Europe Travelblog  -

+ 9 - 3 | § ¶Silent Thread Death with JNI

In the application I'm writing for work, we use a third-party application that has a Java API wrapping native code (using JNI).  Under certain circumstances, one of the methods in the third-party application has a problem.  However, it doesn't throw an exception back to the calling code.  Instead, it displays an exception dialog and kills the thread.  This is really bad for my application, because it has resource management wrapped around the failing method, and the resource cleanup never happens, forcing the user to restart the application.

Is there any way to received notification that a thread has died?  Is there any way to be notified that a JNI method never finishes?  I've read a lot of JNI tutorials, and they all basically say not to do what this app does to avoid this situation.  However, none say what to do if you're stuck with it.

+ 6 - 4 | § ¶AB and GM Foods

Anheuser-Busch is threatening not to use any rice from my home state of Missouri in their beer if Missouri allows genetically-modified medicinal crops to be grown in the state.  My initial thought about this threat is that it's probably misplaced.  I don't have a fear of "Frankenfood" like many (particularly in Europe) have.  I could be wrong, but the whole thing seems overblown.

However, I have a bigger problem with AB's threat; the insistence in using rice in beer.  Rice has no place in beer!  Germans have made some of the best beers in the world for centuries without rice, and the law enforces this.  If AB actually cared about quality beer (or Frankenfoods), they would simply drop the rice from their formula and make a better beer.

I don't expect that to happen.

+ 7 - 3 | § ¶New York Times on a St. Louis Roll

The New York Times has another good article about St. Louis.  It's interesting, because it links St. Louis's resurgence with sexual politics.  As the article rightly notes, the resurgence of many residential neighborhoods in St. Louis is led by homosexual couples buying old housing stock for fixer-uppers.  However, with the strong anti-gay vote everywhere in Missouri but St. Louis last year, the article raises the interesting question whether this gay-linked growth could drive a wedge between St. Louis and the rest of the state.