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For the most part I think Ruby on Rails is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, like everything else, there are some issues I’m uncomfortable with. Mostly, it has to do with deployment, and especially security during deployment. SwitchTower deploy.rb configuration file contains source repository password. This is a consequence of the fact that the application servers check out code from the repository. When using Switch..
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Everyone is talking about SwitchTower these days, so I just had to check it out. When I got it to work, I was quite pleased with how it works, but there were quite a few issues along the road. First of: What is SwitchTower? Basically, it is a tool for automating deployment of applications, focused around Ruby on Rails. With SwitchTower in place, I am able to write stuff like “rake deploy” and “rake rollback”.
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Jason Zhicheng Li has written a blog article about Spring configuration. It is called the 12 Best Practices for Spring configuration. Best practice #1 was “don’t use autowiring*. That got me thinking: I feel very ambivalent about autowiring. Initially, I thought it sounded like a great idea because it reduced clutter, but then people like Jason convinced me that it was not. The more I think about it, the more usure I am.
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We went with Kerttu to a fencing lesson for the first time yesterday. The sabre course feels interesting, and the connections to Kendo , the other sword sport I’ve practiced are definitely visible. A very small course at Ylioppilasmiekkailijat , so we practically get private instruction. Before Kendo I’ve also practiced Iaido , the art of drawing the Japanese sword, and of course Viking swordfighting . Kerttu has some experience..
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Joel Spolsky had a blog entry seems eerily familiar: The Architecture Astronauts (in outer space) I’m starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite. I’ve seen the type, and I’m glad to say that we haven’t got any of those around. A bad architect can cause enormous damage.
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I just got published last week: My article Unit Testing Hibernate Mapping Configurations was last week’s featured article in java.net. This is the first time I’ve really been published (at least been paid for it!). I found the experience interesting and (mostly) fun. Many thanks to the editor, Chris!
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Any reader of my blog should not be surprised by the fact that I think software patents are pretty bogus. So y’all will forgive a little rant brought on by the examining the (pretty bogus) eolas patent. Here is the introduction to the patent, taken from eolas “technology” page: The Web Application Platform Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects with..
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The bad news is that I am taking down the articles about Hibernate-testing from my blog. This is because I am going to publish the text as an article in java.net. (which is the good news). Stay tuned for more information. Comments: [Ash] - Sep 15, 2005 I have read some of your post on testing DAO(s) using an in memory database and look forward to your article in java.net. Awesome work!
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I read an extremely intesting book last week. Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” is a true story about how the author was tracking a hacker in the mid-eighties. It reads like a spy novel, but is appearently all true. I picked the book up at 11 at night, and was unable to put it down until I had completed the whole thing! The book gives a pretty good understanding of computer crime, crimefighting, and the basic methods of the typical script ki..
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https://github.com/mbutler/openwound Openwound is a (re)writing tool named after the famous William S. Burroughs quote about cut-up writing being divination. “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” This project started in 2002 with the publication of the book Alloy: Kind Tricks and Bodily Realities in the Vanguard Party that I created for my MFA […]
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2005-06-27 17:45Z: Anchored for the night at N61.49,45 E36.06,73 . We have made a tent out of the sail and wait on river Vodla for the forecasted SE wind. 2005-06-28 06:25Z: As forecasted, the wind turned in the morning. After a few miles of rowing, we’re finally under sail in a small rain. 2005-06-28 10:45Z: When the headwind died we were able to row out of the river. Now we’ll head slowly into north towards Povenets 200....
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Updated for republication in MrBool. As readers of my blog must have noticed by now, I am somewhat of an advocate of Extreme Programming (XP). However, for the last nine months or so, my title has been “Lead Software Architect”, and I am the (proud?) author of what Martin Fowler calls “the almighty thud” documents. XP is traditionally skeptical of architects, and often with just cause. I’ve frequently heard the term “architect” defined as s..
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I’m joining the Shnjaka expedition in east Carelia this weekend. Shnjaka is a viking ship built without a single nail using the old sowing techniques. At the moment the expedition team is somewhere near the town of Pudoszh on the east side of lake Onega, preparing for the ship launch, scheduled monday. I’m traveling with some friends to St. Petersburg and plan to catch a train to Petrozavodsk during the weekend, and then a boat from....
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Featured in the Rhizome.org Artbase View the code here Schema was originally published in issue 5+6 of Aspen magazine. It is now being archived at UbuWeb and can be viewed here. In 1966 conceptual artist Dan Graham composed a language based work entitled Schema. The artwork consisted of a formal procedure for how to describe […]
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Europe in Miniature 09:00h Made it back to the Midwest of the South Pacific, where the most threatening thing is the drug dog that will point you out to Customs if you have had any fruit (or drugs) in your backpack at any time in the last 10,000 years. How is it that a 12 hour transpacific flight can seem to take forever, and yet when it's over it's hard to say what exactly happened during those 12 hours? The memory of too-small ....
