Friday, 2 August 2002

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. 4:57:06 PM

JIRA Featuritis part 2 JIRA Featuritis. JIRA Featuritis - Hey Mike, want an insane feature addition for JIRA? Here's one. Especially once we get pub/sub via Jabber. Well - Jabber pub/sub is doable under the existing architecture. You just need to write a Listener that sends Jabber messages. If the Jabber APIs (Muse?) are simple, it should be quite easy. What exactly is the feature addition though? RSS feed of 'solved' issues? You can already get that. Please explain.  [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog] [rebelutionary] The feature here is having JIRA listen to RSS feeds for incoming bug reports. The problem with the scheme, now that I have thought about it, is that someone has to massage the incoming data. I suspect the real problem that was being addressed in the linked post is the missing feature you pointed out a while ago - Radio doesn't have a publically accessible bug tracking system. So people instituted a manual RSS subscription based Radio FAQ feed. So the question of the day becomes, "Is it useful for JIRA to take initial bug/feature request/improvements from RSS feeds?" I can see pros and cons all around this one. Hmmmm. Oh, and another feature I think JIRA needs - GANTT charting, based on bug/improvement/feature request dependency data. I need this functionality now that Cisco have decided to try and turn me into a technical lead (read, developer who also project manages for the project manager). 4:37:56 PM

Go In an Ancient Game, Computing's Future. "Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player. " [design notes] If ever there is a trial on why traditional AI failed, this is going to be a primary exhibit. It is fairly simple to play badly, reasonably hard to play well - but all traditional ai go bots fail miserably because the game tree suffers from massive state space explosion. I suspect to beat this one we are going to have to walk away from the von Neumann architecture. 3:45:26 PM

Just don't smoke Cats should avoid passive smoking A new study shows that cats subjected to passive smoke from humans are more than twice as likely as other cats to acquire feline lymphoma. The research appears in the August 1 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. No data is presented on the incidence of cancer in cats who smoke or for those in the presence of cats who smoke. [David Harris' Science News] Always check with the breeder of your kittens as to whether there are any chain smokers in the lines ... 3:32:10 PM

Amiga Forever Bought the t-shirt [dive into mark] More of a Guru Meditation fan myself. [Simon Fell] I wish I still had my A1000 kicking around. It was the best computer I have ever owned. :) 3:30:03 PM

Dogs for Accounting "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. 3:13:08 PM

HP DMCA Tribute HP and the DMCA. I've been a bit behind on the news the last few days, but as I always like to follow DMCA stuff I thought this was pretty interesting: Document: HP backs off DMCA threat.  Hewlett-Packard abandons legal threats it made against security analysts who publicized flaws in the company's software. Read the company's statement here.  [CNET News.com] [jenett.radio] Sometimes I wonder if computers make people slightly insane. It would explain a lot. [life - listed chronologically] Money spent re-branding New HP: Millions Capital that changed hands to merge HP and Compaq: Billions Damage done by flippant inclusion of DMCA threat: Priceless 3:09:59 PM

Adapt or Die RSS Readers and Mac Net Journal. Yesterday on Mac Net Journal fellow Northwesterner Rob McNair-Huff asked: “Do you visit the weblogs you read?” [...] I wonder what the effect of RSS readers really is. Do sites really get less browser traffic? [...] One thing, though, has changed for me for sure: I almost never visit weblogs anymore that don’t have RSS feeds. Example: Zeldman. [inessential.com] Well, I can safely say that I visit the stories on Wired an awful lot more now that I read their story teasers in my RSS aggregator ... 3:06:02 PM

Style Sheet Hell Untitled. Useful: Real World Style.[markpasc.blog] CSS meets Nav4 on Unix. 1:00:43 PM

Blogroots book Klogging: Chapter and Verse. I took a quick run through the on-line version of Chapter 8 and have to say it looks pretty good. [Blunt Force Trauma] [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio Weblog] That chapter is here. 12:46:19 PM

