Saturday October 23, 2004

Remember Lucilla in Gladiator? Yea, that's Connie Nielsen.

Here's a guy with two sons and a wife of 7 or 8 years going to fashion shows, art auctions and movie premiers with his Danish girlfriend. Oh, Lars: you're so damned hollywood! Apparently the paparazzi in Denmark have kept tabs on them as well.

Back in the old days o' Metallica we had loads of fun but didn't go to fashion shows, art auctions and movie premiers. We didn't sip fine wines either. Oh well, I hope the dude is happy.

Friday October 22, 2004

After raising the notion with Tantek, he plugged the trivial bit to enable this on the Technorati site..
Check it out http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/referer.html (ok, so I'm not very popular in this big 'ol cosmos but anyway...). This is what you do:

Thursday October 21, 2004

OK, I lied. It ain't about me, it's about our new office and the major milestones that Technorati is achieving, the agony of startup setbacks and the ecstacy of... having fun! The details:

WHEN

Thursday, October 28, 7 p.m.

WHERE

Technorati, 665 Third Street #207, San Francisco

WHAT

A party to catch up, and celebrate the move to our new offices!

RSVP

rsvp@technorati.com. As space is always limited, please be sure to RSVP.

Here's Dave's original post.

Wednesday October 20, 2004

I've used Eclipse extensively in the past but since there was kinduva a long hiatus in Java development for me, it felt both novel and familiar to install it on my powerbook for the stuff I'm currently working on. I think that liberated feeling of knowing that That Thing Works So I Can Move On Now is referred to as being "Test Infected." Which, unlike the flu, is a good kind of infection. One of the things I've been trying to be more consistent about is writing tests prior to, or if not, concurrently with, application code. I strongly recommend reading Kent Beck's Test Driven Development (who BTW appears to have a work in progress about Eclipse), TDD is a quick read but more than any particular valuable agile techniques per se it offers a good outlook on how to think about what you're doing when you sit down to write code.

Well, I was writing a few initial test cases for a class I was working on and noticed something new (to me anyway) when I clicked on an error that Eclipse flagged. The non-existence of the method in the called class was identified and Eclipse offered to stub it out on my behalf, this is a huge win as far as expressing an API in a test case and continuously filling in the functionality development "TODO" list. Everytime I want to add a new public method, I'll write a new test case and let Eclipse bootstrap the implementation.
Read it:	Now if I could get that level of simplicity and automation working with Perl, Python or PHP, I'd be jammin'! Sure, there are testing frameworks for each of these but Eclipse really streamlines that whole TDD cycle.

Forget about the flu shot hysteria, get "Test Infected"

Tuesday October 19, 2004

Sure, I have a rain parka but that's not the point, I wanted to avoid having my backpack get saturated. So after waiting about 10 minutes, a two car N-Judah rolls into Embarcadero station at aroun 8:40 or so with the robotic audio announcement "two car. mission bay. now approaching...." A crowd piles on; I don't think the MUNI scheduling people have realized that a lot of people work near the ball park.

Out on the surface streets at Harrison, the driver announces that it's the last stop and that the next N would arrive in 3 minutes! Why would they cut the route 3 stops short?! Everyone spills out into the deluge of wind and rain; the shelter there hardly has adequate room, so most of us are getting wet. BTW, that was train cars number 1481 and 1483, in case any MUNI hacks are reading this. Almost 10 minutes later, I ended up getting back on the first train as it showed up on the opposite side of the platform, going the other way -- I was getting concerned that the rain would soak through my backpack and get my powerbook wet. On the way back to Embarcadero station, I saw the "next train" -- it was packed; looked like there would barely be room for all of the folks who'd withstood the rain waiting for it. I finally got another train and got to the office by 9:10am. Thanks for the convenient adventure, MUNI!

Saturday October 16, 2004

The objections on principal may be technical

1. Intrusive inheritance hierarchy and mandatory interfaces, narrowing and recasting, gratuitous class proliferation and so forth (does the framework work for you or do you work for the framework?)
2. Container managed debugging nightmares

The philosophical objections are perhaps a general complaint about the Software Industrial Complex

1. J2EE is handed down from The Cathedral
2. JSR's and the JCP don't constitute inclusive openness, it's a "club" that you're either in or out of
3. Java is not open source

The practical problems of EJBs

1. Using the containers can be a morass of deployment descriptors and dependencies, slowing down project spikes
2. Component dependency on the container requires extra plumbing for testing, which also anti-agile. Specifically, if you want to use CruiseControl and Cactus together, get ready for a visit from an old friend named the OutOfMemory exception
.