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Europe in Miniature 09:00h Made it back to the Midwest of the South Pacific, where the most threatening thing is the drug dog that will point you out to Customs if you have had any fruit (or drugs) in your backpack at any time in the last 10,000 years. How is it that a 12 hour transpacific flight can seem to take forever, and yet when it's over it's hard to say what exactly happened during those 12 hours? The memory of too-small ....
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Europe in Miniature 09:00h Made it back to the Midwest of the South Pacific, where the most threatening thing is the drug dog that will point you out to Customs if you have had any fruit (or drugs) in your backpack at any time in the last 10,000 years. How is it that a 12 hour transpacific flight can seem to take forever, and yet when it's over it's hard to say what exactly happened during those 12 hours? The memory of too-small ....
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Halfway Around the World 09:14h I'm still stuck in LA but feel as if I'm already halfway around the world. Went out for a jog, just around the block, smelling forgotten, friendly smells, but somehow got stuck in a run down neighborhood and had to jump two fences just to get back to my hotel, which was within line-of-sight the whole time. As everyone knows, this place is not set up for pedestrians. All the trees here third-world-nati....
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Halfway Around the World 09:14h I'm still stuck in LA but feel as if I'm already halfway around the world. Went out for a jog, just around the block, smelling forgotten, friendly smells, but somehow got stuck in a run down neighborhood and had to jump two fences just to get back to my hotel, which was within line-of-sight the whole time. As everyone knows, this place is not set up for pedestrians. All the trees here third-world-nati....
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Halfway Around the World 09:14h I'm still stuck in LA but feel as if I'm already halfway around the world. Went out for a jog, just around the block, smelling forgotten, friendly smells, but somehow got stuck in a run down neighborhood and had to jump two fences just to get back to my hotel, which was within line-of-sight the whole time. As everyone knows, this place is not set up for pedestrians. All the trees here third-world-nati....
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GPS: N40d00.000' W88d35.625' (but, bad signal in O'Hare) 13:01h Well, I'm underway, waiting for my flight to LAX. Managed to get my form stamped at customs, and found a seat near my gate with a power outlet. Itinerary: Chicago -> Los Angeles -> Auckland, NZ -> Christchurch, NZ -> McMurdo Station -> South Pole Station. Five plane rides, something like 30 hours in the air. This is my fourth trip but it's been a five year wait and ....
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GPS: N40d00.000' W88d35.625' (but, bad signal in O'Hare) 13:01h Well, I'm underway, waiting for my flight to LAX. Managed to get my form stamped at customs, and found a seat near my gate with a power outlet. Itinerary: Chicago -> Los Angeles -> Auckland, NZ -> Christchurch, NZ -> McMurdo Station -> South Pole Station. Five plane rides, something like 30 hours in the air. This is my fourth trip but it's been a five year wait and ....
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GPS: N40d00.000' W88d35.625' (but, bad signal in O'Hare) 13:01h Well, I'm underway, waiting for my flight to LAX. Managed to get my form stamped at customs, and found a seat near my gate with a power outlet. Itinerary: Chicago -> Los Angeles -> Auckland, NZ -> Christchurch, NZ -> McMurdo Station -> South Pole Station. Five plane rides, something like 30 hours in the air. This is my fourth trip but it's been a five year wait and ....
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Last latched GPS: N41d59.099' W87d39.934' T minus 2 days. Biggest snow storm in 2 years getting me warmed up for the Pole. I've gone out each morning for the past few days on "trial runs" with Dad's old Horseman camera and tripod. Yesterday, by the time I got to Lake Michigan, the shutter cock had frozen (not a good sign) and I only got half a roll. But the film grain looks very fine (APX-100) and today the shutter worked ok. On the b....
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Last latched GPS: N41d59.099' W87d39.934' T minus 2 days. Biggest snow storm in 2 years getting me warmed up for the Pole. I've gone out each morning for the past few days on "trial runs" with Dad's old Horseman camera and tripod. Yesterday, by the time I got to Lake Michigan, the shutter cock had frozen (not a good sign) and I only got half a roll. But the film grain looks very fine (APX-100) and today the shutter worked ok. On the b....
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Last latched GPS: N41d59.099' W87d39.934' T minus 2 days. Biggest snow storm in 2 years getting me warmed up for the Pole. I've gone out each morning for the past few days on "trial runs" with Dad's old Horseman camera and tripod. Yesterday, by the time I got to Lake Michigan, the shutter cock had frozen (not a good sign) and I only got half a roll. But the film grain looks very fine (APX-100) and today the shutter worked ok. On the b....
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The most recent issue of the Norwegian ComputerWorld contains several articles of interest from an open-source point of view. In addition, the subject has come up for discussion at work recently. Who benefits from open-source? Primarily, it is the consumers of software. Yet the consumers of open-source devote very little resources to developing open-source software themselves. Perhaps they should? The hardest issue for organizations using o..
