I suppose the cat’s out of the bag. Don Brown and I have been contracted by Manning to write the second edition of Struts In Action. The updated version will address Struts 1.3, 1.4 and Struts Shale. Additional enhancements include improved taglib coverage, XDoclet, integrating with Spring and JSTL tags. In short, we’re throwing in the kitchen sink.
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We’ve been working on some J2ME applications lately. The available development tools leave a lot to be desired, but I was pleasantly surprised by the EclipseME plugin. While I’m not an Eclipse user, it really saves quite a bit of time when writing and testing MIDlets.
My only problem with EclipseME is that it’s pretty finicky, but that’s likely because I’m too stubborn to read the documentation.
Why aren’t I using IDEA for J2ME development? Because I already had Eclipse installed on my Windows machine and I’m too lazy to either install IDEA on it or figure out how to do J2ME dev on my Powerbook.
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Slashdot linked a story a few days ago discussing ways to make your PC quieter. When I built my desktop machine, noise was a major concern, so I went out of my way to ensure that it was quiet. Here are the components I used.
Case: I went with an Antec Sonata. Easy access and built for silence, the Sonata is very easy to work with. My only complaint is the rubber feet on the bottom of the case come off pretty easily.
CPU Cooling: I didn’t even consider water cooling. Instead, I installed a Zalman fan. Unfortunately, I can’t recall the exact model but I’ve been very happy with my purchase.
Case Cooling: 2 120mm Vantec Stealth fans. The Vantec site is all Flash, so I didn’t bother to link to them. These are some pretty quiet case fans.
The final touch was a product called Dynamat. Dynamat dampens noise and vibration and is commonly used in high-end automotive sound systems. They’ve recently started producing noise reduction kits for computers, but it’s just the same Dynamat. I installed the material in the case, primarily on the easy-access door. If you want to try it, you can probably find it at a local Best Buy.
The end result has been a PC that I can’t hear, even though I’m sitting next to it. If the case didn’t have blue LEDs on the front, I wouldn’t know it was on.
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Part of the wonderous process of creating a book is building the book index. Okay, calling creating a book “wonderous” is a bit much. It’s like how people call giving birth wonderous, when it’s really just a bunch of screaming, blood and miscellaneous fluids flying around, ending with something that looks a lot like a half-cooked lizard. But I digress…
Creating book indexes is hard work, and is easily the least-fun portion of writing. There isn’t any software that can do it for you, since the magic of an index is in the context of the entries. It’s hard to decide what to add, omit or cross-reference. Assumptions you make about categories may not be what readers are looking for. And there’s little guidance available, which means I’ve been referring to books that I believe have excellent indexes, like the ‘Perl Cookbook’.
At the end of the day, indexes are more art than science.
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CNN is running an article about a handful of companies trying to make collaborative technologies accessible for business and consumers, with the end goal being collaboration without requiring excessive email traffic. By collaboration, they cite the example of office workers emailing a document that has many different versions because of editing by various people.
The technologies mentioned most often in the article are wikis and blogs. Can these technologies overcome years of in-grained email use for the average office worker? I’m hopeful, but not optimistic.
In my opinion, the resolution isn’t to teach people to use new technology. Instead, the technologies that people currently use should catch-up. Email attachments should be versioned by the email server, perhaps by using something as simple as WebDAV. Word processors, like Word, should support collaborative editing, like the excellent SubEthaEdit editor. I don’t think most people are willing to leave the confortable confines of their Office apps to write documents in an HTML textarea.
Unfortunately, if anyone does crack the collaboration hurdle, it will be Microsoft.
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Fortune.com has an article about the 10 best tech companies to work for. While interesting, I still maintain that the best company to work for is your own.
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Most frameworks, having developed a sufficient head of steam and user community, are supported by a collection of best practices and design patterns. Collected over the course of man-months and -years of development, they typically represent the best way to solve most problems with a given framework. Hibernate is one such framework, as is Spring. Framework design patterns are typically an indicator of the maturity of a framework.
I’ve noted a trend recently among programmers, particularly those new to a given framework, of skipping documentation and flocking to best practices and design patterns, expecting to find the holy grail of application design and reuse. The problem with this hope is that programmers are failing to understand the basic definition of design patterns: Design patterns are generally accepted solutions to common application problems.
What’s wrong with people wanting to take advantage of collected experiences? Nothing, as long as developers realize that all business problems are different. What worked on one project may not work on another. What works for me would result in a system failure for you. Developers still need to think; not all problems have canned solutions.
And that’s the problem. When these programmers fail to find the exact solution to their problem, fully documented with friendly support, they wallow in frustration, unwilling or unable to read available documentation or write sample code to test ideas. When directed to try such things, they dismiss them out of hand.
These are only my opinions, built from participating in various mailing lists, developer forums and IRC. There are a lot of very talented developers out there, solving hard problems and sharing what they’ve learned. They didn’t become talented over night. They wrote lots of code and tested ideas, which is what everyone has to do. Coding, like everything else, takes effort if you want to become good at it.
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Mac OS X update 10.3.8 has been released recently. From the Apple site, the primary updates include:
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The big news on CNBC this morning is that HP’s CEO, Carly Fiorina, has resigned. This move isn’t entirely unexpected. Since her reign began, HP has bounced from one poorly implemented consumer strategy to another. Contrasted with Dell, HP’s largest competitor, it’s amazing HP is still in business.
Fiorina should have been fired by the board the minute she started babbling about merging with Compaq. It’s a shame it took this long for the board to wake up.
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It looks like XDoclet will be supporting Tapestry sometime this week, which is good news for the Tapestry users. Stay tuned to xdoclet-devel and CVS for updates.
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