Planet TW - Alumni

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-21 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 22 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

WikiMatrix - Compare them all

HUGE site for comparing wiki engines.
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market

Great post by Dare that crystalizes my thoughts on most Web 2.0 companies.

Kurt Schrader: Ruby is a Playground, PHP is a Factory

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:23:34 +0000

While reading yet another article on why PHP Sucks (today's witty twist, "but It Doesn't Matter") I realized yet another reason that I'm glad to be programming in Ruby.

Ruby, to me, is like a big open playground, while languages like PHP remind me of big industrial factories. I don't think that any of us would argue that industrial factories are more efficient for most things, but they also suck the creativity and life out of the people working in them.

For instance, why would you ever want to write code like this:

class DescribeNewBowlingGame extends PHPSpec_Context
{
    private $_bowling = null;
    public function before()
    {
        $this->_bowling = new Bowling;
    }

    public function itShouldScore0ForGutterGame()
    {
        for ($i=1; $i<=20; $i++) {
            $this->_bowling->hit(0); // someone is really bad at bowling!
        }       $this->spec($this->_bowling->score)->should->equal(0);
    }

}

when instead you can write this:

describe Bowling do
  before(:each) do
    @bowling = Bowling.new
  end

  it "should score 0 for gutter game" do
    20.times { @bowling.hit(0) }
    @bowling.score.should == 0
  end
end

You wouldn't. The first case is, at best, a bastard representation of the second case.

Of course, being out on the playground means that people get hit in the face with a ball once in a while, and everything isn't as neatly laid out for you as it is in a factory, but you also have the option to be creative, and not just do things like everyone else does.

And, sure, the playground is far more full of assholes than the factory, but these assholes are also more creative and entertaining to work with than people who just put widgets in place in a factory.

Plus the playground has that weird kid in the corner who's doing something totally crazy, but that just might be a genius, and if you get enough of these kids together, you're going to produce something that's much cooler and more creative than anything that gets built in a factory.

So you can talk all you want about big boring websites being written in PHP (or Java, etc).

As for me, I'll keep working in a language that encourages people to be creative.

Griffin Caprio: Now, this is funny

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:48:04 +0000

While trying to load up the twitter blog post addressing the allegations that their downtime is a publicity stunt, i just got this:

Just kinda funny....

Alex Ruiz: Design Patterns Training with Dr. Heinz Kabutz

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:40:06 +0000

Last week I attended the Java Design Pattern Course by Java Champion Dr. Heinz Kabutz, author of the famous Java Specialists' Newsletter.

The 3-day course covered the following patterns:

Singleton
Factory method
Abstract factory
Template method
Strategy
Iterator
Observer
Adapter
Decorator
Composite
Visitor
Command
Memento
Chain of responsibility
State
Facade
Flyweight
Bridge
Proxy

The course was well organized. The material was clear and very easy to follow, and the labs reinforced what I learned during the lessons.

Heinz is an excellent instructor and a very nice guy. He presented the patterns in an effective way, using clear examples and real-world experiences.

I learned a lot and had tons of fun! Highly recommended!

Here is an interview with Heinz: "Becoming a Better Programmer: A Conversation With Java Champion Heinz Kabutz."

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-20 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 21 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Steve: Developing on the Edge - Artifact numbering in JSR 277

+1!
Deploying: Why artifacts are your friend

Why deploying direct from SVN may not be so wise.
Jake Opines : Writing Custom NAnt Tasks

Writing a custom Nant task
Introduction to Custom Ant Tasks

Writing a custom Ant task
How to Write a Custom MSBuild Task : Keyvan Nayyeri

Uh, writing a custom MSBuild Task

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-20 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 21 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

SiteSucker Home Page

Suck down entire web sites.

Chris Matts: Feature Injection

Tue, 20 May 2008 17:31:12 +0000

OK. So I finally got round to reading the stuff. I'm halfway through and I realised a few bits are a bit out of date. Mainly the information arrival process at the end of the article is missing where I...

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-19 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 20 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Dr. Dobb's | Dependency Management | April 1, 2006

At first I thought this was going to be an April Fools ...
Exubero - Project Dependencies Using Ant

Joe knows his build. Here he talks about how to build the inevitable common bits of your project using Nant.
Automation for the people: Manage dependencies with Ivy

This is a nice concise introduction to Ivy by Paul Duvall. Dependency managers are doubleplusgood.
Dave Verwer: Deploy Rails using Capistrano without access to Subversion

Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting.
Managing Terminal Services Sessions Remotely - Scott Forsyth's WebLog

Boo hoo! I want SSH back!

Griffin Caprio: Blogging for O'Reilly

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:42:46 +0000

Around the end of march, xml.com site editor Kurt Cagle put out a call for writers. I submitted my resume of sorts and Kurt was kind enough to make me a blogger! I will be trying to concentrate on the semantic web and associated technologies.

You can check out the XML.com blog here and my first post is here.

We have a good group of authors contributing, so do yourself a favor and subscribe to the feed if you aren't already.

Here's hoping I don't make too big of a fool out of myself.

Mike Melia: Revisited: AmbiguousTableNameException with DBUnit

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:25:24 +0000

I only had a little time yesterday to follow up on this issue (the priority is low as we know that making the user a non-DBA works) but I’ll document what I have encountered.

The programmatic solution I mentioned

connection.getConfig().setFeature(DatabaseConfig.FEATURE_SKIP_ORACLE_RECYCLEBIN_TABLES);

was dependent on me using DBUnit 2.2.2. I was using DBUnit 2.2 and had to upgrade.

On upgrading to DBUnit 2.2.2, I discovered that a new dependency had been introduced on slf4j. I then discovered that the dependency was on version 1.4.3 (not version 1.5, which I had installed). Eventually, I had all of the correct libraries but, sadly, the AmbiguousTableNameException was still being thrown.

Whilst DBUnit will now ignore all tables that begin with BIN$, my user has access to all tables in the system and some of those may be repeated for different users (the one I am currently failing on is DR$CLASS).

I will leave this investigation now as I’m happy for my test user not be a DBA.

Jonathan Rasmusson: The Toyota Way - Use Pull Systems to Avoid Overproduction

Mon, 19 May 2008 22:35:21 +0000

Overproduction (waste) is one of the biggest tenets of the Toyota Production System. In this principle, Toyota recommends using pull systems to avoid producing overproduction. Section II: The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results Principle 3. Use “Pull” Systems to Avoid Overproduction ■ Provide your downline customers in the production process with what they want, when they want [...]

Julian Simpson: Deploying: Why artifacts are your friend

noreply@blogger.com (Julian) — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:07:08 +0000

(image taken from Nancy's photostream)

You're almost there. There's a single character in a single file that you need to change and you think the deployment is good to go. "There's no need to do a whole CI build and bother the QA's for this one", you think. "I'll just make the change against this tag, and merge it down later this afternoon." Oops. There you go. Provoking the Operations Manager again. You just made a decision on their behalf, and they probably won't like it.