The benefits of desktop CMS solution Radio as a Content Management App. Boldly Going Where No Law Firm Has Gone Before - I have been wrestling with the idea of making my law firm's News & Events page of our website into a Radio Weblog.  The benefits are obvious (ease of posting, ability to add comments, XML feeds etc).  I mentioned this to Rick today in our brief phone conversation.  Rick said "oh, that's easy...just give me 10 minutes."  I'll skip over the whole back and forth with tweaking etc.  Bottom line: look at this page, and compare it to the other one.  Uh, Houston ... we've got liftoff. [Ernie the Attorney] Yup, it was easy. And I like finding little wins like this. Give credit to the folks behind Radio - it was a simple tweak, an obvious extension of the platform they built. Once Ernie pulls the trigger (by using Radio's "upstreaming" capabilities to upload the page to his firm's web site, instead of his own weblog), he'll be feeding news directly from his blog to his firm's site. Nice. Let's make sure that Ernie's firm gets credit for being the first firm to use a weblogging system to power part of their public web site... this is definitely a sign of things to come. By the way, this is what the bigshots like Vignette and Interwoven call a content management system. They'll charge you six figures for the privilege of using their system. Radio costs $40. *shh* [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] Having worked with in a project aimed at replacing Vignette solution, I can proffer the sage advice that Radio comes out of the box with so much more than Vignette ever had. It will be interesting to see what can be done in Interwoven, as it appears I have to hack an automated language translation system into an Interwoven published website. Ten points goes to whoever can guess which site ... ;) 12:43:05 PM

Multiple Community Server Blogging I figured out how to use one copy of Radio Userland to publish two weblogs, each on a different community server. I'm using it to publish this weblog and a Salon Blog. Warning: The procedure isn't pretty. Read my how-to article. [Workbench] [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio Weblog] I am hoping that I can tie the above procedure and Python Community Server together and to make a "behind the firewall" category home for stuff that i'd rather not have on the web... 12:25:17 PM

Meme Evolution Support Seven Myths of Knowledge Management. From the August/September issue of Context Magazine comes the Seven Myths of Knowledge Management: If you look at how companies approach knowledge management, you can see that the problem is in the execution. Companies commonly make catastrophic mistakes by falling for one of these seven myths... [more] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio Weblog] I think Knowledge Management is particularly mis-labelled. First off, it isn't about management. It is about encouraging sharing, thus John Robb starts spreading the Knowledge Sharing meme. Then this article headlines with the factoid that Knowledge Management isn't about Knowledge either. So Knowledge Management is neither really about Knowledge or Management. It is about how to encourage communication, and acknowledge the true life-cycle of memes. Thus we should probably re-label this genre of ideas/products/strategems/et al as Meme Evolution Support. Now I think we can see why knowledge management was doomed to failure before k-logs... 12:08:46 PM

Where I would love to work Design for knowledge work. Designs for Working. Quote: "But when employees sit chained to their desks, quietly and industriously going about their business, an office is not functioning as it should. That's because innovation--the heart of the knowledge economy--is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casual conversations as they do out of formal meetings. More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated, the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company." Comment: via this elearningpost article on a space designed for conversations. [Serious Instructional Technology] Worth a look - a topic that hasn't gotten enough attention. [McGee's Musings] [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio Weblog] A good treatise on how to design offices that actually work. I haven't worked in anything like this yet. I have always worked in the cube-ville reality. Y'know, the place where on one hand you get praise for your encyclopedic knowledge of open source software, and on the other chastised for surfing the web on company time. Oh, and the day after my contract finished, they decided to extend it. How's that for planning horizon? 11:51:25 AM

Usabiblity is hard folks $0 or $100,000 - the truth is in the middle.. Dave Winer on Free Software: Dave Winer says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0." David Watson says, "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for six figures either, Dave." I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. [rebelutionary] The problem here is that software engineers are usually the wrong people to build systems with high usability. We are too close to the code. The real answer is that you need to get inside your user's head. User profiles help. Usages logs help. User interviews help. Trying out lots of variations of user interface really helps. The problem here is that the user can't tell you how to make their life easy, they can only really tell you that you have, or haven't succeded. Kinda like NP Hard. Sucks doesn't it? 10:43:52 AM

Automated testing required Distressing moment of the morning: taking the Batik source release, figuring out all the required libraries (basically all the BSF scripting languages), then looking at the remaining error, and realizing there is no way, the released source base could ever compile. I mean its a baby hack - delete a constant unneeded argument to another member function of the same object. But, there is no way that this code should have passed release testing. Tends to indicate that Batik isn't in the gump auto-build tree. :/ 7:22:18 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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