Friday, 16 August 2002

Accusations of Insanity Phil is accusing me of going nuts over here. Did I not name this blog "Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog"? Oh, yes, I did. Funny about that. [Later...] I probably should have mentioned that Phil did a good job of putting my post in context. I loved his tagline. Something about the need to be eager for the future. I think that is so true. I live for change - as that is the real place where bleeding edgers have the advantage. It's painful to be always on said edge (think paper cuts and lemon juice ...), but I prefer that to being a cog in some massive unchanging machine. :) 6:58:38 PM

JBoss JBoss interview. The ServerSide has a new interview with Marc Fleury. Normally these Tech Talks are full of marketing drivel (except Rickard's of course) but this one is quite good. I'm very glad to see Marc seems more relaxed, rational and calm at the moment - this is very good for JBoss! [rebelutionary] This is indeed a good interview. Lots of really good information. I liked his thoughts on what makes a PC - "if it runs windows and word then its a PC". So true. I hope JBoss can organise their J2EE branding, but in some ways it may not matter. Now that the days of VC fueled brand inanity (running oracle on sun with cisco and f5) are dead, JBoss has the distinct advantage of being exceedingly low entry cost for two-coders-in-a-flat style startups. The fact that it can do failover between cities is really just a nice bonus. Almost tempted to d/l'ed the binaries again and have another crack at it. Ugh. :) 6:54:46 PM

QOTD P. J. O'Rourke. "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." [Quotes of the Day] [dws.] So true. 6:48:40 PM

Another idea for integrating an OS project into CS Curriculum OpenSource as a way. Just a thought on Anthony's blog re: OpenSource as a way of improvement. Yes, entry programmers can improve their 1337 skillz by participating in OpenSource projects. No, they should not be required to do so. A big point of OpenSource projects is that those who participate do so because they *want* to, not because they *have* to. I can think of nothing worse then getting people saying "dude, like, gimme RW to your CVS, because I gotta do this OpenSource thing for a while". Geez Anthony, what were ya thinkin' ;-) You can't change one parameter of the process and think that it'll still be the same. That always fails, no matter what the context is. [Random thoughts] There may be a middle road here. One of the problem's I see with fresh out of uni coders is that the biggest project they have worked on is usually say 2 months coding (in a team of say 3 coders), so they have no real understanding of what working on 10k loc project is like. They have no idea of the real need for code documentation (because it was small enough to fit in their heads), they have no idea of the need for refactoring (we hand it in, and then we never see it again), and a total lack of ability to communicate. So, here is a thought. Take a class of third year CS students. Bring up a CVS server and slave it to some large project. Force the students to then work at understanding the code base. Then get them to work out small projects to make changes to the tree. Make sure to update the tree nightly from the main CVS server to keep the students on their toes. Encourage the students to listen in on the development mailing lists. Stay subscribed to the lists yourself so that the students don't think they can be rude to the developers. It would probably be polite to clear all of this with said developers before hand too. ;) What would the students gain out of this? An understanding of how much pain is involved in coming up to speed with a large code base. An understanding of the needs for documentation, unit tests, integration tests, and code style issues. And finally, the funny issue that they all have to work together, as a class, on the single code base. They could be marked on their CVS commits, the number of bugs they introduced / fixed. How well they interacted with the open source group in question. Whether their modifications were useful enough, and coded well enough, to be accepted into the main cvs tree. Lots of pain, for both teacher and students. But at least they wouldn't be walking out into the real world blind. 6:45:43 PM

I want to go to the movies I want to go to the movies for a bit of light hearted escapist trash. But, there is nothing on worth watching that I haven't already seen. It's crap Ray. 5:31:37 PM

Dog Brush The Mars Coat-King is God's gift to Bouvier owners. If you've got a long haired dog, or a dog with a heavy undercoat, and don't own one of these, you're missing the boat. And I'm not the type of person who would normally get excited over a dog brush. [Phil Ackley's Radio Thingumabob] I wonder if we can use this successfully on our Old English Sheepdog. Hmmmm. 4:22:36 PM

Crypto-Gram Interference with a business model. The August edition of Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter is required reading, as usual. (97 words) [dive into mark] Good read. Anyone figured out an RSS feed for crypto-gram? 3:54:52 PM

The future lies in Asia Tapping brainpower: New generation of engineers. Tapping brainpower: New generation of engineers [Nothing and Some More] Please take a moment to ponder the confluence of Asian (by which I refer to everthing from China to India) IT workers and the continuing inanity of innovation strangling happening in America through the law courts and the patent office. For a comparison, it is interesting to refer to what has happened to Aircraft Manufacture in America. Especially in the small end of the market. Due to litigation, no change has really happened in the small end. As a result, most manufacture in the small end of the market now happens outside of the US. The same will happen to the IT industry. The future will be coded in Beijing and Bangalore. 1:51:04 PM

GCC 3.2 GCC 3.2 Released [Slashdot] So, how far are we away from native win32 SWT apps? This could be very tasty... 1:08:38 PM

Another Java Blogger Oh the humanity!. I talked Sanjiva Weerawarana into creating a Radio weblog.  He's one of the driving forces behind many important Web services standards including WSDL and BPEL4WS. [Sam Ruby] Mike, as Sanjiva is the author of Bean Markup Language, I suspect this guy should go on your Java Blogs page. Not that there is a lot of content there yet. Yet. :) 11:23:41 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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