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I like metadata for some tasks. Luckily for all of us, Commons-Attributes implements metadata for pre-Tiger JDKs. Unluckily, it requires an extra compilation step (with Ant, no less). But no more. I’ve created an extension that does it all in memory. The class uses both xjavadoc and commons-attributes. Here is an example of usage: CommonsMemoryAttributes attributes = new CommonsMemoryAttributes("src"); Class testClass = AttributeTestClass.c..
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How should development teams be organized? Reduce chatty interfaces. In Lean Software Development Mary Poppendieck describes the seven wastes of production and their analogy in software development. Three of these are: Motion (software analogy: Finding information), Waiting (Waiting), and Transportation (Handoffs). I see these in many projects that I am involved in, or hear about. One problem many organizations experience is a divergence of..
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I would like to start by apologizing from having a political entry in my blog. I believe that politics is intertwined with other intellectual endeavour. As scientist and engineers, we have a duty of social awareness, to see that our creations are being used for the benefit of humanity. I was saddened by tuesday’s election results. Up until the eve of November 2nd (Central European Time), I was hoping that the Unites States would wake up fro..
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When I have been using easyMock Mock Objects for testing I often find it helpful to intersperse expectations and test code, for example: mock.start(); control.replay(); server.handleCommand("START"); control.validate(); control.reset(); mock.shutdown(); control.replay(); server.handleCommand("STOP"); control.validate(); Doing this with easyMock requires me to validate and reset the object frequently. I was thinking: What is stopping me from..
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Spring has shown us how to effectively separate the business logic from data access logic. This allows for easy testing of business logic without having to deal with the database, but it does not provide any easy way to test the DAO code. A new feature in the Hypersonic database might just be what the doctor ordered. HsqlDb 1.7.2 introduced RES urls. If you access your database with a RES-url, you get an in-memory database initialized with ..
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For a long time, I have been plagued by comment spam on my blog. To battle this problem, I have now installed a Movable Type plug-in that verifies that posters are not robots. This will hopefully improve the situation. The plug-in is called scode. It displays a number in an image that the user needs to type to verify that he is not a robot. The plug-in was a bit of a pain to install: My version of the perl GD image creation library did not ..
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On JavaZone (which was an huge success, IMHO), Richard Stallman was the guest of honor. He talked about the four freedoms which free software gives you, how the Sun Java implementation is not free, and why that might concern us. Then, he talked about something that should concern all of us, even if you think Free Software is bogus: software patents. As I understand Stallman, if software patents become law, you can violate a patent without k..
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I am currently reading Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. It contains many brilliant essays, but it also has a few not so brilliant ones. In “Mind the Gap”, Graham proposes the idea “in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health”. The rationale for this is that some people have the potensial to be more productive than others and by rewarding them proportionally, everyone as a whole would be better off.
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When I look back at the lessons from User Stories Applied, I realise that many approaches to requirements muddles different purposes of requirements together. There are three things requirements need to address in one form or another: First, the development team needs an understanding the needs (requirements) of the user. Second, the project needs a specification of what is inside and outside the scope of the project, as well as the priorit..
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I bought User Stories Applied to get help with practical problems with writing good user stories and requirements in general, but it ended up changing the way I think about requirements and tracking them. The book first fullfills one very important mission. It answers “what is a good user story” with a mnemonic rule: Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable (INVEST). Cohn refers to William Wake as the source of th..
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We just came back from the Ontario Science Centre today. While my daughter checked out the educational exhibits (obviously learning important information), I was more impressed by the fact that some exhibits that haven’t changed for several years are still powered by Mac Classics! And to boot, the exhibits were still pretty damn good with those old computers.
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We just came back from the Ontario Science Centre today. While my daughter checked out the educational exhibits (obviously learning important information), I was more impressed by the fact that some exhibits that haven’t changed for several years are still powered by Mac Classics! And to boot, the exhibits were still pretty damn good with those old computers.
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In 2004, I had the distinct privilege of being an unpaid Interaction Designer and Programmer for an ambitious Iowa City tech startup hoping to make waves in the then-emerging world of touchscreens. The technology was crude, unreliable, and already a dead-end, but the founders had a patent, some trademarks, and just enough confidence to convince […]
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Today I attended a meeting where IBM/Rational got to extol their glorious Unified Process (RUP). RUP has a lot of good sides, and I think a lot of the high-level ideas are very good. Phases, workflows, artifacts, and roles all make sense. The concepts can be used to understand any process, even “non-processes” like code-and-hack. The central question then is whether the components of RUP individually are the right ones for a given project a..
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I have a confession. I looove gadgets. With many knobs and blinking lights and cool stuff. Stuff like Blinkenlights makes me quite excited. When I was young, I used to play with hours with math. I invented the hyperparabola, which was my own term for a formula that combined a hyperbolic function and a parabolic function. I could make a neat curve based on the formula. Opening Rational’s RUP tool gives me the same feeling.
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Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design Elden Nelson interviews Kent Beck, the founder of the Extreme Programming method and author of “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change”; and Alan Cooper, the prime proponent of interaction design and author of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. The interview is well worth the effort of navigation through the horrible interaction design of FTPOnline. Beck’s analysis of interaction design a..
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