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Joel Spolsky, of Joel-on-software fame was in Oslo, and had an open invitation to dinner for readers of his website. I think around 30 people showed up, which totally blew my mind. It is always nice to meet people who care about software development beyond having a job to go to from 9 to 5. Maybe there is enough interest to have a regular network event for technical people who care about what they do?
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Learning OO is such a disappointment. When you go from the models and into the code, you pretty much discover that it is all bunk, anyway. In your neat customer-order-product design, each entity explodes into circa 10 artifacts if you implement it in J2EE, or gets fragmented into mostly pure data management if you use .NET. You can hardly find the classes again anywhere in the implementation. What went wrong?!
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On the Agile Management mailing list, David J. Andersen writes: It would get a little more involved than that but the you get the basic idea. Pay for the value delivered, not the effort expended. Incentivize the vendor to deliver high quality. Most agile methods use a variation of a backlog. In an ideal project, the payment would be only dependent upon the value of each feature requested. Most software projects are much more resilient to un..
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This project was the final culmination of a 13-year exploration of the world of get-rich-quick schemes. In high school I sent away for John Wright’s “The Royal Road To Riches,” a home-publishing business that suggested the easiest way to become a millionare was to reprint books about reprinting books and sell them in the classified […]
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Ullman’s book describes the lives of two people related to a large software development project in the early 80s. Ethan Levin is the programmer who is judged responsible for the bug. As it proves to be impossible to reproduce reliably his life seems to spiral down into dispair, loneliness, and depression. Ullman is a master at describing the almost hypnotizing urge to “just fix this last problem before” when programming. The dysfunctional t..
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Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes. Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?) Alan Turing (of course) Edger Dijkstra (pioneered software and computer science as a discipline) Grace Murray Hopper (championing accessible program writing) Kr..
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Bush ’not mad’ at France [via CNN] “I’m going to remind him, like I’m going to remind a lot of people, that we can do a heck of a lot more together than we can arguing with each other,” [Bush] said." ITYM, “I can do heck of a lot more on of what I want if you stop hasslin’ me”, Dubya. Dubya might be “not mad” at France, but I sure hope France is still mad at him.
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Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent. [ - from MacCentral ]
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free culture Creativity and innovation builds on the past The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it Free societies limit the future by limiting the past Ours is less and less a free society
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welcome spammers Dear Spam Robot: I don’t have much time to read emails, and I especially don’t have much time to read unsolicited commercial emails. But I have decided to make an exception. If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that you promise to pay me $500, and subject to the additional conditions mentioned below. You can accept this offer by sending unsolicited commercial..
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I went to the rOOts 2003 conference this year. As always, it was a great convention. ROOTS draws a fairly small, yet advanced audience. A recurring theme this year seems to be agile development. It also seems like all the speakers concluded with the fact that “everything was better in the good old days” (more or less). This seems to be a sign of the times, and was also reflected in Alan Kay’s keynote at the O’Reilly Emercing Technology conf..
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Originally produced in May 2003 for Spatial Intersections at the University of Iowa Museum of Art seminar version performed for Version>04 Invisible Networks based on the book ALLOY Dully Servant (Soviet No-Gang Shriners) reads from the twisted linguistic cosmology of >KIND TRICKS as [tele-psychic puppet] action-script for Skeleton Bride (People’s Republic of Delicious Foods). An […]
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How Mortal These Fools Be… …Wherein we explore what it means to be a computer, or computation, or computrons, or a computer programmer, and why Ken is even touching a computer when he’s on vacation. (From Ken Arnold’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]
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I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all. What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:
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A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]
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Book: "Testing Extreme Programming" by Lisa Crispin and Tip House
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jhannes.github.io
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23 years ago
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eng
This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that). The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality.
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The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like: addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { list.Add(new ListItem()); } Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use variables from the scope. This is a much needed amendment. Why was it not there from the start? (whine, whine)
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Very noteworthy quote: “I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the “application generators,” will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don’t yet support programming at a high level. " (Pragmatic Dave Thomas) Truer words were seldom said.
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Attributes. Keeps getting better ’n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably overused, though) Not EJBs! Getting rid of the defunct EJB model saves a lot of headaches. Better UI. For the user, that is, not the developer!
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Open Source Community. The number of excellent open-source tools for Java is staggering. Look at HSqlDb, BeanShell, Eclipse, Recoder, JGraph, Tomcat, JBoss, and many more. More importantly, the Java community has proven much more interested in doing it the open-source way. Eclipse. Already mentioned, but it deserves a point of its own. Eclipse is a better IDE than VS.NET! Checked Exceptions. Less Native Code & more code reliability. .NET st..
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The Psychology of Computer Programming (Jerry Weinberg) The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas) - from Journeyman to Master (the view of the software professional as a craftman is the only thing that will save the business!) PeopleWare (Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister) Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck) After the Gold Rush (Steve McConnell)
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Test-Driven Development describes in detail this technique from Extreme Programming. In addition, the author spends some time teaching the reader a useful set of mental tools for writing better code. TDD is a very fast read, but it is full of useful information. If I wanted my developers to only read one small book about software development, this would be it. Note: The back of the book lists it as “Software Engineering/Testing”.
