• 人类往往更容易相信和自己关系密切的人；而歧视和自己疏远的人。
• 人类往往更容易相信和自己有着同样或者近似文化，宗教，地域背景的人；而歧视异族，异类。
• 人类往往更容易相信简单的论点或者简短的论据；而歧视复杂的论点或者有上下文的内容丰富的论据。
• 人类往往更容易相信约定俗成或者常识；而歧视冷静合理的逻辑分析。

• 感性大于理性：即使是再聪明的人有时候也会头脑过热，不能冷静的思考。
• 没有完整的逻辑思维的方式和常识：还是有一些人会搞出黑马非马的笑话。
• 由于涉及个人或者阶级利益而故意忽视论据的上下文。

… and move to newer dope…

I just realized that I had about 58 eclipse SDKs downloaded on my hard drive and 22 instances of different versions of eclipse. That was a whooping 9GB for the sdk downloads and 6.5GB for the extracted versions. Time to move to newer dope

Similar was the case on the cruise based build grid that tested SWTBot from all versions starting from eclipse 3.2 upwards to the latest RC build on all platforms — linux-gtk/linux-gtk-64/win32/macosx-carbon.

Eclipsetasy

Perhaps culture is driven by just such flea-market ideas in a vast network of uncredited influence.

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1. A reasonable option for a number of applications.
2. Sets the bar in terms of low barrier to entry
3. Technical things to consider before taking the plunge:
1. Testing - development environment not (yet) quite the same as production.
2. Persistence - Different idioms needed than when persisting to relational databases.
3. Concurrency - The deployment sandbox is effectively single threaded. A whole bunch of Java libraries that spawn their own threads will need to be ported over before they can be used on the app engine. Moving away from shared memory concurrency is probably good anyway.
   
   

1. There is a spectrum from infrastructure (Amazon) to applications (Salesforce) with platform (app engine) being in the middle but closer to infrastructure. Domain specific play (statistical analysis cloud) is possible in the space between platform and applications. Of course, considering the venue, the speakers did not emit competing names like Amazon or Microsoft.
2. Standard potential advantages - dynamic scaling, low entry barrier (therefore low downside risk), pay as you go (op-ex over cap-ex)
3. Economies of scale (in terms of skilled people and infrastructure) mean that it is much harder to do-it-yourself (private clouds).
4. Security, privacy and IP - SLAs are ok but not nearly as good as the ability to fire your CIO when things go horribly wrong.
5. Is it really cheaper? - Unambiguous yes only if you move everything and close down your own data center.
6. Need new IT org? - probably yes - hopefully one that has better relations with the business.
7. Vendor lock-in? - probably not much worse than Oracle lock-in.
8. Other use cases - experiments, spiky one-time computational needs.
9. This is another of those things that lets you focus on core competencies.
10. Has the potential to solve the last-mile problem in agile software development - frequent and incremental deployment to production.

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A reminder to those following Planet Eclipse that there’s a Galileo DemoCamp in Pune on Saturday, 13th June 2009. Sign up on the wiki page so that the ThoughtWorks Pune office is stuffed with enough food to feed you

An Eclipse DemoCamp is a congregation of Eclipse enthusiasts to meet up and demo what they are doing with Eclipse. The demos can be of research projects, Eclipse open source projects, applications based on Eclipse, commercial products using Eclipse or whatever you think might be of interest to the attendees. The only stipulation is that it must be Eclipse related.

There’s a joke about maven downloading half the internet. Apparently p2 talks to the other half maven does not download.

Earlier you’d go get a coffee every time you clicked the eclipse update manager. With the eclipse servers taking a beating and download speeds really going slow you better grab lunch.

But wait there’s another nifty “hack”: Don’t talk to the eclipse servers.

To make the p2 update manager faster (assuming you aren’t downloading from the eclipse mirror sites):

• Edit your hosts file (/etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts)
• Add a fake alias for the download server:

  127.0.0.10 download.eclipse.org
  

Open the update manager again, enjoy the amazing speeds, remember to remove the line if you indeed want to talk to the eclipse servers.

You can download the latest and greatest from the SWTBot download page.

A listing of some of the new features available:

Bug 263036 – SWTBot finally has an icon that was missing since two years!

