Saw The Prodigy tonight here in Boston. The rawness of Firestarter [video] and Smack My Bitch Up has been replaced by impotentence and conspicuous cheesiness in the 12 years since the album, Fat of the Land, was first released. Regardless of the fact that much of the authentic (or at least believable) angst is missing, the music was obnoxiously loud and I had a fun time with some good company.

Oh, and by the way, what’s with the xenophobic mantra of the latest album, Invaders Must Die?

Today, Wolfram Alpha told me my life expectancy is 78.91 years as a 25 year old Canadian male.

Earlier last week, on May 4th, 2009, I released version 1.0 of Elm4J on the University of Calgary’s InnoVis Lab site. Elm4J is a Java library for representing hierarchically structured data, also known as tree data structures. It makes use of generics, provided in Java 5, to enable the creation of trees of arbitrary vertex and edge types. The library also comes with a handy Newick file parser. The project is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Elm4J is a Java port of an Elm, a C++ library I wrote in earlier 2008 as part of my master’s thesis project. Interestingly enough, I haven’t had the chance to release the original C++ project, though the progenitor should be released into the wild at some point in the next few months.

Today I updated Elm4J to version 1.0.3, after stamping out a bunch of bugs in the Newick file parser and extending the robustness of the tree traversal API. To this date, I’ve had one known user (thanks Darryl for the bug reports), so I’m already counting this as a win.

If you were to ask me how the last few weeks have been, I’d have to let you that things are ok and this pretty much sums it up:

From FFFFOUND, posted by Shaz Madani.