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Tuesday, 16 July 2002 |
bob. bob has setup blogs for both Jelly and Maven so we've now got jellyBlog and mavenBlog. Cool! Hopefully this can start a new trend where open source projects use a weblog to keep developers up to speed of whats going on, without them having to read gazillions of emails on the mail lists. [james strachan's musings]
Subscribed to both. I would love to see more Project Blogs! Oh, and how about a link from the blog page back to the project main page? I suddenly want to have a geek at Jelly (which I can do because it is linked inside this post, but if I had just stumbled on the blog from google, say, I wouldn't be able to ...)
Thanks!
6:34:43 PM 
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I just got an email from Oliver regarding Solex, an Eclipse plugin for webapp testing. It uses the HTTP Proxy paradigm to record an interaction session between a browser and a webserver. Akin to the stuff Mike was talking about.
I will begin testing Solex shortly ;)
[Later...] Hmmm found a bug while asking Solex to record a session with localhost:8080. I'm still a little new to eclipse to want to launch into attempting to debug an Eclipse plugin, but given that it's under the Apache license I think I will give it a push in the next couple of days.
It is reasonably similar in model to something that has started brewing in the back of my head - so this could be a good launching point. We will see. :)
6:18:17 PM
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Hmmm. Looks like sourceforge is on the blink. Or cisco's link to sourceforge is dead. Hrm. Anyways...
Eclipse has some interesting stuff happening around it:
5:25:21 PM
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Google has a problem. They can't hire enough good people. I wish they would hire in Oz.
As part of the doco, they give the different ways of spelling a certain singers name. Kill Me Now. :)
5:02:22 PM
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 Jeffrey Friedl
Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition
What's New with Regular Expressions. "Whether you program in Perl or Java or VB.NET or Python or PHP or C# or Ruby or any language with regular-expression support, I hope and believe that the second edition will provide you with a wealth of practical information and helpful examples." [toolbox]
Did you know Java had 7 different regex engines? Hooboy. Friedl is going to have to do 3rd edition when (if?) Perl 6 ships ...
4:05:52 PM
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The Eclipse 500 (the jet, not the java editor) rolled out of the hangar. Cuteness. A civil aviation 6 seater jet for 1/4 of the cost of previous jets. Could lead to some interesting changes.
1:57:10 PM
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Open Source J2EE Landscape.
As usual I started on a small post, that turned into a longer post, and then into a story. Voila - the Open Source J2EE Landscape document. Feel free to mail me additions, corrections or flames. [rebelutionary]
Good collection of links. Anyone would think I am trying to be the one with the most links. ;)
1:31:21 PM
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Open source Java persistence frameworks. David is looking at all the different Open source Java persistence frameworks. Personally I'm an OFBiz Entity Engine fan - but I do realise that it's more 'radical' than the others. Having worked with a couple of them - and entity EJBs - OFBiz makes it very easy to modify your data model dynamically, and to treat different objects similarly - but in a flexible way.
For example in JIRA we have methods which take an entity representing a Project, Component, Version or Issue - and the method behaves differently depending on what entity it is given. You can't do that elsewhere.
One day I should really dump all my knowledge about this sort of stuff somewhere. [rebelutionary]
On your blog, preferably. Then we can scrape together the BlogJavaSecrets or something equally insane and all become rich. Or something.
11:29:07 AM
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Measurement
I've long claimed that incentive pay isn't such a hot idea, even if you could measure who was doing a good job and who wasn't, but Austin reinforces this by showing that you can't even measure performance, so incentive pay is even less likely to work.
[Joel on Software]
Hmmm. The long lost question of how to actually pay people such that their work is good. Hard question. Hard answer, Trust 'em.
10:15:28 AM
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Bruce Tognazzini: How Call Centers can Make or Brake Companies. "Call center personel should see their primary job as giving engineering enough information to put the call center out of a job. Certainly in the computer field, this bears no actual risk, as engineering sees their jobs as manufacturing enough new bugs to keep the call center fully employed." [Column Two] Once again, CRM and KM. Interesting. [toolbox]
One more story well worth reading from Bruce Tognazzini: Good Grisp: Usability before Branding. "The best branding starts with a good quality product that stands out from the pack. [...] Look at your company's recent work with a new eye and see whether you've been branding, instead of building a product people actually want to use. Then change it." [toolbox]
Love a good read by Tog. The above speaks volumes. Mainly about the need to make things actually usable, being as Tog is a major usability pundit :) I like the thing on integrating knowledge from the call center. Something most companies would be loathe to do.
