssertionInspection, and the name of the warning was JUnitTestMethodWithNoAssertions. I can now suppress my warning.

All that work was probably too much to do for each time that I want to suppress an IDEA warning. So I decided to find every warning, and store it in a table. Obviously I wasn't going to do this manually, so using this neat utility for finding all the classes on the classpath, with a few modifications to limit where it searched, I was able to generate a table of every warning that IDEA can flag. Here it is, sorted in alphabetical order of the description:

Just when I finally got a mobile device that was (just) powerful enough to use most websites without pain, what does Google do? They bring out a new browser, which raises the bar for the minimum requirements needed to run websites. Ok, sure, there doesn't currently exist any websites that take advantage of Chromes performance. But I think you'll find that Google will start releasing enhanced versions of their apps targeted at Chrome, and, if Google are lucky and play their cards right, people will flock to switch to Chrome in order to use the cool new features of the Chrome version of their apps. And then what use will my the browser on my iPhone be?

But the thing to note about what Google have done here, is that they have created an improved new rich client platform for the web. As a response to the difficulties of using JavaScript and HTML to create rich client interfaces on the web, Adobe released Flex and Sun released JavaFX. These technologies have a chance at success due to the existing widespread availability of Flash and Java, respectively. But what they have against them is that they don't play well with the existing web ecosystem. For example, a search engine can't index a Flex or JavaFX site. However, it can index a well written AJAX site. The back button doesn't work on Flex and JavaFX sites, but again, can work in a well written AJAX site. Copying and pasting URL's is a similar issue.

Google have addressed the exact same problem that Adobe and Sun have tried to address, but Google has taken the opposite approach. Rather than rewrite the protocols and standards used in web based applications, they've beefed up the client to make better use of the existing protocols and standards. If V8 is really up to standard performance wise, who knows, you may find soon when visiting YouTube with Chrome, that you don't need a flash player, the videos are rendered by JavaScript¹. You may also find something similar for Google Street View.

¹ Maybe this is a little far fetched, but, if they were to write some JavaScript extensions, which they can do now, and everyone would love because then they can ditch Adobe and Flash, it just may be possible.

When I first heard about Google Chrome, I was very skeptical. Why does this world need another browser to contend with in producing cross browser websites? If open source is what you want, what's wrong with Firefox? So I had to read the Google Chrome comic, and I must admit, it has got me excited. But there is one feature in there that has got me concerned.

Google has suffered a large amount of criticism over the years in relation to privacy. From keeping information on your searches indefinitely, to reading your email, and most recently, getting too close for some with Street View.

One feature that intrigued me in Google Chrome is its location bar searching. It's very cool, it goes above and beyond the recent trend of other browsers to offer past url's based on title searches, it supports full text searching of pages you've visited. But, it also offers suggestions of popular pages that you've never visited. This is cool and convenient, but what does it mean? Everytime you type something into your address bar in Google Chrome, those words get sent to Google. This means that even without using Google's search directly, they can still see what you are typing into your address bar, and most users won't realise it. While that scares me a little, I'm more interested in seeing how the critics will respond to that, are Google up for another onslaught of bad publicity over privacy?

#herring, the long standing meeting place for many of ANU's 2004 software engineering graduates, has passed away. Born in 2002, on the Australian IRC network oz.org, #herring has been a lively channel for keeping in contact, arguing about meaningless topics, and a nice distraction from a busy days work. #herring, the solid backbone of a friendship group, you will be missed.