I heard some pundits on the radio jostling about sports players with the best surnames for Scabble (ignoring the proper nouns rule). The best they came up with was Wayne Gretzky with 24. Unfortunately for the world, this made me think this would be a pretty nifty short programming task to do (src, tests). Doesn’t everyone hobby code over the weekend?

Scrabble has rules to abide by, such as no hypenated words (good bye Eric Djemba-Djemba) and due to the English character set we can’t have any accentated letters (goodbye the otherwise similarly fantasticly named winner Francisco Jiménez Tejada)

So here goes, the official best scrabble surnames for any player ever to have played in the English Premier League (one player allowed per letter for better distribution/bad code):

1. Kuszczak -> 36
2. Mazzarelli -> 30
3. Tramezzani -> 30

But wait! None of those names can be created using the letters available in the Scrabble set. So ignoring these heathens we are given:

1. Khizanishvili -> 35
2. Bozinovski-> 28
2. Warzycha -> 28
4. Djorkaeff -> 27

So there you have it folks, all hail ex-Ger Zurab Khizanishvili, a Scrabble scoring god.

I went along to the Java Users Group of Scotland on Wednesday to hear a talk by a colleague about the latest Java web framework. It was through in Edinburgh in the spiffy CIVIC office.

It was good to meet other people outside of the financial world who are using Java. In Glasgow the 3 big financial services probably employ over 2000 devs. So a substantial mindshare is dedicated to Trader focused development (glorified Excel). I often find myself wishing I could work on something which is available to the outside world.

After the talk a few prizes were up for grabs. Personal IntelliJ liceneses were the top prize (I’m lucky enough to already have one) though I managed to swag a free tshirt and a USB stick. JUGS also give you the opportunity to review O’Reilly books before they hit print. I would have quickly taken them up on this offer if I didn’t already have millions of books to read already!