Thursday, May 27, 2004

two of my favorite females artists: annie lennox and kate bush. it's a shame that they never recorded a duet together. the mind boggles at what that might have been like. currently ripping: "diva" by annie lennox. 11:50:27 PM    comment []

there's an interesting article about MDA (Model Driven Architecture) on www.theserverside.com. the link is: http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=MDA_Haywood. MDA is primarily about raising the level of abstraction that an application is developed in. rather than code most logic in a low level language like java, you capture the system in a variety of levels (from high to low) that are linked together (both at development time and run time). personally, i think that at least 90% of an application should be defined at a higher level than a language like java. for example, a business process can be defined as a collection of orchestrated steps that specify *what* should happen but not *who* should perform them. this is analysis & design 101 (which incidentally i used to teach in a previous lifetime), but something that almost nobody does in practice. these steps are then linked to services which perform the steps (sometimes called the "task allocation phase"). i think a move towards MDA is as inevitable as the move from assembly to C and C to Java. it's just a matter of time. and another thing about the article that is bogus; an assumption that MDA involves code generation. in general, code generation *sucks*. there's no reason that models should not be directly executable. 11:45:30 PM    comment []

set up about 50% of my bowflex tonight. there are literally hundreds of parts in the six boxes that were delivered. so far, it's been smooth sailing. the assembly instructions are very good, probably the best i've seen. 11:35:17 PM    comment []

ripped another 10 CDs tonight, while doing other stuff. not too bad. most CDs seems to rip at 10x their play time. currently ripping: musicology by prince, one of my favorite artists. 11:34:18 PM    comment []