Monday, February 24, 2003

CNet.  The end of the BIOS? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Very nice geek talk here.  Intel is designing the successor to BIOS called EFI.  Very intriguing to me.  It is like a mini-operating system, written in C, that is more powerful than BIOS.  Intel says that EFI can be enhanced through a programming interface to provide additional functionality.  I'm imagining some interesting programming hacks around that interface. Speaking of hacks, it also would introduce some interesting HACKING possibilities.  EFI will have its own networking built in for remote diagnostics.  I know all the hax0rs will be all over that. 5:57:58 PM    comment []

How not to name your source files Ever wonder what an extremely bad naming convention for your source files (.java, .jsp, etc.) would be?  Well here's one.  Name them after the use case (or step of the use case) whose functionality that the source is designed to represent.  (ex.  UC10_02.java)  You might think it's clever or it might save you from having to be clever with naming your files, but it's a bad idea. Why is this so bad?  Well, just imagine the maintenance nightmare that you are creating.  In this scenario the names of the source files do not give the code maintainer a hint about what they do without the list of use cases.  So, there can be no educated guessing as to where the problem the maintainer is trying to fix might be lurking.  She will have to cross-reference the list of use cases with the file names to try to figure out what every source file is doing.  BAD!  Imagine having to do that yourself. A second reason this is bad is because it implies that every file only incorporates functionality from a single use case.  I'm sure I'm getting ready to tread on someone's holy ground here, but I think this is BAD!  It is not uncommon for more than one use case to be represented in a single class.  Consider the use cases of Log In and "log out".  I believe that the functionality in both of those use cases could be represented in a single servlet and that it may make sense to. I have actually witnessed an application that has followed the naming convention above.  I cringe when I think of having to maintain it.  Fortunately I don't have to.   If this still sounds like a good idea to you, please see How to Write Unmaintainable Code.  Roedy Green has compiled several tips that you can follow to further obfuscate your source code. 5:48:38 PM    comment []

Nelson Minar: "Trillian Pro has an RSS plug-in that delivers blog content to your IM client." [Scripting News] Oh baby!  Leave it to those clever Trillian guys. 12:47:59 PM    comment []

Phil Windley's InfoWorld debut. Phil Windley Hey, Phil Windley's first InfoWorld piece is up on the Web. As I knew he would, Phil delivers an authoritative analysis that balances hope for Web services with a realistic view of the challenges we face: Web services will increase BI [business intelligence] vendors' ability to gather data and ease the integration burden, but they will not increase the business's ability to execute the business decisions that BI systems can identify without the methodical effort that is necessary to build a mature technical infrastructure. [InfoWorld.com, via Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] ... [Jon's Radio] I also thought the following paragraph from the article was of particular note: To see why, think about what BI is really about. BI isnít just giving the executive team easy access to information, but giving employees all of the information they need. A properly functioning BI system is more than a big data warehouse that executive management uses like a crystal ball. A real BI system forms a corporate nervous system that connects workers to the right information at the right time. It is difficult to imagine such a system functioning in an atmosphere of dysfunctional desktops, fractured data stores, and splintered systems. You know, it's funny how much this sounds like Knowledge Management - giving users the information they need.  Perhaps that's just what enterprise application development is about? 12:45:31 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.