I emailed her my blog URL. The nice thing about this is that next time we won't have to waste all the tedious time it takes to “catch up” and can instead talk about books and games and cats and memories and all that kind of good stuff. Because she'll know what I've been up to. She can read it in my archives. If she's crazy enough, she can look in on me almost every day. Multiply that by a lot of old friends (and even some family), and it's a considerable saving in tedious “catching up” time.

Just one more reason to blog.

11:27:04 AM    

Conversation at work, that will only make sense if you've used Websphere Application Developer or Eclipse:

[David P] Every so often, I just get a GPF and it vanishes.
[Neville] (referring to a big piece of paper from a previous project that we used to tick every time VisualAge crashed) We need another one of those posters with the check-marks.
[David R] Or a dartboard with a picture of WSAD...
[Charles] Yeah, that'd be a good idea. Except every time you threw a dart at it, it'd land in the wrong perspective.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

11:06:55 AM    

Charles' Six Rules of Unit Testing:

1. Write the test first
2. Never write a test that succeeds the first time
3. Start with the null case, or something that doesn't work
4. Don't be afraid of doing something trivial to make the test work
5. Loose coupling and testability go hand in hand
6. Use mock objects

Read Six Rules of Unit Testing for the whole story...

11:05:46 AM    

"intelligence of dogs". Scientist proves dogs can count Brazil Robert Young, a  scientist at Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte,  has proven that dogs can count. He used a technique which also proved that 5 month old infants can count:

"He placed treats in a bowl, hid it with a screen and let the animals watch as he removed or added some. The dogs studied the contents longer when the screen was taken away if a trick had been played leaving more or less treats than expected. He tested 11 mongrels and found they paid little attention when one plus one resulted in two treats. But they looked more closely when one plus one left three." [Ananova.com Quirkies from newscientist.com] Related: Old dogs learn new tricks

[Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales] [Phil Ackley's Radio Thingumabob]

I think we under-rate the natural intelligence of animals. Anyone who tries to tell you that animals aren't intelligent sentient beings has never had a pet.

The fact that they don't do existential philosophy is neither here nor there, really. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]
10:47:52 AM    

Hibernate.

A shameless plug...

A shameless plug for a colleague. After a long and annoying project trying to do XP with EJB1.1, Gavin and Daniel from our Melbourne office came up with Hibernate, an open-source (LGPL) O-R mapping tool written with agile development in mind.

It supports the Domain Model. It's lightweight. It runs on reflection so you can persist your objects without an extra code-generation step, and without following any coding conventions more stringent than "use properly named getter and setter methods". It supports object composition, inheritance/polymorphism, relationships, and the Collections API. It may even make tea, if you ask it nicely enough.

[The Desktop Fishbowl]

I needed a toy to noodle with over the weekend... Tanxs ;)

[Later...] This is so much sexier than Sun's JDO implementation. Reflection is a wonderful thing. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]

10:46:41 AM    

A possible blogged future. The real tragedy of recessions is not all the money lost due to de-valuing assets (it was all paper money, right?), but the large amount of the workforce who have nothing to do.

Many people have written about recessions, why they happen, and why they are good for the economy. My personal take on recessions is that they are very crude forms of feedback. If your company can't deal with a recession, you obviously made some dud decisions.

The reason I see that it is very crude is that there is no solid feedback as to which decisions were duds. Thus we get spectacles like RIAA that is blaming fall in sales on pirated content, when in fact the market is trying to tell the RIAA that we want a different form of service from them.

Now, if blogs expand to the point where groups of people can self organise, with consumers stating a demand on their blogs, designers proposing solutions on their blogs, and manufacturers implementing from this blog'versation, we can move beyond recessions.

I'm not saying that life will suddenly get easier without recessions. In fact it will be a constant recession. Recessions are the marketplace informing the manufacturers that something is wrong. A blog based economy will always be informing everyone that what they are doing is wrong, in some way. But at least the feedback will be more informative.

Hopefully, this tighter feedback loop reality will be less lossy. I can hope, anyway. [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog]

10:45:54 AM    

You can certainly join a community by deliberately entering into relationships with the people in that community. Recently, I've changed the way I visit a local deli for breakfast: I used to sit at a table, either with a friend or (less often) alone. Now, alone, I sit at the counter, and I visit more frequently. I'm becoming a “regular”, and I talk with the other regulars every visit. Ask a person how they got into their current line of work, and their breakfast will grow cold while you listen. Ask what they do outside of work, and you can get a few coffees down while getting to know something about that person. (Who really listens to someone else, without charging a fee in dollars or a piece of their heart?)

And, in time, you are part of the community, because on the level that counts—person-to-person—you have made connections.

Do You Join Communities?.

I am part of a community, but I did not join it.  Nor did I explicitly create it.  A community is the set of relationships you have. 

I don't join things.  Sometimes I get curious, and I "join" a group or club.  Soon, I feel restricted and constrained by the rules of the club.  Soon thereafter, I leave it.

By definition, I can't leave my community.  The community can change, but it's still there.

[James Jarrett's Radio Weblog]

10:39:36 AM    

A view to windward..

Brett Morgan thinks I'm overstating the case about programming moving off-shore.

...

The globalization of labor markets affects other disciplines too. The 12 August 2002 BusinessWeek has a column on Boeing outsourcing work, including advanced design and engineering. For example, its Moscow Design Center now employs 500 engineers, positions removed from Seattle.

Think of the price of Russian workers. How do you compete against the three better-educated people who will do your job for the same pay?

Flight (shift into another line of work), Fight (become world class) or change the rules.

[a klog apart]

10:18:03 AM    

For the rest of us, let's keep on running.

The IT rust belt..

Do you live to code? If you don't and that's your job, move on. Bob Lewis, InfoWorld columnist, forsees doom for the million U.S. programmers. I must agree.

In his July 15th column, The IT rust belt, Bob blames:

1. Better/cheaper communication technology (Internet, Voice over IP, team programming tools)
2. Leading to labor market globalization (follow the sun work sharing) and
3. Dramatically increased supply of good software engineers in cheaper markets.

...
Phil (I believe) continues...

I've sent projects out of the country. It works. I have a team in Vancouver. They work at 60-75% of Silicon Valley wages. And they average an extra college degree. They use the latest tools (J2EE, IBM, Bea, Allaire, PGP) and methods (they are an XP team). They work as hard, fast, and well as any team I could field here. They get specs and return working systems. (Call me if you'd like an introduction.)

And Canucks should be the least of your worries. India's labour minister has a stated goal of producing a million programmers a year by 2010. a year! ...

So what do you do If you are a programmer, software engineer, software QA, sysadmin?

How can you compete on price?

You can't.

...

You must compete on some combination of:

• Quality
• Scarce expertise
• Domain knowledge
• Human relations

Bob says "Expect to work harder for less."

Forewarned may be fore armed.

Now where did I put that university extension catalog?

[a klog apart]

10:11:23 AM    

August begins.

August began in western Massachusetts this morning at 3:18 AM. That's when Canada, after holding its breath all July, exhaled, banging the canvas awning next to our bed on the second floor screened-in porch. Whitecaps rattled the lake. Branches brushed their neighbors. Something vinyl blew off our shore.

This morning I opened the third drawer in my dresser for the first time and put on a sweatshirt. We'll have to dangle our feet off the dock to get used to the newly chilled water and before the swim is over it will be time to take our children shopping for their new notebooks and bookcovers. My son senses this. He has formed the blankets around himself to trap the warmth as he reads in bed. [JOHO the Blog]

9:36:01 AM