The Operations Manager's job is about keeping services available, and about managing risk. They tend to mitigate risk by insisting that all code releases have passed whatever QA process your organisation has.

When your users turn on the telly for Neighbours, the operations team will be deploying a release candidate. Allowing deployments direct from your VCS (even if you compile it), is opening the the door to the possibility (no matter now slight) that the release candidate might have a few "enhancements" to it, courtesy of someone who isn't aware of the QA process.

So this is why people have a job that involves taking code from a Version Control System like Subversion, checking out a tag that a developer emailed them, optionally building that code, and then deploying it to a QA or production environment. You might think that's inefficient. But when it comes to keeping a major web property or financial system online, there's different calculations going on: and they are about risk.

Every time software is deployed, there's always the risk that no matter how diligent the development team has been, there's errors. Which can lead to outages, and cause at best reputational issues. So having someone to be the interface between the development team and the operations team and pull the right code across comes pretty cheaply.

Tools like Capistrano that work off of Subversion aren't yet a good fit for some the organisations because of this effect. When those organisations see fit to use Java and C# code anyway, I think there's virtue in taking the code that is built via Continuous Integration and using that as the clean, deployable unit. That's a repeatable process, and it doesn't involve humans typing stuff in, or clicking stuff, which always seems error prone to me. Mind you, that's could just be my typing.

Bret Pettichord: Next Watir Austin Meeting: Jim Matthews' Link Checker

Mon, 19 May 2008 17:40:20 +0000

The next meeting of the Austin Watir Users Group will be this Wednesday, May 21. Jim Matthews will be speaking about his link checker, a web crawler optimized for testing that he has released as open-source. He needed a script...

Alex Ruiz: FEST-Swing 1.0a2: Fluent interface for testing Swing GUIs

Mon, 19 May 2008 12:55:26 +0000

We are proud to announce the release of FEST-Swing 1.0-Alpha2.

FEST-Swing is a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing. This library provides an easy-to-use API that makes creation and maintenance of GUI tests easy.

Changelog:

Updated documentation and Javadocs.

Fixed issue 68: Add multi-selection support for JTrees:

dialog.tree("feeds").selectPaths("Web Feeds/Groovy/Andres Almiray's Weblog",
                                 "Web Feeds/Groovy/The Disco Blog");

Fixed issue 99: Add methods to check properties of JTable cells. Many thanks to J. Simmons. For more details, please read "Verifying Colors and Fonts" and "Custom Cell Renderers."
Fixed issue 123: NullPointerException when calling deleteText() on filled JTextfield. Many thanks to Manuel Kueblboeck.
Fixed issue 124: Unable to use JListFixture when CellRenderer.getListCellRendererComponent does not return a JLabel. Many thanks to Woody Folsom. For more details, including how to provide your own cell reader, please read "Custom Cell Renderers."
Fixed issue 125: JToolBarFixture should extend ContainerFixture. Many thanks to Woody Folsom.
Fixed issue 128: Add support for custom cell renderers in JComboBox. For more details, including how to provide your own cell reader, please read "Custom Cell Renderers."
Fixed issue 130: Add support for custom cell renderers in JTree. For more details, including how to provide your own cell reader, please read "Custom Cell Renderers."
Fixed issue 131: Requiring no selection in combo box. Added method requireNoSelection() to JComboBoxFixture, JListFixture, JTableFixture and JTreeFixture.
Fixed issue 133: JTreeFixture should scroll to the element to select if it is not visible.
Fixed issue 135: Return and validate contents of a JTable.
Component finders (WindowFinder, JFileChooserFinder and JOptionPaneFinder) can perform lookups using GenericTypeMatchers. Many thanks to Mariusz Saternus. For more information, please read "Testing Long-Duration Tasks"
Added method font() to all component fixtures. This method returns a FontFixture.
Added method background() to all component fixtures. This method returns a ColorFixture.
Added method foreground() to all component fixtures. This method returns a ColorFixture.
Renamed method selectionContents() to selectionValue() in org.fest.swing.fixtures.JTableFixture.
Renamed method contentAt(TableCell) to valueAt(TableCell) in org.fest.swing.fixtures.JTableFixture. This change was made to keep name consistency between JComboBoxFixture, JListFixture and JTableFixture.
Added method requireValue(String) to org.fest.swing.fixtures.JTableCellFixture. This method verifies that the value of a cell in a JTable is correct.
Added methods showPopupMenuAt(int) and showPopupMenuAt(String) to org.fest.swing.fixtures.JTreeFixture. These methods show a JPopupMenu in a node located by row index or path, respectively.
Replaced TreePath as method parameter in org.fest.swing.fixtures.JTreeFixture with a String specifying the the node path. For example, instead of:
```
dialog.tree("feeds").selectPath(new TreePath(new Object[] { "root", "node1" });
```
we can write:
```
dialog.tree("feeds").selectPath("root/node1");
```
where "/" is the default separator. The separator can be changed to any String.

FEST-Swing can be downloaded here (file fest-swing-1.0a2.zip.) FEST requires Java SE 5.0 or later.

Here are some useful links:

Feedback is always appreciated

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-18 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 19 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

nutrun » Blog Archive » Erlang eval and dynamic dispatch
Facebook Developers | Thrift
Yariv’s Blog » Blog Archive » Erlang does have shared memory
Using SSH: Secure Tunnels for the Common Man: Part II - AppleMatters

Good intro to tunnels.
NFL Stats: Homemade Sagarin Ratings

Nice overview of using Excel solver to mimic jeff sagarin ratings.
NFL Stats: Elo Ratings

More about sagarin and his ELO rankings.
Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM)

Interesting benchmarking for semantic web repositories
wiki.dbpedia.org : About

Very cool site that is extracting data from wikipedia and making it available as a dataset.
Pellet: The Open Source OWL DL Reasoner
openRDF.org: Home

RDF Parser and more

Alex Ruiz: Thanks Andres!

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:24:56 +0000

My good friend and Groovy guru, Andres Almiray, has written the following excellent articles about using FEST-Swing and Groovy:

Writing functional GUI tests for Swing applications is pretty easy with FEST-Swing. By using Groovy and Easyb, Andres takes GUI testing to a higher level of simplicity!

Andres has been a great supporter of FEST. He has answered every Groovy-related question in the FEST mailing list. He has also helped me understand how Groovy can benefit FEST, by showing me the cool things that Groovy can do and proposing different ways to create a Groovy-based DSL.

Thanks my friend!

Shane Duan: Fix : ERROR: While executing gem ... (Zlib::BufError)

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Duan) — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:00:10 +0000

All you need to do is

gem update --system

Thank you dontrepeatyourself !!!

Chris McMahon: The Software Artists: Index of Links to All Sections

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McMahon) — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:14:58 +0000

Explanation

Introduction

The Value of Software

Citations for Part One

Chris McMahon: The Software Artists: The Value of Software

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McMahon) — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:09:13 +0000

Previous: The Software Artists: Explanation

Previous: The Software Artists: Introduction

Philosophy of Art and the Value of Software

Manufactured goods generally have a clear relationship between

cost, price, and value. In software, as in art, the value of the work

is more often completely unrelated to cost and price. Operating

systems provide a great example: the Windows audience for the

most part must use Windows regardless of cost or price. The

Mac OSX audience generally chooses to use OSX regardless of

price, and often explicitly because of the aesthetic experience of

using OSX. Linux has no cost at all, and a price that varies

wildly, and it also has a dedicated audience.

