Sunday, November 10, 2002

Grady strikes again While Sarah was making lunch for Jonathan today, he stole the peanut butter sandwich from the counter. I've read about this kind of behavior in Beagles before but it seems that ours is getting a bit more aggressive in his food theft techniques. We might need to do something about this... 1:13:38 PM

Thoughts on refactoring and code ownership I'd never stumbled across artima.com before, but the site has a number of interesting Java related articles and interviews. It seems to be a one man operation run by Bill Venners. I was led there initially because of this interview Design Principles and Code Ownership, which turned out to be the second in a series of six with Martin Fowler. The first article was on Refactoring. I find Fowler's ideas about Public versus Published interfaces very interesting. Within a development group, I agree with this concept entirely. When public interfaces need to change, all of the callers can be quickly identified and in most cases, modified. There may be times when interfaces can't be changed but the older version can be deprecated and documented as such. The problem becomes bigger in organizations that are trying to share a large quantity of code across multiple development groups. In this type of situation, weak code ownership isn't really possible. Often you won't even know who is using the code or how. At that point, public does become the equivalent of published. Refactoring code for libraries takes a bit of care and patience to achieve interfaces which can be stable over a long period of time. If you don't put in the work ahead of time, the interfaces will do a lot of changing over time, making the library code less useful to others who might be interested in taking advantage of them. 12:51:30 PM

So bad it's good If you are a fan of bad B movies, in the style of Mystery Science Theater, then Shark Attack 2 will make for a fun rental. Apparently, there was a Shark Attack, which I have not seen, but the comments on IMdb do not indicate that many people found it funny. On the other hand, several people seem to have found the humor in SA2. I happened to catch it on the SciFi channel while reading the paper this afternoon. It captured my attention and I had to put the paper down to fully appreciate what an absurd movie this was. The general plot: A great white shark kills a young woman off the coast of South Africa. Scientists discover that there is more than one shark, that they are mutants which are more aggressive and growing much more quickly than normal and that they have abnormal hunting habits. The dialog alone would not move this film into the 'really bad' category. For that we needed special affects, and we got 'em. Jumping around (literally) between stock footage (some of which doesn't even appear to be sharks), models and CGI, we've set the stage for a bad movie to become surreal. That's where the sound track kicks in. The sound effect used for the shark attacks sounds like some kind of big cat (a lion or panther) doing their low volume growls. Combine these and you get a movie that is so bad, it's good (if you are into that sort of thing). Note: Holy moly, they're on a roll. It seems that Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is coming. 12:08:41 AM

© Copyright 2002 Dave Ely.