Bug 269919 – Added support for toggle buttons

Bug 271246 – Better support for handling editors. This should serve as a good start towards providing support for multipage, forms based editors

Bug 271132 – Using Display#post() to support sending native click events instead of fake events. This is still work in progress and not all widgets support native events yet.

Bug 273624 – Use native keyboard events for typing. SWTBot currently defaults to using AWT robot. SWT’s Dispay#post() is available as well — it is however buggy across platforms and swt versions. Since SWTBot uses native keyboard events, it needs to understand various Keyboard Layouts.

Bug 267189 – Support capturing screenshots of widgets.

Bug 277093 – Support for Link widgets.

There are also a lot of minor bugs that were fixed in this release.

Monday morning excitement. JUnit tests that pass in the IDE fail in ant and cruise servers running on all platforms.

java.lang.AssertionError:
Expected: a string containing "... text=Ç..."
     got: "... text=Å..."

My immediate reaction was the encoding used by the JVM. Setting the “file.encoding” system property to UTF-8 did not help. Running the ant based tests in remote debugging mode also confirmed that the two strings were indeed different.

Since the tests used Cobertura for code coverage, the next step was to disable cobertura. Cobertura manipulates the generated byte code to add logging statements for code coverage. Still the same error.

The hidden gem seemed to be the -encoding java compiler flag. Setting it to UTF-8 fixed the problem.

So the next time you have something fail because of an encoding issue, it could just be the compiler encoding and not just the encoding used in the runtime!

All merchants online know pricing is absolutely critical to their bottom line. Plain discounting of products seasonal or in general is a merchandizing skill that is learned by all merchants when they’re trying to push sales online. Given the ease with which prices can be compared from one store to another and the popularity of price comparison engines. It is imperitive for all merchants (big and small) to understand how to price their products effectively to ensure that consumers purchase and “stick”.

The way you set prices doesn’t just influence demand it also effects consumption: ie. the extent to which your users actually use your service or you products that they’ve paid for and if they come back for more.

Let’s take this example: 2 friends: Jill and Jane get a membership to a local gym. Jill gets a monthly membership at 100USD/month and Jane pays a 1000 USD for the yearly membership upfront. Now, fast forward 6 months later: who is more likely to remain committed to their exercise schedules? Given the motivations of both J’s is the same, there is a higher likelihood that Jane (yearly membership) drops off her regimen first. Psychology tests have shown that Jane in an attempt to extract the most value from her higher one time payment will peak at a certain time and stop exercising as frequently at the gym. Jill on the other hand continues to use the gym and is happy with the value that she is gaining from her purchase. Jill eventually sticks on with her monthly plan for another 2 years at the same gym.

The lesson learned above is that not only is it critical to price correctly so that you target the Jill’s of the world to purchase today, but, it is also critical to make these one time buyers “stick”. Whether it is a one time purchase of a chair online or a discounted golf club bought online it is important to price correctly for “that” consumer and personalize the visit to an extent that the consumer has subliminally been affected positively.

The first and foremost step in this process is to “price correctly“. To effect the behaviour of the user positively a simple dumb discount that treats all visitors alike is just not going to cut it. This is the precise problem we’re tackling at Runa: understanding how to enable merchants to make better discounting decisions in real time for individual consumers that visit their sites and to increase lifetime value of these customers while at the same time maximizing their profit margins.

I’ll be writing about some basic techniques on how simple dumb discounting can help your bottom line and then provide some measurement of how you can further optimize this $ value by using Runa’s SaaS campaigns (I’m talking about a 200% increase in profit by using Runa in some cases :) ).

This post summarizes my series on fallacies of knowledge management.

1. Well begun is half done, so let's begin by collecting content
2. Repositories ensure that knowledge lasts longer than employees
3. Good organization is key
4. Access Control is Key
5. Make it easy to import and attach documents
6. Put usable tools in place, adoption will follow
   
   

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1. Not clicking "I found this review helpful/unhelpful" on a website that carries reviews (e.g. Amazon) or "This documentation was/was not useful to me" on a website that actively solicits feedback on documentation (e.g. many of Google's help pages)
2. Not adding appropriate tags to images found on Flickr
   
   
3. Not posting answers to unanswered questions that you ask in a public forum and later figure out the answer/workaround for.
4. There are times when programmers struggle with a cryptic stacktrace at work and a web search points them to the exact cause. All because someone took the effort to blog about that issue. You often see a number of grateful comments at the bottom of such posts. Yet, when I overcome such a problem by myself, I seldom try to write a post about it.
   