The value of software, like the value of an artistic performance,

lies in the ability of the software to attract and keep an audience.

The software industry would benefit immensely by turning the

tools of artistic criticism on software.

The 20th century in particular saw a great proliferation of critical

theory of artistic work. Among the most important ideas were

The New Criticism and Structuralism. Both provide fine tools

for evaluating software.

The New Criticism: The Intentional Fallacy and Aesthetic Value

The New Criticism was the most important school of literary

criticism in the middle of the 20th century. An essay this length

can touch only lightly on some key ideas of New Criticism, but

those ideas turn out to be quite valuable.

The New Critics believe that once the authors finish their works,

they disappear from the milieu in which the work exists. New

Critics do not involve themselves in what the author intended to

create; they concern themselves only with the work as it exists.

This principle is called the “Intentional Fallacy”: what the author

intended has no part in the value of the author's work.

Creating software can be seen in a similar light. Once the

software is released, the team that created it cannot control how

the software is used, nor who uses it, nor what it is used for. The

value of the software must lie in the software itself and in how it

is used, not in how it was created or in what it was intended to do.

The most important tool of the New Critics is a technique called

“close reading”. From Wikipedia: “close reading describes the

careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a

reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general,

paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order

in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.”

Creating software has its own kinds of close reading: code

review, unit tests, and feature tests are all ways in which software

creators emphasize the particular over the general. But one of the

most important results of close reading, and one of the most

important aspects of value to New Critics, is to identify and

examine the works for ambiguity. These ambiguities are

examined for their value: some kinds of ambiguity add to the

value of the work; some kinds of ambiguity detract from the

value of the work.

Software whose ambiguous features allow the user to do more

than the developers intended will be more valuable-- think of a

wiki. Software whose ambiguous features stop the user in his

tracks has much less value-- think of the Windows Vista security

regimen.

Aesthetic Value: Unity, Complexity, Intensity

Monroe Beardsley, who wrote “The Intentional Fallacy” along

with William K. Wimsatt, also proposed a way to measure the

value of a particular work. Beardsley states that the value of the

work resides in three criteria: unity, variety, and intensity.

Applying these criteria to software is an interesting exercise.

Software may be unified if all of its features support a central

activity or theme. Software may have variety if the features cover

a wide range of activity. Software may be intense if using the

software is a compelling experience.

Periodically examining a software project throughout the

development process using these criteria is a fascinating exercise.

Structuralism: Signs and Myths

Structuralism became popular later in the 20th century. Where

New Criticism seeks to examine particular works disconnected

from intent or affect, Structuralism is rooted in linguistics and

anthropology, and seeks to examine works in the context of their

language and of their culture.

Two aspects of Structuralism are of particular interest: the idea

that linguistic signs can be decomposed into the signifier and the

signified; and that works can have deep structures that reflect

cultural values that can be represented as myths.

Signs: Signifier and Signified

A linguistic sign is a speech act: a word, a sentence, a poem, a

book. It is not at all unreasonable to treat the use of a software

feature or a software user interface as a sign.

The signifier is the “sound pattern” of the sign. It is what

happens in the physical act of speaking, or in the personal act of

reciting to ourselves. Furthermore, signifiers are the tokens by

which people communicate. Signifiers are what people send each

other as they participate in culture.

The signified is the “concept or meaning” of the signifier. The

signified is the true act or true feeling or

physical/emotional/apprehended manifestation of the signifier.

With the ability to separate signifier and signified, the

Structuralists look for common deep elements and mythological

underpinnings of artistic and cultural works.

The value of any particular work, then, can be evaluated in

several ways. A work might have value to a Structuralist if:

Signs are rich and easily available
Signifiers in the work are rich and pleasant
Signified are deep and clearly delineated by their
The work reflects a rich understanding of the cultural mythology and milieu

Exercise: New Critical and Structuralist Evaluation of Browser Behavior

New Critics contribute the idea of close reading in order to

evaluate unity, variety, and complexity of a work, looking for

ambiguity in the service of a rich aesthetic experience.

Structuralists contribute the ability to separate signifier and

signified within a work, in order to evaluate the richness of both

the experience of the work itself and the extent to which the work

relates cultural mythology, either that of the work itself or that of

the consumer of the work.

As a thought experiment, use these tools to measure the value of

this behavior:

When Internet Explorer opens a web page that contains MPEG3

files (for instance

http://www.drummingstyles.com/Genres/Latin/Bossa-

Nova/index.html), it by default prevents the user from loading the

page, and pops up a warning message that reads

(IE6 and IE7) Do you want to allow software such as

ActiveX controls and plugins to run?

(IE6) A script is accessing some software (an ActiveX

control) on this page which has been marked safe for scripting.

Do you want to allow this?

(IE7) This website wants to run the following add-on:

'Windows Media Player' from 'Microsoft Corporation'. If you

trust the website and the add-on and want to allow it to run,

click here...

A New Critic can use close reading on this behavior to see if it

exposes any ambiguities. If those ambiguities contribute to the

unity, intensity, and variety of the experience, then the behavior is

valuable.

Since the only executable files on the page are mp3, the false

reference to ActiveX sends the reader down a false path. Since

there is no explanation for why an mp3 is considered to be

ActiveX, this falseness only detracts from both the unity and the

intensity of the experience.

Furthermore, since the software requires validation of behavior

that the reader requested anyway (the false “ActiveX control” is

in fact “safe for scripting”) this behavior can only detract from

the whole point of the work, which is to play the mp3 file while

reading the text of the page.

So a close reading of the the behavior in question in a New

Critical sense shows that the software reports false information.

Although the behavior could be construed as adding variety, it

does so for no good reason, and prevents the experience of the

work itself, which is to play the mp3 files while reading the page.

A Structuralist would have a different interpretation. The

references to ActiveX are a signifier, but it is unclear exactly what

is being signified, since the obvious signified (a real ActiveX

control) does not actually exist.

The Structuralist finds a clue in IE7, where under some

circumstances, when loading a page with mp3 files, warns “This

website wants to run the following add-on: 'Windows Media

Player' from 'Microsoft Corporation'. If you trust the website and

the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here...”

Microsoft itself is concerned about security, or at least about the

appearance of security. Perhaps the false warnings are intended

to warn about the possible insecurity of the Microsoft Windows

Media Player itself.

Looking at the wider culture, everywhere from airports to banks

to offices, there is a demonstrable trend toward what Bruce

Schneier calls “security theater”. Security theater is

“countermeasures that provide the feeling of security while doing

little or nothing to actually improve security”.

A Structuralist will see that the culture that produced this work

values “security theater” while providing only the appearance of

security, so the Structuralist will concede a certain value to this

Internet Explorer behavior that a New Critic would not.

