Thursday, March 4, 2004

Java, just say NOOOO!

From Primate Brow Flash, the weblog of Mcgyver5: To he who wrote the java programs I have to maintain: I curse your name 10 times daily. I curse you for having different stuff checked in to version control than is actually in production. I curse you for inventing your own stupid inscrutable templating system. I curse you for not leaving any comments in your code. I curse you for leaving some parts of your application calling a test database and others calling a production database. I curse you for naming methods f2, f3, f4, f5, f6, f7, f8, f9 etc but also for having a method named fl which in my editor is indistinguishable from f1 I curse you for the critical javascript functions called blah and blah2. I curse you for leaving me a java class with 3000 lines. I curse you for naming things ShowBean and MenuBean when they aren't really beans at all. Nine good reasons why you should use a software engineer, not a programmer. 10:23:21 PM

Mental tools

Curio is a really nice alternative to the mind mapping software that I've used before. I found mind maps to be great way of starting off a project. Just blat your ideas down and organise them. The trouble with mind mapping software (I've tried several packages and settled for NovaMind on the Mac) is the orientation of the nodes in the map. You very quickly build up something that doesn't work too well on a landscape screen. Curio is a different kettle of fish. It's more like having an electronic white board or flip chart. You can put text, images, links and hand drawn art work on a page. If you want a mind map you could draw it by hand with a felt tip pen or paint brush (best done with a graphics tablet). Of course, it's another excuse for that 23" cinema display. There's a lot more to it than I've described; check it out for 30 days. It too highly priced for an impulse purchase at $99 but well worth it if it suits your way of working. Only down side was the occasional lag between the pen moving on the graphics tablet and the line appearing on the page. 10:03:48 PM

More beautiful images

Take a look at Fracture. It's a screen saver that generates some stunning fractal images. There are several examples on the Stick Software site, so you can get an idea of what it does. Takes no time to download and it's shareware; stump up your $10 if you like it. 9:36:05 PM

Hey, I just started this blog and UserLand tell me my time is up! Que passa? 6:09:19 PM

Sun Java site running sluggish on decaf. Doctor orders cache injection [The Register] Heh, heh, heh, I always thought Java was a really bad idea. It sounded good to start with, but ten minutes into my first Java project and I knew that performance was going to be a nightmare. Sure, cross-platform execution sounds like a good idea, but there are two problems in practice. 1. Very few enterprises need to execute on multiple platforms; they've all standardised on Windows desktops. 2. A single multi-platform executable usually looks good on the platform where it was developed, but looks awful on any other one. And don't get me started on anonymous classes, event classes and the two million methods you need to memorise to develop for the enterprise... 5:03:18 PM

The Crimson Room is a super-cool MacroMedia Flash puzzle. I've never seen anything like it before. I loved it, so if you know of any more like it, let me know. 4:51:26 PM

I have found beauty in an unexpected place. The Astronomy Picture of the Day consistently fills me with awe. The size, the scales and the colors are simply stunning. To see all these things going on out there really puts me in my place. Yet it's little more than hydrogen and dust. By the way UserLand, setting up the link above was a really ugly business for me, as a Mac user. 4:36:05 PM

The point of this blog is to try out Radio UserLand. If anyone at UserLand is listening, it's really annoying to see that Windows users get text formatting controls while Mac OS X users just get a dumb text field. Mind you, iBlog's not much better. For all its brushed aluminium compliance, it won't let you put a nice link in without having to resort to raw HTML. 4:28:23 PM

Argh, here I am plodding away on a 667MHz PowerBook and dreaming of a dual G5 with a 23" cinema display, and Apple send me a picture of John Lowry standing in front of 100 G5s in his render farm. How cruel can you get? 4:17:44 PM

I'm fishing about for something to concentrate my attention on. Last time I had a break from client work I built a case tool. It was the the best time I've ever had in this business. There was no project manager whining, "When's it going to be ready?" There was no six month delay while you grovel for permission to do technical work, build sandcastle plans and find make-work to do as the concept composts in some manager's in-tray. Ooo! Feeling cynical today or what? I reckon that most small projects could be completed in the time it takes a big corporation to authorisation for them. That's how 'skunk works' projects come into being. 4:13:42 PM