It does pose the question, how should these type of 'heated' discussion be handled. People who are passionate about their work, easily takes offence if their design approached are shot down. They then quickly get despondent and disruptive in the project/company, being sometimes very difficult to work with. People who do things buy the book...well will keep throwing the book at you. In turn they will start throwing the book to your/their superiors and so on until they feel they have acquired the desired attention. These situation has a habit of turning in your classic political games within project/company structures.
Methodologies followings these days also seem to more like religion than ever before. Agile, Domain Driven, Test Driven, RUP and so on. What i do find ironic about this, is that most of these development methodologies started out by intelligent professionals that felt existing methodologies did not work for them, so they came up with their own that fit their way of software development. The next logical step...sell it of as the best thing since slice bread. Now where these guys took their intellect and did something that worked the best for them, so why don't everyone one do it. Instead every software developer will meet a person whom swears by his chosen methodology and refuses to change or adapt it. Why the strict following? Is it because to deem yourself an "expert", promoting yourself about your peers? Or is it the blind devotion in a manner of doing things, with the expectation that everything will work no matter what solution your implementing.
At the end of the day is usually comes to two outcomes, everything works and everyone is happy...or the solution does not work, and the finger pointing and book throwing starts. What no one seems to realise, is there is no silver bullet way of building software solutions in the Java space. The only thing that a sane Java professional can do is to select frameworks and components in their solutions that give the most benefit for the current requirements. More importantly realise that as requirements change, that certain frameworks and components might fall out of favor and is simple not the best option for the updated requirements. Personally for me a good architect must always design for change, expect the unexpected and design solutions that can adapt with changing requirements and environments. Not to code into a framework, but keep a level of abstraction so that frameworks can be replaced with the least amount of effort and time.
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( 0 / 0 )Karmic is on its way, and people seem to be itching for it. I have loaded the BETA on a workstation at work so far is seems very smooth. Some people have nit-picked on the BETA state of the Gnome installation but myself not worried about this.
One thing that people have been against is the exclusion of Pidgin, which is replaced by Empathy. I for one do not mind chat clients that much as long it works, but Empathy has annoyed me already. There is no proxy support within Empathy, and this an issue for people especially working within corporate environments. Would not be surprise if they switch back to Pidgin in the 10.04 release.
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( 2.9 / 154 )I recently reloaded my Acer Aspire One with CrunchBang (#!) Linux. Being a very light weight distro with OpenBox Window Manager, it seems like the perfect fit. With the Kuki Linux kernel it really does work well. I have played with several distros lately on my Aspire One, still looking for the perfect fit. Kuki Linux is a distro target for the Aspire One, I might that a go next.
Concerning Crunchbang, it as basic as it comes and i like it. One browser app, one media app, one terminal app...what more do you need. The nice thing about the default media player (VLC) is that they have already most of the media en DVD codecs pre-installed. All hardware seems to work out of the box, there are some write ups on the tuning the cpu fan controls but i have not noticed anything funny yet. With all this reinstalls of distros I am finally experiencing the pro's and cons of the SSD drive, and what effect the performance tuning settings makes to it.
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( 3 / 149 )Been using my HTC Magic Android phone for almost 3 months now, and I enjoying it very much. Before the choice was made to go with this phone I did a lot of reading on the Net, trying to figure out what phone would suite me best at this time. My previous phone was the HTC TyTN, although not bad in concept, the Windows Mobile frustrated me to much and the phone's buttons stop functioning (most likely because it was involved in some of my bike accidents ;-). First I have to say that Android succeeds in, is change the perception of the device. Most people experience a phone as key pad with number to dail, and secondly accessing features via a menu. With the Android phone your phone dialer is simply an application like all the rest on the firmware. I cannot help but get the sense that i am working on a mini-desktop rather than your a typical cellular phone.
I recently read a post about people complaining that they do not enjoy the touch screen keyboard and prefer the slide out keyboard of the G1. These post always have one thing in common, pointing out why the device is so great or horrible...for them. Personally I have found the HTC Magic phone a joy for any power user. I have already replaced the ROM with hacked version, tried out the new HTC Hero ROM and back to HTC Magic ROM again. Additionally being a Linux user, there is a lot of similiar concept between the platforms, adding apps from Android Market is as simple as adding apps from Linux software repositories. It helps to develop a consistent mental model about using a mobile device and using a pc.