Citations for part one

Chris McMahon: The Software Artists: Citations for Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McMahon) — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:06:48 +0000

Many of the ideas in this paper were first presented at the Austin

Workshop on Test Automation in early 2007. The substance of

the talks appeared on the author's blog shortly afterward:

http://chrismcmahonsblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/craft-and- discipline-larks-tongues-in.html

Most of the New Criticism and Structuralist citations are from

Wikipedia, except:

Child Jr., William C. 2000 Monroe Beardsley's Three Criteria for

Aesthetic Value: A Neglected Resource in the Evaluation of

Recent Music. Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol 34, No. 2

(Summer 2000), pp 49-63 doi:10.2307/3333576

The author did not know that unity/variety/intensity had been first

presented in music criticism until reading this article.

The author also referred to

Adams, Hazard, Searle, Leroy (eds.) 1986 Critical Theory Since

1965 University Presses of Florida/Florida State University Press

for background information.

Bruce Schneier on “security theater”:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secur. html

Steve Freeman: Doubtful metaphors (i)

Sun, 18 May 2008 10:49:24 +0000

TDD is Keyhole surgery for software

Whilst writing up an extended example of TDD, I was trying to be as incremental as possible, adding tiny little slices of behaviour all the way through the system: replace one component, get that working; show a connection established, get that working; show one field on the UI, get that working. I took the trouble to structure the changes so that the application was working nearly all the time, rather than having to rip it apart.

Before I learned how to make progress is such fine slices, I would have cracked open the whole codebase and made the changes in one sustained effort. That would have meant that I couldn’t stop until I finished, I couldn’t check in without branching, and that merging with rest of the team would be unpleasant. Lots of coders talk about this in terms of “open-heart surgery”.

So maybe keyhole surgery is a better ambition as a metaphor. All the invasive work is focussed on the part that actually matters, rather than having to open up a route to get there. It takes a little more effort, but it’s less damaging to the patients who recover much more quickly, so the procedure as a whole is safer and cheaper.

Jerry Weinberg has a post, where he writes about how “surgery” may a better term for what many software teams do than “maintenance”. It gives a better sense of the risks involved and why quick solutions implemented by juniors may not be the best approach.

Medical joke from when I shared a house with a medic. “How can you spot the laparoscopists at the pub?”, “They drink their beer through a straw.”

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-17 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 18 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Steve Freeman

Sat, 17 May 2008 10:23:12 +0000

Robert X. Cringley has another entertaining rant about whatever turned up this week. Two quotations:

First, while ranting about the IT research consultancies.

There are themes at Gartner and its competitors — ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is.

Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users — the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn’t, Lord knows) — are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.

Second, on the acquisition of EDS by HP

I wonder what would happen to an outfit like HP Services if the company just decided to forget about acquisitions and simply invest $12+ billion in their current operation? Heck, half the people working right now in HP Services probably worked at some point in their careers for EDS (or IBM). What DNA is HP acquiring here that they don’t have already?

Mike Melia: growth@gigantiq

Sat, 17 May 2008 05:48:25 +0000

Over the past couple of months we’ve had the good fortune to welcome James Pott and Cory Prowse to Gigantiq. Both are fantastic additions and have already been busy with ideas to develop the company.

At the moment, I’m lucky enough to be on the same team as James and Cory and I’m really enjoying the experience. Their passion for software development has certainly reinvigorated me; I’ve been on a podcast mega-marathon this week in an effort to keep up with some of their technology discussions.

It’s quite amusing that the group of us at the same client are popping to the gym next door on a regular basis. It may even realise Andy’s bizarre dream of having a team of Gigantic Software Developers at Gigantiq. I’ll have to order a few more of those 5XL corporate polos.

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-16 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 17 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

thoughtbot: Shoulda testing plugin
Powerset

Nice, semantics based wikipedia search engine.
I Love Stars | Potion Factory

Very nice, low friction iTunes ratings apps.
Concurrency with MPI in .NET - Matthew Podwysocki
Alloc Init | Downloads

Nice iTunes helper app for laptops

Griffin Caprio: Twitter

Sat, 17 May 2008 03:33:43 +0000

A little over a year ago, I decided to start using twitter to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly bagged it because I just did not see the benefit of subscribing to the itty-bitty thoughts of a large group of people and I quickly was forgetting to tweet myself. The whole thing stagnated.

However, about a week ago, I decided that maybe it might be time to give twitter another shot. I did so for one particular reason. While I still don't think that twitter is compelling as a desktop app, what is making me come back is the mobile and local component. A twitter client on my iPod Touch could be a compelling view into what's happening locally, either here in Chicago or wherever I am. So, I reactivated my account and began to set things up on my laptop / desktop. I started by downloading my old favorite client, Twitterrific and setting it up on my computers.

That was three days ago. Below are photos documenting my entire twitter experience over the past three days:

First up, shots of my OS X client Twitterrific:

Those photos have been constant. "No problem" I say, i'll just use the site for a little bit. Well this is an example of what i've gotten from their site:

Now, I don't care what technology they're using or how many users they have, this is just a joke. You're sending small pieces of text across the internet. This shouldn't be this hard right? I mean how many IM services stay up with no problems? Granted, this is a little different, but not my much. We're talking YEARS that twitter has been out and they're still having these problems.

Geez....

Mike Melia: AmbiguousTableNameException with DBUnit

Sat, 17 May 2008 01:43:09 +0000

We had a problem this week whilst using DBUnit to set up some test data. A quick google didn’t really reveal much so I’ve included a (snipped) stacktrace to help anyone who also encounters this problem:

Caused by: org.dbunit.database.AmbiguousTableNameException: BIN$S/1W2ofvNM7gQAB/AQEkDA==$0 at org.dbunit.database.DatabaseDataSet.initialize(DatabaseDataSet.java:140) at org.dbunit.database.DatabaseDataSet.getTableMetaData(DatabaseDataSet.java:186) at org.dbunit.operation.AbstractOperation.getOperationMetaData(AbstractOperation.java:59) at org.dbunit.operation.AbstractBatchOperation.execute(AbstractBatchOperation.java:130) at ...

Our quick fix (based on a hunch) was to ensure that the database user did not have DBA privileges. We’re using Oracle 10g XE and this privilege change was easy to make using Oracle APEX. As soon as we’d changed the user privileges, the exception went away.

Now that the weekend is here I have a little more time to investigate the cause of the problem and the (potentially) correct fix.

It looks as though this problem is caused by the Oracle’s use of a recycle bin to hold deleted objects. The objects in this recycle bin are still accessible as schema MetaData if you issue a jdbcConnection.getMetaData().getTables(..).

As DBUnit uses the schema MetaData to build up a map of tables in the schema, the duplicates in the recycle bin will result in the AmbiguousTableNameException.

Fortunately, DBUnit offers a means to ignore these recycled tables. I haven’t tried it yet (I’ll give it a go on Monday) but it looks as though you can set a property DatabaseConfig.FEATURE_SKIP_ORACLE_RECYCLEBIN_TABLES on the connection and all should be fixed.