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Brilliant book. “How the Mind Works” is a tour de force over many of the puzzling aspects of the human mind: Why can our eyes be fooled by optical illusions? Why would we evolve emotions? Why would we evolve behaviour that makes us unable to fully control ourselves, like rage? The book puts forth theories for all these questions and more. The best part of the book, however, is the style in which it is written.
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Saddam's bioterrorism is rational from a evolutionary psychology point of view
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jhannes.github.io
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23 years ago
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eng
A view on the conflict from the standpoint of cognitive science/social science Steven Pinker (“How the mind works”): People may use “doomsday machines” (strategies that are both harmful to themselves and an agressor) to deter agressors. Hernando de Soto (“The Mystery of Capital”) An important reason a society with big differences are more prone to violence is that the underprivileged do not have any bargaining power. Personal opinion: In a ..
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What does it really mean when they say stuff like “the fighting in order to capture Umm Qasr is heavier than expected”. What does it mean when the fighting is heavier? Do more people die on either side? Do any people die on either side? After almost three days of war, I have still to hear of any casualties in the fighting. Are we supposed to believe there are none?
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On the news yesterday, I heard Blair say that the british lawyer-general claims the present war on could be legal. I understand he finds his justifications in the UN resolutions 678, 687, 688, and 1441 (probably among others). These resolutions calls for disarming the Iraqi regime by any means necessary. There are two fundamental problems with this argument: First, the stated goals of the “coalition of the willing” are disarming Iraq and ch..
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This is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for in C#. I am still some ways away from having looked at it as thorough as I would like, but it looks very good. Basically: Attributes that are processed compile-time with any code you like. This is the basic building blocks for AOP.
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A fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. This entry was written with it. Pretty cool Comments: [Aaron Sevivas] - Mar 12, 2003 this seems to be a fairly decent-seeming RSS feed reader. That entry appears to be written with it. Pretty cool [Sarah] - Mar 12, 2003 Is there any way you can get rid of that annoying footer when posting?
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Hikikomori/Otaku Japans Latest Out-Group - Creating Social Outcasts to Construct a National Self-identity
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0xadada.pub
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23 years ago
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eng
Introduction Hikikomori (Jap. 引きこもり) and otaku (Jap. おたく) are considered today’s most prominent social problems. Hikikomori refers to the recent state of middle and high school students who drop out of school, and withdraw completely from society. Otaku are the deeply obsessed fans of a particular subject who commit their free time (and sometimes lives) to the complete memorization of their obsession. In both cases these groups are extre....
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Produced by Community Architexts Chicago/ Los Angeles Read the script I wrote based on audio and written interviews in the collection of the State Historical Society of Iowa library. I also arranged and composed the score based on factory and manufacturing sounds. Public artists Jane Gilmor and BJ Krivanek joined together to produce Work-Shift, a […]
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A project funded by the Reggie Amos Project Grant for Intermedia Development and originally distributed through Printed Matter. The manuscript was debuted at the Version>02 Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The first printing was used in a drawing class taught by Nathan Peck at St. Xavier University. The second and third printings were […]
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An album dedicated to the best verb tense, future perfect. Released under the Soviet Shriner alias and mostly constructed out of left-over audio fragments from art school video scores. Future Perfect by Soviet Shriner
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This is an experimental user interface I built for the Mediated Trace Structures video conference in 2001. Art faculty and students from the University of Iowa, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Dortmund, Germany each created media objects to present via this Internet2 event. We were very loosely exploring the concept of the Derridian “trace” and how media […]
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This video is part of the Sarsenworld game demo featured in the Tender, Squalacious, and Digital show at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, curated by Ebon Fisher.
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There’s an immense amount of things online about Disney, and especially so about Disney dining. We ourselves have frequented disney world a number of times over the years, and in time have made it to many of the restaurants there with only a few of the fancier ones left on our list. Here’s a few of our favorites, what to get, and why: Food Flying Fish Le Cellier Drinks
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Disney, and specifically disneyland, is a frequent vacation for us as it can be a convenient long weekend getaway. It doesn’t hurt that my wife is a huge disney fan. At the same time there’s certain things that can make it more of a relaxing trip than you may realize without screaming children. Rides are purely up to you, but I’ll dig into a few favorites for food/drinking. Food Carthay Circle - This is our most common visit in Di....
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Food Po Boy Factory - This is a regular stop anytime I’m back in Huntsville. No pomp and circumstance at all, just great New Orleans food that measures up to much of it actually in New Orleans. Gibsons - A clear staple of the south is BBQ, Gibsons does it quite well. The pulled pork is great, though my favorite is probably hitting up this place for breakfast. A good country ham biscuit which is just not a thing in most other parts o..
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Drinking / Food Three Muses - One of the best bars in the area. Great cocktails including orange blossom sazerac. Their food is quite great as well, amazing things had there – lobster spring rolls, crispy pork belly, fish tacos, edamame with toasted sesame oil and star anise Jackson Brewery - As with many a pretty solid brewery with good food. The few isn’t quite traditional bar food, slants more to new orleans cuisine, but definite....
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