I need get around to develop my first Android application...not sure what yet.
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( 2.9 / 166 )I recently acquired a Acer AspireOne Netbook...at a 10th of the price of my big dual core 64-bit pc at home. I quickly grew very fond of the gadget. Loaded it with Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix after purchase.
Initial bit of issues. Followed some guides I found of the net and now its flying. I enjoy working on it, it so small and versatile...and made me wonder why I should use any other machine when at home or somewhere else. The netbook easily browses the net, chat, play divx movies and all my music. This is essentially all I have been doing on my big pc. So it made me think about the relationship between amount of processing power versus the amount of usage. I can say honestly that I am of buying the latest and greatest kit, and only get what I need.
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( 2.9 / 239 )The whole Java community has been discussing the possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. There seem to be a consensus going around that it might mean a slow death for both Glassfish and NetBeans. Taking my experiences with IBM software and as a company, I tend to agree.
On my current project all the J2EE apps have been running on Glassfish and has been running well in my opinion. Today I have been instructed to port all our J2EE apps from Glassfish to WebSphere. This is simply because the client had a bad experience with SUN App Server clustering a year ago, and for that reason we must port. I suggested that we rather port to WAS CE (Geronimo) and use it as a path to move to WAS 7.
The installation of WASCE as well as the Eclipse 3.4 Server Adapter was straight forward, but all came to a halt when tried to create a web application with WASCE set as its target runtime. Eclipse kept returning a NullPointerException. After checking the internal logs, it came down to a JAXB Exception. After few hours of trial and error, I realized the Server Adapter plugin is failing because my Eclipse has not been started on the IBM JDK. It seems that the SUN JAXB Provider keeps failing the code in the WASCE Server Adapter plugin but the IBM JDK Provider accepts it. This on its own gets me worrying already.
So after setting my Eclipse ini configuration to start using the IBM JDK things started to work. Problem is that all my project have been compiled on the SUN JDK 1.6, so I will have to recompile and re-test especially since some of my modules are complex multi-threaded concurrent applications.
With this experience, my opinion of IBM's acquisition of SUN is becoming more pessimistic. I can say out of experience that IBM has even written a Java applet for its internal staff that ONLY runs on Windows and ONLY runs on Internet Explorer. So much for the "write once, run anywhere" goal.
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( 2.9 / 279 )Woman are so lucky, they have just to look down to see boobs...
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( 2.9 / 233 )I am currently on a project, experiencing the joy (and some bites) of fully concurrent software development. Writing call queue management components for a new call center implementation. One thing i have been introduced to is SIP.
Had an interesting experience so far. Took a while to get my head around the design and how to go about implementing code on it. And since i am able to start using it... the cracks are starting to show.
A protocol so simple, yet it can get horribly abused by SIP based servers, loading messages with implementation specific data...making reuse damn near impossible. Unfortunately plans are in motion to drop the current SIP server, and now I have to basically reverse engineer the business components to be able to use it in a JSR289 container. But i am not too bothered about it, kinda like re-engineering software, always gives me chance to write better improved code.
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( 3 / 190 )As blogged several times, I take pride and joy in my interest in martial arts and in particular Aikido. But I came upon an interesting situation a few weekends ago.
I went to a club with a mate and walked into an old high school friend whom happens to be the bouncer of the club. After the usual chit-chat I question him about what he has been up to last few years. He had a much larger build since high school, typical mean bouncer...but only in appearance. He started chatting to my how he has been doing a number of martial arts all they way thru to cage fighting.
I did not remember him as the fighting type when we were in school. He did went on to explain why he did all that training without me even asking. He told me that he felt its his duty (and pleasure) to fight those who pick on the weak and timid. The reason he developed this aggressive attitude is because road he walked during high school. Unfortunately this road included being bullied often and at one time being beaten up to such an extent that he has a permanent dislocated jaw.
He still harbor ill feelings for certain individuals, which he will probably try to beat up when confronted. All this desire for revenge, is it just? I kinda felt sad, that it seems he main focus for the last 9 years has been to take revenge on what happened to him.
I hope that his ways and opinion of life changes, to focus more on his own happiness rather the suffering of others...no matter how much they might deserve it.
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( 3 / 202 )Elegance is unnatural, only achieveable at great expense.
If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you
do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do
it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations,
get something that is very elegant. -- Naggum
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