I’ll update the post on Monday to let you know if it worked.

Chris Matts: Feature Injection

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:22:04 +0000

I met up with Romilly Cockling and Liz Keogh at XTC this week. Romilly encouraged me to write something on Feature Injection. When I got home, I remembered that I had already written most of the Feature Injection stuff down...

Alex Ruiz: FEST-Swing got a really cool NetBeans plug-in!

Fri, 16 May 2008 06:13:47 +0000

Not long ago, Geertjan Wielenga wrote the article "Festive Functional Tests for Swing GUIs." In the article, Geertjan describes the features that FEST-Swing provides, with examples showing how easy it is to test Swing GUIs with FEST-Swing.

On top of that, Geertjan wrote a NetBeans plug-in for FEST-Swing! The plug-in makes creation of GUI tests with FEST-Swing very easy. It provides the latest FEST-Swing libraries, Javadoc documentation and a test template. Installing the plug-in is very easy (Geertjan provided detailed instructions on how to install and use the FEST-Swing plug-in.) I tried it with NetBeans 6.1 and I can say that both, the plug-in and the IDE, are really impressive. Here is an image taken from the plug-in page:

Note: for some reason, the link to the plug-in needs to be clicked twice, the first time goes to the NetBeans plug-in main web page.

We had the pleasure and honor to meet Geertjan at JavaOne. He is such a cool, nice and humble guy!

Geertjan, we don't have enough words to thank you!

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-15 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 16 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

The Disco Blog » Blog Archive » Gant with Hudson in 5 steps

So now I need to reserch Phing and Gant. Probably Gant first as there's no freaking XML.

Mike Melia: Read my mind not my code

Fri, 16 May 2008 02:04:01 +0000

I was pairing with James Pott the other day (welcome to Gigantiq, James) when we had an interesting mini-squabble.

We were writing a test to state that we expected a class at a layer boundary to catch a SQLException and wrap it in a LayerException.

I was at the keyboard and started typing something like this

SQLMapClient sqlMapclient = EasyMock.creatNiceMock(SQLMapClient.class); EasyMock.expect(sqlMapClient.blah()).andThrow(new SQLException("bad things happened"));

At this point James stopped me and the conversation went something like this:

James: “we should be using a stub. We are not stating that we expect the SQLMapClient to be called; we are only stating that we expect the exception to be wrapped”.

Mike: “I’m not stating any expectations on the SQLMapClient being called” (at this point I may have crossed my arms).

James: “but you’re writing a Mock”

Mike: “no, I’m writing a stub” (my eyebrows had now become knitted)

James: “look at what you just typed”

Mike: “I used EasyMock to create a stub”

James: “look at what you just typed”

Mike: “EasyMock.expect… oh yeah. That should be EasyStub.when(..) shouldn’t it?”

I’ve spent so long enjoying that I could use EasyMock to knock up a quick and easy Stub that I stopped paying attention to how it reads. If I am using a Stub then it should be clear that I am using a Stub.

Jonathan Rasmusson: The Toyota Way - Long-term philosophy

Thu, 15 May 2008 13:16:45 +0000

Section I: Long-Term Philosophy Principle 1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals. ■ Have a philosophical sense of purpose that supersedes any short-term decision making. Work, grow, and align the whole organization toward a common purpose that is bigger than making money. Understand your place in the [...]

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-14 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 15 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Guide to building .NET projects using Hudson

It's all the rage to demonstrate that your Java CI server can build .NET projects. All a good thing. CruiseControl.NET was written because someone refused to have the java version installed on their estate. Not all all insecure.

Joe O'Brien: Teaching with Jim Again

Thu, 15 May 2008 02:57:06 +0000

I’m getting to teach the Test Driven Development with Rails studio with JIm again this month and next. We are doing two, one private studio in Los Angeles and then another public studio in Denver June. We still have seats left for the June studio, so come on out and join us.

Teaching with Jim is awesome. I’ve never had someone infect me with positive energy as much as he has. We’ve tweaked some of the material recently (as I reluctantly switch over to git) and are very excited about it. One of the best parts of this studio when we did it in Columbus was the discussion. I’ve never had more interaction with an audience as I did in Denver and I’m hoping it gets repeated. I love nothing more than getting on a soap box about testing and Ruby :-).

Come on out and join us, it’s going to be a good time.

Julian Simpson: Unclean. (does your CI server have an IDE installed on it?)

noreply@blogger.com (Julian) — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:08:20 +0000

(image taken from SubFlux's photostream)

Your build shouldn't depend on an IDE. I've been saying that for a long time. It doesn't matter that all the developers use the same IDE on your project. At least in the Java world that I have inhabited for most of the past 8 years, you absolutely should not need an IDE installed on your build server.

Yesterday I installed an IDE on the build server.

Casey Charlton and I both agree that in an ideal world, there's no connection between the build and the IDE. I've been trying to find a reference to the "thou shalt not install an IDE on the damn build server" rule. I've found a pretty authoritative quote from Paul Duvall's book:

You should avoid coupling your build scripts with an IDE. An IDE may be dependent on a build script, but a build script shouldn't be dependent on your IDE. .... Creating a seperate build script is important for two reasons:

1. Each developer may be using a different IDE, and it can be difficult to to account for configuration differences in each IDE.

2. A CI server must execute an automated build without human intervention. Therefore, the same automated build script used by developers can and should be used by the CI server...

As usual, Paul is bang on. But my issue at the moment is Visual Studio. Not that I can't write code in it (I haven't really tried), but the fact that it's actually more than an IDE in the traditional sense. It's also the container for the testing framework. It's almost the entire stack. It comes with Crystal Reports (which I'm happy to say I didn't install), and other stacks of middleware. Which you need to build your app. Ever tried to build a VSTO app? You need Visual Studio.

In theory, you don't need it, because the build tool for Microsoft Products (MSBuild) comes with the .NET framework. But it seems like in practice, you do.

So I installed it. And the build works, without me fiddling with the GAC. I can live with that. What works for you?

Paul Holser: Jaggregate with BGGA closures

Wed, 14 May 2008 14:46:31 +0000

The latest snapshots of Jaggregate seem to work well with BGGA closures converted to functors and predicates. I had to extract one-method interfaces from the abstract *Function and *Predicate classes (the interfaces are "*Functor" and "*Condition") -- they basically correspond to the single abstract evaluate() and matches() methods -- and to change method signatures to accept the interface types rather than the abstract class types. This was to allow closure conversion to occur -- if the parameters remained of types corresponding to abstract classes, the conversions would be rejected.

The one tweak needed was that initially, the BGGA prototype (dated Apr 27 2008) was rejecting calls such as:


    Interval.fromTo(1, 4).forEachDo(System.out#println(int));

where the closure (here, a method reference) passed as a UnaryFunctor had return type void, and the signature of forEachDo() was:


    void forEachDo(UnaryFunctor<? super Integer, ?>);

If I changed the signature to:


    <R> void forEachDo(UnaryFunctor<? super Integer, ? extends R>);

things were fine, but I wasn't sure why the change would be necessary.

