We are starting to use thrift and needed an ant build recipe. Here’s what we came up with. It works good and the only thing that looks like an abstraction leakage to me is that I needed to know the package, the java namespace, for the resultant generated thrift code and the name of one of the thrift generated files. The primary goal was to eliminate running the thrift generator when the generated code is newer than the .thrift files. There isn’t a one to one mapping between .thrift files and generated output so if any of the generated stuff is newer than any of the thrift then it all gets recreated.
I also didn’t want to have to copy the thrift output to someplace else, so a javac target was added to just treat the “gen-java” thrift output as a new source directory for direct java compilation. The normal ant target to compile the java code can now just depend on “thrift-gen”.
This quote is from a lovely little volume by John Urquhart titled The Wonders of Prophecy, or, What Are We To Believe?. The book is not dated, but seems to be from the early 1900’s.
There are few truths which have not had to run the guantlet of controversy: and those truths are our possession today solely because there happened to be men who, while they loved peace, would not part with conviction though the holding to it meant war. Science as well as faith has had its martyrs. They were brave enough to leave the beaten track in search of truth; and, when they found it, they were not to be frightened from their possession by the chorus of doubt and condemnation with which they were assailed. That man will do little in the world who can be terrified by clamour, or who surrenders convictions because all are not agreed as to their truth. The manly man feels that, in such differences, there is a call to inquire and to make his own decision. The rest, though it pains one to say it, are no great loss. The wind that sweeps across the threshing-floor takes only the chaff away; or, if it take with it too the light, withered, heartless, grain, the wheat that is left clean and sound is all the worthier of the garner.
Seems applicable to a lot of the goings on in the intelligent-design community, the vitriolic spewage from the new militant atheists, and lots of other current events at the intersection of true religion with the public square, true religion and science, true and false religion, and most people’s seeming apathetic lack of conviction and clear individual thinking on or about anything.
I learned about the need for homochirality in amino acids that can be used as the building blocks of life from A.E. Wilder-Smith. Dr. John Lennox also mentions it a little bit in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God
Here then is Casey Luskin interviewing Dr. Charles Garner who has been heavily involved in chrality research for 25 years. He speaks pretty candidly about OOL and homochirality issues – really fascinating stuff, about 13 minutes long, courtesy of the Discovery Institute.
You won’t read about this stuff in your high-school biology text books. Miller-Urey is in there, of course, but no mention of the racemic amino acids that were produced and their complete and utter unsuitability for life. We know from direct experience that some high-school biology teachers who spout on and on about Miller-Urey, upon being questioned about chirality and what Miller-Urey really shows or doesn’t show, claim never to have even heard of chirality!! Highest ranked high-school in the state. You can’t make this stuff up.