man, am i glad i work at home now.  if i didn't, i might not have one anymore!  i was at my desk this morning - prepping for a web seminar i'm doing in about 15 minutes when i heard this loud pop and sizzle noise.  then, the smell wafted in - the smell of electricity and burning.  i'm walking around trying to figure out what it is - when i spy a battery pack my son left plugged in to charge while he is at school, well, what was left of it anyway:

 that green bubbly looking bit - that is the battery pack - the words "fly model set" - used to be "straight and all the same size".  it was smoking, it was hot, it was sizzling.  i unplugged it and threw it outside on the concrete porch to cool off.

after it cooled off - i read the back:

it reads

refreshing time pleases according to the enactment of the manual refreshing, the person pleases do not leave.  when refresh to complete, asking real time to pull out the power supply, avoiding refreshing time over long, damage battery.

damage battery indeed - damage battery, burn down house is more like it.  it was only plugged in for 30 minutes!

i guess a new rule of life is "if the back of the plug is 100% gibberish - do not plug it in".

when i'm leaving my house empty for a while, i gotten into the habit of unplugging stuff - i'm definitely going to be more conscious of this in the future - i leave for days at a time, i'll be unplugging lots of stuff now.

i sort of wish us plugs were like those in the uk - with the little on/off switches on them, i'll have to search around and see if they exist - i'd replace all of my plugs with those.

memory leaks? we have a garbage collector!true. java comes with a garbage collector and makes reclaiming of heap space easier. on the other hand, java offers a number of features, which, if used carelessly, can be the root for your memory leak nightmares.
simple and temptingsince jdk 1.1 we have a quick, simple and tempting tool within the core language to create our own memory leaks. it doesn't matter whether we build server or standalone applications. this tool is called inner class. together with its twin anonymous class both are very efficient in creating memory leaks.
public class outer {
  class inner {
  }
}how is this?every non-static inner class has an implicit reference to its surrounding class. anonymous classes are similar. to successfully create a memory leak simply pass an inner class object to a method which keeps references to the provided objects and you're done.
why?suppose you implement something like a cache. next follow the execution path to a local object which stores some of its inner class objects into the cache. after the local object was out of scope, it won't be garbage collected anymore! the inner class object in the cache holds a reference to the surrounding object and that one is still referenceable and therefore not a candidate for garbage collection anymore. the same is true for anonymous classes!
how to prevent this style of memory leaks?

in october 2006 oracle launched their oracle accelerate program, according to their accelerate page oracle accelerate delivers a complete set of applications, rapid implementation tools, and an industry-leading partner ecosystem, allowing companies to maximize their limited budgets and achieve unlimited possibilities.

one major part of the product management role is "enablement". which basically means getting the world ready for your product. as such, its fallen to me to put together the enablement planning. the first stage of this (currently doing) is to pull together the vast list of new features and present them in a way that anyone who is picking up jdeveloper 11 (and who is already familiar with earlier releases of jdeveloper) will be able to quickly get up to speed. the initial idea is the enablement gets rolled out to our internal audience who then take it out on the road..