   

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Jruby-in a jar already bundles rspec and rake, so the goal was to find out where it gets packaged.

Download the jruby source zip, extract it and open the build.xml file, search for “rspec” (there’s two occurences) and you’ll find that it’s passed in as an argument to the gem installer, add in another line with “cucumber”:

<target name="install-gems">
  <property name="jruby.home" value="${basedir}"/>
  <java classname="org.jruby.Main" fork="true" maxmemory="${jruby.launch.memory}" failonerror="true">
    <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
    <classpath path="${jruby.classes.dir}"/>
    <sysproperty key="jruby.home" value="${jruby.home}"/>
    <arg value="--command"/>
    <arg value="maybe_install_gems"/>
    <arg value="rspec"/>
    <arg value="rake"/>
    <arg value="cucumber"/> <!-- add cucumber -->
    <arg value="--env-shebang"/>
  </java>
</target>

Then run ant:

$ ant jar-complete

To verify that everything is fine:

$ java -jar lib/jruby-complete.jar -S gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

builder (2.1.2)
cucumber (0.2.3)
diff-lcs (1.1.2)
polyglot (0.2.5)
rake (0.8.4)
rspec (1.2.2)
sources (0.0.1)
term-ansicolor (1.0.3)
treetop (1.2.5)

Great we’ve now managed to package jruby-in-a-jar with some additional gems. Now to run cucumber on jruby in eclipse.

Fredrick recently asked on the swtbot newsgroup:

My goal is to be able to write some user acceptance tests (using Cucumber) to be able to tests some of my Eclipse plug-ins.

Cucumber is a BDD framework written in (J)ruby. It executes plain text files as functional tests. As a first step, the goal was to be able to print a simple ‘hello world’:

This required being able to bundle jruby with the necessary gems, the jruby jar is already OSGi-fied, so creating a manifest was not required.

First drop in the jruby-complete.jar that we just created inside the target eclipse’s plugins directory.

Then create an eclipse application with the following in it:

public class CucumberRunner implements IApplication {

    public Object start(IApplicationContext context) throws Exception {
        Bundle bundle = Platform.getBundle("org.jruby.jruby");

        URL jrubyHome = FileLocator.toFileURL(bundle.getEntry("/META-INF/jruby.home"));

        RubyInstanceConfig config = new RubyInstanceConfig();
        config.setJRubyHome(jrubyHome.toString());
        Ruby runtime = JavaEmbedUtils.initialize(new ArrayList(), config);
        RubyRuntimeAdapter evaler = JavaEmbedUtils.newRuntimeAdapter();
        evaler.eval(runtime, "p 'Hello, Eclipse World'");
        JavaEmbedUtils.terminate(runtime);

        return EXIT_OK;
    }

    public void stop() {
        // do nothing
    }
}

Hello, Eclipse World

Now all we needed was to be able to execute the cucumber executable instead of printing hello world

Import the cucumber plugin with a sample calculator to execute it:

Cucumber Output

Alex Payne: I’d definitely want to hammer home what Steve said about typing. As our system has grown, a lot of the logic in our Ruby system sort of replicates a type system, either in our unit tests or as validations on models. I think it may just be a property of large systems in dynamic languages, that eventually you end up rewriting your own type system, and you sort of do it badly. You’re checking for null values all over the place. There’s lots of calls to Ruby’s kind_of? method, which asks, “Is this a kind of User object? Because that’s what we’re expecting. If we don’t get that, this is going to explode.” It is a shame to have to write all that when there is a solution that has existed in the world of programming languages for decades now.

Alex Payne: I think programmers who’ve never worked with a language with pattern matching before should be prepared to have that change their perceptions about programming. I was talking to a group of mostly Mac programmers, largely Objective-C developers. I was trying to convey to them that once you start working with pattern matching, you’ll never want to use a language without it again. It’s such a common thing that a programmer does every day. I have a collection of stuff. Let me pick certain needles out of this haystack, whether its based on a class or their contents, it’s such a powerful tool. It’s so great.