I mailed Neal Gafter about this, and seemingly within hours he'd fixed the issue and released a new cut of the prototype (dated May 11 2008). Many thanks to Neal for the quick turnaround and for fighting through my silly questions. :)

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Ron Jacobs : Living through "The Change"

Dealing with change. Planning for it, etc.
Channel9 Wiki: EquivalentTasks

nant vs. msbuild:
MSBuild Community Tasks

The MSBuild tasks that Microsoft didn't make.

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Building an F# powered indexing system < Trying This Again
Jungerl - a dense and chaotic Jungle of Erlang code
SourceForge.net Repository - [jungerl] Index of /jungerl/lib/otp.net

.NET & Erlang integration
Integrating .NET and Erlang using OTP.NET - Nauman Leghari's Blog

Howto integrate .NET & Erlang.
Building an F# powered indexing system (part 2) < Trying This Again
You don't create a culture - (37signals)

So many don't 'get' this.
TBox and ABox Reasoning in Expressive Description Logics - De Giacomo, Lenzerini (ResearchIndex)

Greg Luck: Ehcache-1.5.0-beta1 Released

gluck@gregluck.com (gluck) — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:05:03 +0000

I have released a new version of Ehcache, 1.5.0-beta1, which provides a host of new features and a few bug fixes. Some of the features are up to a year old, so this pretty large release is a chance to clear the decks ahead of some exciting new work coming in 1.6, such as the ehcache Cache Server.

Please dive into this version and let me know if you find any issues. I am hoping the tyres will be kicked by enough people to do a final release in 3-4 weeks' time.

New Features

Added JGroups Implementation. Thanks to Pierre Monestie for the patch(es) for this. Though new to the core distribution JGroups replication has been in production use in a large cluster for the last year. This does not create a dependency on JGroups unless you want to use this replicator. That will be made clearer when it is moved to a separate module before final release.

CachingFilter performance improvements,

Constructs performance improvements

added loadAll() to the loader implementation to enable preload without specifying keys.

diskPersistent now can be used with caches that use only MemoryStore in normal use but want to persist to disk

DiskStores are now optional. The element is now non-mandatory. This will simplify configurations particularly where multiple CacheManagers are being used. If one or more caches requires a DiskStore, and none is configured, java.io.tmpdir will be used and a warning message will be logged to encourage explicity configuration of the diskStore path.

The default RMI based cache replication can now configure a RemoteObject port so that it can be easily configured to work through firewalls. This is done by adding a new property remoteListenerPort to RMICacheManagerPeerListenerFactory to enable it to be specified.

Added a new system property expansion token "ehcache.disk.store.dir" to DiskStore configuration which can be used to specify the DiskStore directory on the command line or in an environment variable.

e.g. java -Dehcache.disk.store.dir=/u01/myapp/diskdir ...

Added the ability to specify system property tokens using $tokenname in ehcache.xml which are then replaced when the configuration is loaded.

Updated the remote debugger with enhanced reporting and better documentation (See Logging page in the documentation).

The new version prints a list of caches with replication configured, prints notifications as they happen, and periodically prints the cache name, size and total events received.

Summary of Bug Fixes

CachingFilter bug fixes for various rare edge conditions

Major speed up to shutdown process when diskPersistent is not being used

Fixed various shutdown exception when both Hibernate and Spring both try to destroy caches

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-12 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 13 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

ant [thecrumb wiki]

Jim Priest's collection of Ant resources, including his own blog posts.

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-12 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 13 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Calvin Coolidge quotes
Microformats test-suite concept

Interesting.
Home

KM Tools
Moody - Mac OS X / Windows app to mood tag your music in iTunes
Rdb2RdfXG/StateOfTheArt - ESW Wiki

State of RDF <-> Relational mapping.
GraphPath Language

Graphing processing language
Describing statistical data on the Web - The Statistical Core Vocabulary (scovo)
Twitterverse Quartz Composer on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
.NET HITMAN: Exception Handling - Do's and Dont's

Nice list of exception best practices.
Five More Principles Of Effective Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
College Football Preseason Magazines

TONS of machine ready stats.
XML.com: Under the Hood: Oracle Berkeley DB XML
sontek ( John M. Anderson ) » Python with a modular IDE (Vim)

Paul Holser: Props for JOptSimple

Mon, 12 May 2008 23:21:38 +0000

Yay!

Paul Holser: JavaOne 2008, Day 4

Mon, 12 May 2008 23:19:36 +0000

"The Layperson's Guide to Building a Better User Experience" -- in short, you are a user experience designer; take interaction design, user experience, and user personae seriously; and read up.

"Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" -- Interesting discussion from the chief scientist of TopQuadrant. Interesting mention of D2RQ, a library to expose relational stores as stores of RDF triples; though to hear Dean Allemang tell it, there isn't much of a community forming around D2RQ.

Neat presentation from two Jython commiters about the challenges involved in compiling Jython code down to JVM bytecode.

Two Selenium cognoscenti, Dan Fabulich and Patrick Lightbody, gave a decent account of Selenium for web testing. Apparently the XPath support library that Selenium uses has been tuned quite a bit and should be faster in the new 1.0 beta. Still holding out hope that it can handle non-trivial (and even some trivial) XPath expressions on IE.

Julian Simpson: The Ant Best Practices Series

noreply@blogger.com (Julian) — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:12:06 +0000

(Photo taken from 33mhz's photostream)

In 2003, Eric M. Burke published an article at OnJava called Top 15 Ant Best Practices. Are the practices still relevant? What has changed in the last 4 years? In this series I'll be reviewing each one and trying to find out.

1 of 15: Adopt consistent style

2 of 15: Put the build file at the root of your project

3 of 15: Prefer a single buildfile

4 of 15: Provide good help

5 of 15: Provide a clean target

6 of 15: Manage dependencies with Ant

7 of 15: Define and reuse paths

8 of 15: Define Proper Target Dependencies

This page is updated every time there's a new article.

Julian Simpson: Ant Best Practices: Define Proper Target Dependencies

noreply@blogger.com (Julian) — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:10:00 +0000

(Image taken from Nick Sieger's Photostream)

Wondering what this post is about? Have a look here.

Last time I wrote, it was about reusing paths. Tonight, it's about the dependency graph. My [N]Antcall is evil post goes into some detail about dependency graphs. Let's just agree here that Ant targets tend to accumulate dependencies. The point that Eric makes is that the dependency graph (otherwise known as the dependency tree) grows over time as you add targets. Being a thing that accumulates over time, the graph can get crufty. That target that was just a short term thing while Bob worked on a refactoring exercise (oh, the irony) is now central to your build. So from time to time you need to clean the dependencies out, like that burned cheese that melts off of pizzas and sticks to the bottom of the oven.

Some projects seem to run into trouble and throw dependencies out completely. Umm, good luck with that. Eric suggests a half-way house approach: a few well known targets that contain dependencies on lesser known but functional targets for the more experienced to use at their own risk. I can go along with that.

