The Desktop Fishbowl
tail -f /dev/mind > blog

Wednesday, 4 September 2002

Lovely quote from Doc Searls (via Dave Winer) about Steve Jobs' contributions to computing: “They were also inventions intended to mother necessity” This week I'm experimenting. I bought a USB keyboard, turned off my Win2k desktop box, and I'm running the Powermac as a desktop replacement plugged into its monitor whenever I'm home. So far, I've not missed Windows one iota. 8:56:24 PM

A very interesting mailing-list post from Ralph Johnson, one of the authors of Design Patterns. He talks about good and bad Patterns practices. People who make up-front designs are attracted to patterns, because they think that patterns will help them to have designs with less of the flaws of their current designs. Patterns might help a little, but the real problem is lack of feedback and lack of experience, and patterns do not directly address these problems. If people are both designing and implementing systems, then when they use a pattern, they will quickly learn whether it works and whether it makes their system better. If they are doing paper designs then they will not, and so are likely to use the pattern inappropriately. 8:40:48 PM

My random Java peeve that popped up today, about programmers rather than the language this time: The StringBuffer Myth. I can't believe this particular myth still has wide circulation, but I guess it's far easier to create a meme than it is to kill one. 5:05:09 PM

I recently had a similar experience to John H. Farr. I followed a back-link from my referrer log, and found that someone was using my RSS feed to re-display my whole front-page on their website. I can't remember the name of the site any more—I was going to write about it at the time but I got distracted. Anyway, I think that republishing my blog on another site is somewhat less than polite. Hence, I've stuck a copyright notice in my RSS feed explaining what I consider to be permissable uses of the file: Copyright 2002 Charles Miller. This content is made available for personal use and limited syndication. It may be viewed, stored and cached without limit. It may only be republished in an abbreviated form: as headlines, with optional truncated summaries of the contained items. Permission is NOT given to republish this page in full, even if all credit is given to the original author. 1:20:01 PM

Just a random note. I love building graphical user interfaces in Cocoa. So many things that really suck to do in other languages (*cough* Swing) pass the “it just works” test on my Mac. 10:57:37 AM