But then most companies are loathe to listen to the front line anyway. It's why they are all so inefficient.
10:10:57 AM
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Open source Java persistence frameworks.. I know about
Castor
and
Torque,
but I need learn about
Object Relational Bridge,
OFBiz Entity Engine,
Hibernate,
JGrinder,
JRelationalFramework, and
Abra. Maybe I should just skip all that and go straight to Sun's JDO - it is going to rule the roost, right? [Blogging Roller]
Snarfing for the links.
Oh, and about Sun's JDO, unless they have radically improved it in the last 8 months, it's a dog. Hmmm. Actually, someone needs to do something silly, like take something like Roller and set up a persistence layer, as a set of factories say, and then try and implement it on top of a series of different frameworks. It would quickly show which frameworks are usable, and which ones aren't.
Unless I run really quickly, I may just have signed myself up for a block of pain... :)
10:06:33 AM
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Howard Rheingold: Smart Mobs This is an interesting twist. I have watched this take off too. It happens in the blog world with regularity (I still wish that people would get off of these automated reputation systems -- a blog is a reputation system, it works via a "I trust you, you trust him/her, etc," and scales extremely well. The difference is that there are real people making decisions vs anonymous voters.).
>>>Smart mobs use mobile media and computer networks to organize collective actions, from swarms of techo-savvy youth in urban Asia and Scandinavia to citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle, Manila, and Caracas. Wireless community networks, webloggers, buyers and sellers on eBay are early indicators of smart mobs that will emerge in the coming decade. Communication and computing technologies capable of amplifying human cooperation already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. Already, governments have fallen, subcultures have blossomed, new industries have been born and older industries have launched counterattacks.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Nothing really new here for those on the bleeding edge, but the bringing together of these trajectories into a print book that you can hand to people is going to make a serious difference. Weblogs are a part of the smart mob, or emergent intelligence unit as I like to think of it.
In some ways, this will be akin to the bootstrapping that happens in a neural net as it becomes cohesive. Which basically means that, depending on your bullshit meter settings, we could be in for the creation of a global consciousness. Which could be bad or good. Definately interesting.
Choice quote:
The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?
9:28:31 AM
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There have been a few posts of late talking about the politics of k'logging. I suspect the reality is going to be that most organisations are not going to be able to easily handle k'logging, at least initially, as it will completely disrupt the standard political back-stabbing dynamic.
The flip-side of this observation is that a large number of companies are incredibly inefficient because such large chunks of their employee's time is spent dealing with & hiding from the politics. You get farces such as "all-hands meetings" where everyone is pulled into a single spot where they have to listen to some disconnected soul from central management (often from another country) try and tell the workers something. Often this means a half a day, or maybe a whole day, of completly lost output.
So, in retrospect, I think we will find that k'logging will be regarded as a disruptive technology. In those companies that introduce k'logging, along with the appropriate tolerance of alternate views, et al, we will see a massive climb in productivity. We will probably also see a climb in employee morale as employees align into emergent groups for getting things done.
This will probably mean the companies that go down this path will outstrip the companies that don't. But, there is a real limit to the scalability of people and weblogs. I am personally topping out at about 100 rss feeds subscribed, but I suspect most people will find 30 feeds more than enough.
This means that the size of companies doing k'logging will have to be limited. Probably fairly close to the oft-posited 150 person limit. If a company gets bigger than this, the people will stop being able to visualize the company as a whole, and start visualizing the emergent factions within the company.
This change to smaller k'logging enabled companies, if it happens, will be a massive boost for the economy as the oft enforced limits on change by oligopolists and monopolists interested in charging monopoly rent will melt away, as said oligopolists and monopolists are rendered assunder by more nimble schools of opponents.
I am, however, not going to say this will lead to utopia. If anything, such a transition in the economy will reduce employee's work stability and predictability. A more fluid environment will be more prone to booms and busts, as fads sweep across the supple medium of small companies.
I would prefer to work in such an environment, as my personal input into the system will stand a real chance of making a difference. A good thing I think.
7:39:53 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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