We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

- Frank Tibolt

I suppose that is how skunk works projects get started. Seriously though, I think Frank is right. Sometimes you just need to put pencil to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and get something started. Oftentimes the inspiration will come later.

It reminds me of my old friend Bob Zimmerman. Bob had Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, something he used to his advantage. Bob was a very good coder, but could not focus on a problem long enough to design a solution. His approach was to start developing lots of solutions until one worked. One colleague remarked that with Bob's approach "one starts with the solution and the problem slowly begins to emerge".

The quote also reminds me of an old-line manager that used to walk between the rows of application developers' desks saying things like "I only want to see elbows and a**holes out here". Crusty, but effective.
6:21:27 PM    Google It!  

I suppose I could generate email from my weblog postings easily enough, but I think I would prefer that Zoe provide the ability to subscribe to, and index, specified RSS feeds. In this way I could also index particularly interesting feeds that I subscribe to. Voila! A nice index/search engine for postings of interest to me.
6:18:20 PM    Google It!  

EJB Bashing

Listen to the EJB's go Pop[Thinking In .NET]

6:10:09 PM      

John Lam has written a cross-language "weaver" for adding aspects (as in aspect-oriented programming) into .NET languages. Aspects allow one to compose behavior based on the method signature of a target program. In that sense, they're similar to .NET's native attributes. The difference is that attribute behavior is restricted to programs that interpret that attribute, while aspects inject the behavior into the flow of an existing program. Thus, with attributes, programs like NUnit 2.0 can say "Which methods in this assembly are marked as test methods? Okay, call them all." While with attributes, one can say "Generate trace output for every method call that returns an integer." See my September 2001 review of AspectJ in Software Development (although note that I didn't write that it was "the first aspect-oriented compiler," which I believe is incorrect). [Thinking In .NET]

6:08:06 PM      

Today Radio is consuming just 20M since startup 10 hours ago. Since the startup quickly goes from 14M to about 18M, I figure this is not too bad. Sure wish I could pin it down to something specific. Hmm... I just checked and usage zoomed up to 25M while I was writing this post. Then I went into Radio and ran window.dbstats() and saw usage drop to 16M. I guess it flutters around a bit. Still, I am pretty happy.
5:48:00 PM      

A better approach is to let the business rule specify the form types to be produced. (perhaps using an application-defined enumerated type). The event controller could then use the types as a key to look up the particular form number that is in effect for the state on this date. That "look-up" structure (a fairly simple table except for the effective date aspect) should also be under the business client's control. That is where the Versioned Configuration Data Editor fits in. It is just another type of rule, but table look-up as opposed to algorithmic.
5:03:08 PM      

1. The generated event handler includes a time stamp.
2. There is a separate bundle structure for each rule in the generated event handler.
3. The generated event handler now includes a simple testing harness bundle.
4. The generated event handler accepts multiple input parameters.
5. The rules use english terms for logical operators (e.g. "or" as opposed to "||") - OK, Radio gave me that one as a freebie!
6. Versioned configuration data (see the next post for an explanation).

4:53:54 PM