Java

One of the big features that Java 6 added was the ability to use subpixel anti-aliasing when rendering fonts. This greatly improves the way fonts look on LCD screens, making it far more readable. By default, Swing now uses these AA settings.

Unfortunately, for what I can only imagine must be backwards compatibility reasons, text rendered by user components in Java still uses no font anti-aliasing. (Period.)

Fortunately there's API that allows you to enable subpixel rendering.

This error message is just priceless:

I love the title. It's really wonderful. "Problem occurred." You know, I did figure that out. I figured it out because an error message is being displayed.

"Unable to create the selected preference page" - this is basically the only helpful message for users on the entire box. And it's not very helpful because once you close the dialog, the same text appears in the preferences dialog anyway, making the error dialog practically worthless.

I've seen the double-checked singleton pattern before, and at first thought it would work. It's an attempt to reduce the penalty of requiring synchronized access to obtain a singleton.

Essentially the pattern is as follows:

public class Singleton {
    private static Singleton instance;

    public static Singleton getInstance() {
        if (instance == null) {
            synchronized(Singleton.class) {
                if (instance == null) {
                    instance = new Singleton();
                }
            }
        }
        return instance;

This thread on The Daily WTF is rather depressing. Essentially, the original poster is complaining about the following code:

So I'm trying to build an Eclipse application using Eclipse's ANT toolset. This would allow me to build an Eclipse application from the command line without having to go through the Eclipse GUI.

But whenever I try and run the build script, I get the following errors (path names changed):

I seem to recall Sun announcing they were going to open source Java, with some hints that Java 6 would be released open source around October.

Well, it's October. Actually, it's late October.

Where's Java SE 6, open or not? Java SE 6, Beta 2 has been available for months, since May if I recall correctly. (A beta, at least, if not beta 2 itself.)

It's fall 2006. Where's Java SE 6? Why have there been no status updates? When are they going to release it?