She knocks on my door.

Darn I was gonna start putting in those lookup calls... but you know she's very polite and nice, and whenever she has a question, I always end up learning something. Usually about an area that I hadn't been in before. She drags me into some area, and I look at it, and say, "Yeah, you're right, this doesn't make sense. Lemme think about this. I think, what you should do next, is this." So I'm getting an education too. And she thanks me profusely and maybe that's why I put up with her.

Fayeo Dahyog. File Dialog. java.io.FileDialog, that's a Java class. It puts up a dialog on your screen, you know when the computer is asking you which file should I do something to. They built this into Java, you just call the FileDialog and it does it. Well, there's some magical incantations and you have to remember that the show() call blocks and your other threads will be running in that time. Copy the example in the book and you'll get it to work.

So she has a problem with her FileDialog, she can't get it to work right. I remember, she said she was using a FileDialog the other day, I can't remember.

Fayeo Fitter. File Filter. java.util.FileFilter. She tries to use a FileFilter and it doesn't work. Now lemme see, yeah, here it is. FileFilter. They call you with a filename. You look at the filename, to see if it's one that you are interested in. This is what you do deep inside your program. If it is, you return "true", otherwise you return "false". So for instance you can tell it "I only want to see GIF files" by making your code check the last four characters of the filename to make sure they are ".gif". Or ".GIF". Better make a case insensitive comparison.

She tries to get her FayeoFitter working on a FayeoDahyog. The idea is to get your FileDialog so that it only shows GIF files, or whatever files. She's trying to only show ".java" files. Whatever. Not too hard. She couldn't get it to work.

Then, she says, she typed in the example from the book. She showed it to me in the book, a good page and a half of typing, she typed it all in, got the program running.

It still didn't work. She got a file dialog, but it showed all the files. Not just ".java" files.

Are you SURE it's saying... I read it in the book, my own books. You know books, half of my books are electronic. I've got the Help in Visual Cafe, I can websurf to java.sun.com, I can read the O'Reilly books or the Javasoft books. This particular information I have listed in four places, most of them say roughly the same thing, a kurt assertion that in fact, they do work as their names imply, end of story, no more details. I hate it when they just don't give you any details.

You use FayeoDahyog? Yeah, there's this place in my stuff that I put up a file dialog. It's very simple, I'm not using a file filter. I start explaining what I'm doing. You puh in FayeoFitter, she asserts. You try using FileFilter, see if you can get it to work.

A file filter, it looks pretty simple. Just one method, return "true" if it's a gif file, not hard. I hack it together in about five minutes while she's sitting there, syntax errors, get it to work. I put in a print statement, see if it ever gets called. If it gets called, I get a message printed out. If it gets called a hundred times, I get a hundred messages.

I fire it up. I get a FileDialog. But it shows all the files. There's no messages. My FileFilter is never ever being called, they don't care what files I'm interested in, they don't care, they aren't even calling my method.

Then, we're looking in my O'Reilly book and there's this one paragraph, set offwith rules above and below. "The JDK does not support the FilenameFilter with FileDialog boxes. FilenameFilter works but can't be used with FileDialog."

What the fuck does that mean. It's Fucked. It doesn't work. It's saying, "We have this feature. We've documented it meticulously in this book. But, it doesn't work. It's never worked, not in the mainstream version of Java. Maybe somebody else has gotten it to work. Not us."

Fuck You, in other words.

This is an outrage. But not all that surprising. We're used to it. We spent a good ten or twenty minutes bashing these assholes who do shit like this. Then we calmed down.