My last thought is this: your default build should never depend on a clean target. Leave it to the compiler to have a go at working out what it should do. If you use Continuous Integration, you can make a little target that depends on clean just for that case. Your fellow developers will thank you.

Griffin Caprio: Persistence

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:29:32 +0000

Whew....I'm going to start off my first blog post in 7.5 months with a quote from Calvin Coolidge:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race"

It's with that that I explain my absence a bit. About 2 years ago, when I first started working for TrackAbout, I made the decision that I would use the opportunity of working from home to the fullest extent. That meant I would go back to school and finish the bachelors that I had been working on for the better part of a decade. My new bosses were on board with the idea, as long as it didn't hamper my ability to deliver at work. After transferring from Aurora University, where I was double majoring in Mathematics and Computer science, in the spring of 2001, I enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago ( UIC ), with a declared major of Statistics and Operations Research. I spent a year at UIC, going to school full time. In the Summer of '02, I decided that I would work full-time instead of going back to school. I made the decision that I wanted experience over education. Over the next few years, I took a class here and there, but nothing major.

Finally, after leaving Mobitrac and starting at TrackAbout, my decision was made. I was going back. I decided I would get it done as quickly as I could, while still fulfilling my duties at TrackAbout. Since I had ~30 hours left, that meant taking ~10 a semester for 3 semesters. Because of a scheduling goof, I actually didn't enroll in classes until the Spring of '07.

When explaining my decision to people, they often ask "Why go back?". After all, I have a good job & a pretty successful career which hasn't been hindered by a lack of a degree. So why do it? Well, I bounced things around in my head until I came to this final conclusion:

In the end, the degree was something big in my life that I started and I wanted to finish it.

That's not to say that every person needs to get a degree to be successful. Far from it. If I never started college, I doubt I would have gone through it all. I know several very successful people who are 10x smarter than some college graduates I know. Life is all about what you make of it and a college degree is just one optional component. In the end, I didn't want to look back at my life and see something I quit at. Especially something so big. That's why I went back.

Well, after 1.5 years of intense studying, I am happy to say that I am now a college graduate.

That's where the quote comes in.

Going back to school while maintaining a normal, 50-hr a week full time job was going to be tough. Unfortunately, around Nov '07, the TrackAbout engineering team lost a team member and our head count went from 4 down to 3. As if that wasn't bad enough, we were staring down the barrel of a Jan 1st deadline for not one but TWO very large, company changing projects. They were:

The roll out of a new order integration system for one of pilot customers. This is an end-to-end, completely paperless system of placing and delivering orders.
The first customer of our brand new partnership with TECSYS, a supply chain management software company, was going live on Jan 1st. They were going live with our standard tracking solution, rental bill generation module and the TECSYS EliteSeries Distribution Management Systems (DMS) offering. We, TrackAbout and TECSYS, were completely replacing their exiting system(s). Needless to say, a sizable chunk of our targeted vertical was going to be watching the rollout and we needed to impress.

Whew....there was a lot to do and I had to balance work and a school curriculum that included classes like:

Applied Statistics for Engineers
Intro to Mathematical Probability
Nonparametric Statistical Methods

Needless to say, I felt like quitting SEVERAL times. I tried to come up with every excuse I could think of. "I didn't need the degree", "I could finish up next semester", "I can go back another time", etc....

But I didn't quit. I sucked it up, quit my whining and pushed through. Which brings me to the quote I started this post with. Looking back at the past 5-10 years of my life, the one thing I can point to that made me successful isn't intelligence, upbringing, luck or chance.

It's perseverance.

I succeeded simply because I didn't let myself fail. Initiative and hard work will get you ahead of 70% of the people out there. A lot of people are plagued by procrastination, laziness or simply a reluctance to sacrifice. I meet lots of people in my life who think I'm lucky or that I am in a good field and being in computers makes it easy to be successful. However, people don't see the hard work that goes into being employed in the tech industry. Sure, they see the cool toys or the nice paycheck, but they don't see the support phone that you have to sometimes carry. Nor do they when you have to cancel plans because of some problem with work. Or how about the difficulty in scheduling a vacation? People don't realize that when tech people go on vacation or take days off, our work doesn't go away. It's there for us when we get back. Only now, we've shortened the time we have to get it done :)

In the end, I'm extremely happy I went back and finished. I'm also extremely happy I am done now. I now have free time again and just in time for the summer. Especially since I hear the Cubs are winning the world series :)

Well, I can dream, can't I ?

Chris McMahon: The Software Artists: Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McMahon) — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:08:00 +0000

The people who create software are not factory workers. Nor are they engineers, in the sense that engineering is the “practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences, as physics or chemistry”. But the software industry continues to treat software workers as if they were factory workers or construction workers. The software industry also attempts to value software as if it were a manufactured product.

But making software is a fundamentally creative process, more similar to performance than to manufacturing. Like art and music, software has an audience that is involved in a personal way with the software. And the people who create software are much more like performers than they are like construction workers.

If it is true that software is much more like art than it is like manufacturing, then the tools of artistic criticism should be useful for evaluating software.

It should also be possible to apply successful approaches to art or music pedagogy to software pedagogy.

Furthermore, it should be possible to manage software projects in the same way that artists manage performances, with better results than if the software projects were managed like manufacturing or engineering projects.

Chris McMahon: The Software Artists: Explanation

noreply@blogger.com (Chris McMahon) — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:05:35 +0000

I wrote a paper some time ago to submit to the Conference of the Association for Software Testing, but the paper was not accepted for the program. I'm on the waiting list if another presenter drops out, which seems unlikely at this point.

I think it is likely that my paper was not accepted at CAST was because it is somewhat similar to a presentation from Jonathan Kohl and Michael Bolton, two of the best testers in the universe. I intend to publish my paper here on my blog in the hopes that Jonathan and Michael and other Software Artists will have access to as much relevant information as possible to support their position.

I think that one enormous reason that few people take software-as-artistic-practice seriously is because of a perceived lack of practical application: manufacturing and engineering provide venerable examples of measurement tools, education curricula, and market strategy-- assuming that you believe that software is an engineered and manufactured product. Those of us who believe that software is an artistic process have failed to provide compelling alternatives to the tools provided by engineering and manufacturing.

I set out to start to remedy that situation with this paper.

It is a long piece, so I'll publish it in several sections in the coming days, as I have time to get it right and looking good. I have extensive references also. My plan is to publish references as separate blog posts after each section, so that people who don't care can skip them and people who do care can relate them to recent posts.

Paul Holser: JavaOne 2008, Day 3

Sun, 11 May 2008 18:22:49 +0000

"Using FindBugs in Anger", with the great Bill Pugh -- nice summary of a great tool. I liked the slide listing some common (but incorrect) wisdom about bugs and static analysis: programmers are smart, and smart programmers don't make dumb mistakes. We all make dumb mistakes. I really like FindBugs, and use it on my open-source projects. Interesting to learn that there is commercial support for it via Fortify Software. Pugh described how large organizations such as Google use FindBugs on large code bases, strategies for prioritizing resolutions to issues FindBugs detects, tracking issues historically over time and adding issues to bug databases, etc.