@PersistenceCapable(identityType = IdentityType.APPLICATION)

public class SomeDomainClass implements Serializable {

@PrimaryKey

@Persistent(valueStrategy = IdGeneratorStrategy.IDENTITY)

@Extension(vendorName = "datanucleus", key = "gae.encoded-pk", value = "true")

String id;

Update: Coverage by fellow ThoughtWorkers:

Ola Bini

Paul Hammant

John Hume

Philip Calcado

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Date: 25/3/09 1:24 AM

Hi,



I was to be informed about the status issue 18088886 regarding blocking of Undernet IRC servers by Airtel latest by 13:30 on 24th March, but have not been contacted. Please get back to me with an update.



Thanks,

Sidu.

Date: 25/3/09 1:32 PM



Dear Mr.Sidu,



Thank you for writing to us at Airtel Telemedia Services.



We acknowledge the receipt of your mail dated March 25th, 2009.



With regards to reference number 18088886, we regret to inform you that IRC

port 66602 cannot be opened as the same has

been blocked by Department of Telecommunications (DoT).



For further assistance, please.

• Call us at 080-44444121

• E-Mail us at - care.karnataka@airtel.in

• Fax us at 080-41112346



Assuring you of our best of services at all times.

Yours sincerely,



Thrapthi

Customer Relations

Airtel Telemedia Services

Date: 25/3/09 3:08 PM

Hi,



The highest port possible is 65535. Port number 66602 does not exist. Please confirm your response.



Please keep in mind that I am able to connect to other IRC networks (like Freenode) on the standard IRC ports, which would not be possible if the ports themselves were blocked by the DoT.



Best,

Sidu.

Date: 26/3/09 9:15 AM



Dear Mr. Sidu,



Thank you for writing to us at Airtel Telemedia Services.



We acknowledge the receipt of your mail dated March 25th, 2009.



Your request for broadband related has already been registered with the

reference number

18088886 and we have forwarded your mail to our technical team for further

clarifications.



We would get back to you as per the updates.



For further assistance, please.

• Call us at 080-44444121

• E-Mail us at - care.karnataka@airtel.in

• Fax us at 080-41112346



Assuring you of our best of services at all times.

Yours sincerely,



Mohsin.

Customer Relations

Airtel Telemedia Services

require 'rubygems'

require 'spec'



module DynamicGetter

  def method_missing(name, *args)

    if(@attributes.has_key? name)

      self.class.class_eval do

       define_method(name){ @attributes[name] }

      end

      self.send(name, *args)

    else

      super

    end

  end

end



describe DynamicGetter do

  before(:each) do

  # Reference the class used in the specs

  # as an ordinary variable rather than a

  # named constant (@ooga instead of Ooga)

  # so that it can be created afresh for

  # each spec.

  # If we did class Ooga, the second spec

  # would fail because the first spec already

  # created the method #woot.



    @ooga_klass = Class.new(Object)

    @ooga_klass.class_eval do

      include DynamicGetter



      def initialize(attributes = {})

        @attributes = attributes

      end

    end

  end



  it "should know how to add a method to a class on first call" do

    o = @ooga_klass.new(:woot => 5)

    o.should_not respond_to(:woot)

    o.woot.should == 5

    o.should respond_to(:woot)

  end



  it "should raise a method not found exception if the attribute isn't present" do

    lambda{ @ooga_klass.new.woot }.should raise_error(NoMethodError)

  end

end

• Ruby blocks gotchas
• Loading classes from strings in Ruby
• Ruby's new as a factory
• Ruby's method_added object lifcycle hook
• Consistent interfaces, contrived examples and define_method for instances

def upcase_collection(collection)

 array = []

 collection.each{|item| array << item.upcase}

 array

end

• The presence of objects whose states are changed from within a block in a different scope
• The fact that you need a temporary variable at all in the first place
• The availability of methods like collect, partition or inject which do exactly what you need - for free.

ln -s ~/Work/ruby/jruby/bin/jruby /usr/bin/jruby

ln -s ~/Work/ruby/jruby/bin/jirb /usr/bin/jirb

ln -s ~/Work/ruby/jruby/bin/jgem /usr/bin/jgem

ln -s ~/Work/ruby/jruby/bin/jirb_swing /usr/bin/jirb_swing