Pushing the envelope

Darren's take on Java, agile methods, cool open source stuff, interesting technologies and other random wanderings through the land of blog.
Updated: 26/01/2003; 11:48:58.
Places to go
Apache Jakarta Project
c2.com
ExtremeProgramming.org
OpenSymphony
XProgramming.com
XP Developer

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Russell Beattie
Eugene Belyaev
Tony Bowden
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Jeff Duska
Paul Hammant
Scott Johnson
Brett Morgan
Rickard Öberg
James Strachan
Joe Walnes

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  11 October 2002

On hosting and domain names

I've been hanging on to darrenhobbs.com for a couple of years, but never done anything with it. I always felt it was a bit narcissistic somehow, don't ask me why. Anyway, having discovered JohnCompanies thanks to Russell, and having suffered before from not having full control over my hosting I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a linux account with them. So hopefully in a few days www.darrenhobbs.com will go live. What shall I do with it?

And what do I use for an email address? me@darrenhobbs.com? mail@darrenhobbs.com?


11:59:20 PM      comment []

Chinese torture

1000 megawatt powerstation turbines, Concorde taking off, high speed dentists' drills. These are the images that come to mind when I sit at my keyboard. Could my hard disk please just die, or shut up!?

8:37:12 PM      comment []

Expectations

F*!?#&! FeedReader. I'm on the way out the door but before I leave I decide to check the RSS feeds I read. I open FeedReader and lo and behold all of my feeds are gone! Argghhh!!! On top of that I can't find where FeedReader stores any of its data. Plus add to that the fact that when it was working it would run at around 85MB of memory when I was using it! FeedReader is out, manual reading is back until I can finish my own desktop RSS aggregator. [All Things Java]

Its locked up on me a few times, but nothing that bad. It does seem that programmers have a far higher quality bar than 'lay-people' when it comes to applications. Maybe because we know that it is actually possible to write decent apps that work as expected and don't crash every 10 minutes?


8:33:35 PM      comment []

Noise pollution

My HDD whine is getting louder. This can't be a good thing. I started considering buying a new drive out of a concern that this one would die, now I find myself considering it just to get some peace and quiet. Seagate's Barracuda IV gets excellent (ie. low) noise ratings. I'd mind less if the thing was more than 3 months old. Serves me right for wanting the biggest and newest. Who needs 120Gb anyway?

7:41:21 PM      comment []

Framework coding

Still confused.
OFBiz Turning OO on its Head or Programming in the Large?

My take on all this is that "programming in the large" is a bit different that the usual programming. What happens is that abstractions that are quite similar to the usual procedural things become important. You simply can't deny the importance of these Actions in webapp or gui work, however they aren't the same thing as functions in C. The difference is that an Action (aka Command) can be persisted, sent as a message, suspended, undone, redone, stopped, cancelled, approved etc. These are not attributes that are associated with function in the procedural sense.

[::Manageability::]

Hmmmm. This is all starting to feel a hell of a lot like python crossed with scheme. I mean, we have taken a strongly typed language and side-steped all of the strictures of typing.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I love programming in python where typing is a run time thing, and coding is so quick. I'm just wondering why we are doing this Java? So we can be J2EE buzzword compliant?

[Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla]

Its the difference between framework development and application development. You've heard advice like 'you shouldn't need to use instanceof in your code', and for application development that's often true. You've essentially sidestepped polymorphism by using it. However, I find it really quite hard to avoid using instanceof or the functionally equivalent isAssignableFrom method call when I'm writing framework / infrastructure code. The whole point of frameworks is that they are generic, and the framework developer doesn't know how it will be used by application developers. The 'nnnAware' interfaces from Webwork are an example of this (although they've apparently now been deprecated for reasons I don't know). The point being that the framework can do the right thing without knowing the specifics of your implementation. But this power usually comes at the cost of explicit type-safety.


7:27:08 PM      comment []

Lies, etc.

Just signed up with nedstat. Thanks to James for the link.

One thing occurs - most regular weblog readers are probably using RSS. Is there any way to get stats on how many people are subscribed to your feed?


12:17:24 AM      comment []

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