This is the second time this conference I've seen or heard "Q & A" and QA (as in quality assurance) confused. Hm.

"Writing Your Own JSR-Compliant Scripting Language" was a good overview of the new Java 6 API for launching scripts that can interact with the calling Java program.

"Pimp My Build" offered some very Ant-specific hints for maintaining build scripts -- it all pretty much boiled down to refactoring out common bits and treating your build scripting with the same refactoring and coding care you would afford your production code.

"The Future of Guice" from "Crazy Bob" Lee and a couple of other Googlers -- "Types are the currency of Java" -- nice mantra, and it clearly informs the decisions the Guice crew made regarding how to indicated injections, etc. Came with a promo code for an ebook version of the aPress title on Guice. Bonus!

Julian Simpson: Links for 2008-05-10 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 11 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

I've come up with a quick test you can do to see if you should automate your deployment process.

Cautionary tales

Griffin Caprio: Links for 2008-05-09 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Joshua Flanagan - Readable Regular Expressions
Introducing LINQ To Regex - ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design
Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

The new ParentDish: helping raise kids of all ages TUAW PHOTO GALLERY ENGADGETDOWNLOAD SQUADJOYSTIQBLOGGINGSTOCKSGREENDAILY TUAWWEB SEND US TIPSRSS FEEDSMACWORLD COVERAGE Indigo 3.0, increased geekiness for your home Posted May 7th 2008 6:00PM by Bret

Steve Freeman: Glass Virtuoso, remarkable

Fri, 09 May 2008 22:49:08 +0000

Wait for a minute in.

This requires a lot of practice.

via http://centripetalnotion.com/

Paul Holser: JavaOne 2008, Day 2

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:27:17 +0000

On Day One, I picked Josh Bloch's brain for a bit about whether the BGGA closures proposal was redeemable if the gnarlier bits might be removed, leaving it basically with function types. It was cool to mingle with the Java "rock stars", if only for a moment.

I enjoyed Neal Gafter's Day Two talk "Closures Cookbook" immensely. He gave a very clear exposition of the BGGA proposal and the use cases propelling it.

Right out of the gate, he started with a disclaimer: Google is open to multiple parallel investigations of closures but is not currently prepared to commit to any particular proposal.

The cool bit is that closure literals can be used as instances of one-method interface types whose method parms and return type are compatible with those of the closure:


    Runnable r = { => doWhatever(); }
    r.run();

    Callable<String> cs = { => "result"; }

    Comparator<String> reverse = { String s1, String s2 => s2.compareTo(s1); }

    ItemSelectable is = ...;

    is.addItemListener( { ItemEvent ev => doSomething(ev, is); } );

Apparently there are technical reasons why this couldn't be done for abstract classes with one abstract method, didn't quite get the picture...

Also considered were aggregrate operations, near and dear to my heart:


double highestGPA = Double.MIN_VALUE;
for (Student s: students) {
  if ( s.graduationYear == THIS_YEAR ) {
     int gpa = s.getGPA();
     if ( highestGPA < gpa )
       highestGPA = gpa;
  }
}

double highestGPA =
    students.filter( { Student s => s.graduationYear == THIS_YEAR } )
            .map( { Student s => s.getGPA(); } )
            .max();

I just love how the second reads -- nothing like method names to make intent clearer.

An extended example involving an API for timing units of code:


interface Block<R, throws X> {
    R execute() throws X;
}


public <R, throws X> R time(String opName, Block<R, X> block) throws X {
  long startTime = System.nanoTime();
  boolean success = true;
  try {
    return block.execute();
  }
  catch (final Throwable ex) {
    success = false;
    throw ex;
  }
  finally {
    recordTiming(opName, System.nanoTime() - startTime, success);
  }
}

int f() {
  time( "opName", { => someStatements } );
  time( "opName", { => return computeResult; } )
}

Yowza. Nice how it genericizes over whatever exceptions the block may raise (including none), and whatever the block might return (including nothing). Note the use of "safe re-throw" by marking a catch parameter final (proposed for JDK7).

Alex Buckley and Stanley Ho gave a nice summary of the first-class language and tooling support for modularity in Java (JSR 277). Seems a JAM module would be able to leverage OSGi bundles and repositories? Nice.

The Java Persistence API 2.0 talk was packed. Ridiculously packed. Fire marshal, anyone? People continued to stream in well into the presentation. One guy ended up accidentally kicking separating my MacBook power supply from the pluggable portion of it. Not so much as a "sorry, my bad" -- never looked back. I understand there's a certain amount of Asperger-style intense focus at a geeky conference, but come on. Sorry if I seemed a bit peevish, but several hot buttons were hit in this one: overcrowded room, disregard for personal space, cell phones ringing after several admonishments to silence them, relatively shrill speaker a bit trigger-happy on the slide flipper ... I guess my bitching about it was way more annoying to the guy in front of me, as when I uttered the line, "As a courtesy to others, please silence your cell phones", he shot back with the timeless classic, "Why don't you silence yourself, dude?" Cue the slow clap.

Anyway, I didn't get that much out of the JPA talk. I'm not doing much RDBMS work these days, but at least I have a sense of where to look for JPA info.

I bailed out of the talk "Unit Testing DB Operations with DBUnit" a shade early to catch a power nap -- I had no idea how exhausted I'd be after 1.5 days at the conference. That said, I scheduled a number of sessions and BOFs -- perhaps next time I'll pace myself a bit better. Besides, I've used DBUnit before, and it it quite nice -- not much new ground covered for me.

"Boldly Go Where the Java Programming Language Has Never Gone Before" -- Geert Bevin's talk's premise was that "You don't have to master new languages, tools, or libraries to deliver applications that go much further than what the standard Java platform provides." He gave compelling demonstrations of Terracotta, an OSS clustering solution for the Java platform; RIFE, a component-based web framework featuring continuations; GWT; and Google Android. Very nice stuff!

"Building RESTful Clients with JavaScript, Ruby, and JavaFX" -- not much here you couldn't get from an introductory article on REST.

Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks gave a talk about TW's use of JRuby. As an ex-ThoughtWorker I was eager to hear about what TW's been up to in the Ruby world -- clearly, quite a lot. I left TW just as it was beginning to pursue and land Ruby/Rails work. Right now, 40% of its US revenue comes form Ruby/Rails work. Surprising to learn that test suites run more slowly often in JRuby than in MRI -- less opportunity for JIT leverage, it seems. Often they run test suites in MRI pre-commit, then with JRuby in CI build.

"Cooking Your Own Groovy Builder: A Step Forward into Domain-Specific Languages" -- nice exposition of the Builder support for languages that describe hierarchical structures such as XML documents and Swing widgetry.

Julian Simpson: Last chance to sponsor us before the Woking bikeathon.

noreply@blogger.com (Julian) — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:46:29 +0000

Leukemia is horrid. Riding bikes is good. That's why we are riding in the 2008 Woking Bikeathon for Leukaemia Research. More info: Link