While the practical problems of test-friendliness seem to be addressed by IoC, it sounds to me like some of the morass-of-deployment-descriptors problem are inescapable. Mapping services into POJOs declaratively (as Spring, Hibernate and Struts all require) isn't a walk in the park; until there's a linter and/or metadata/xdoclet support for easing how services can be mapped in given a specific runtime context, the pain of diddling XML config files and finding errors at runtime are going to be part of the landscape. Nonetheless, automated unit testing without cactus is a huge win in my book -- leaving CruiseControl to run unit tests and having Cactus runs reserved for manually-invoked integration tests sounds like the way to go.

I'll be steering clear of the traditional J2EE containers such as JBoss or Weblogic.

Thursday October 14, 2004

So many books, so little time

Hibernate in Action

If the slashdot review glowed any brighter, it'd spontaneously combust.

Agile Database Techniques : Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer

Weighing YAGNI against the PITA'ness of data model changes has bit me before. Data modeling and iterating over model revisions are often the hard part in agile development cycles. I'd expect Scott Ambler to offer useful insights into lightening what is often the heaviest part of a projects development.

The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

As one who actively looks for opportunities in subverting the dominant paradigm, I'm interested in Clayton Christensen's follow-up to The Innovator's Dilemma.

Someday real soon, I'll build a little app with Amazon's ListLookupOperation to integrate wishlist items with my blog and perhaps fold it into an Attention.XML data source.

Friday October 08, 2004

See for yourself, Bush's mystery bulge I hope Kerry brings it up in tonight's debate, may be pat him down.

Master of Puppets

I will occupy
I will help you die
I will run through you
Now I rule you too

Come crawling faster
obey your Master
your life burns faster
obey your Master
Master
Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings

The hackathon percolated a lot of interesting ideas. One of the bits of feedback that caught my attention was from Chris Fry:

There are some drawbacks however to not having a WSDL and to not using SOAP. (1) You are bound to HTTP; (2) If you version the contract how do you notify your clients? (3) Related to 1, no SOAP Headers; (4) No public contract other than your documentation.

This sounds great, getting Technorati developers out of the wire-protocol-awareness business (unless they want to be in it) is one of my goals for future development efforts with the Technorati API. The direction I'd like to take it is an "all of the above" implementation where API consumers can fiddle with the low level if they want to (via REST w/XML, REST w/XOXO, xml-rpc or whatever interface to du jour is desired) but also provide a SOAP interface for those who want to use WSDL to skip all of that.

We have some work to do internally at Technorati to get us to that point though.

Check it out:

Gmail Atom Feed Coming?

According to internetnews.com, Google is enabling feeds of gmail mailboxes to make feed readers lightweight mail clients (well, readonly clients). I'm imagining subscribing to mailing list digests through gmail and reading them through a feed reader will become an adopted practice. Additionally, gmail's search capabilities are getting some augmentation.

Google Searches Books: Google Print

As has been widely publicized, Google Print seems to be Google's response to A9 ...so far Google Print has been down half the time I've tried to use it but I wouldn't bet against them executing well on it.

Google queryable via SMS

I'm imagining all kinds of goodness out of this... querying Froogle for prices while you're shopping bricks-n-mortar venues, looking up local bars and restaurants (and Dodgeballing them!)

Gbrowser

John Doerr says that he doesn't see browser in Google's future but still, if it quacks like a browser builder, it's probably a browser building duck.

So what's next from Google? An Orkut that isn't all-Brazil-all-the-time?

Tuesday October 05, 2004

If you haven't checked it out, stop what you're doing and check out Mount St. Helens right now! ( Oct 05 2004, 10:03:09 AM PDT ) Permalink

Monday October 04, 2004

Sure, this is always the time of year when the weather gets a little colder, the sun sets earlier and the volume of junk mail catalogs arriving from the postal service goes up. But what makes this Bad is obvious: the Giants aren't playing baseball until the spring. I just can't wait until spring! Any claims that the lack of October play is Felipe Alou's fault is just silly. The last few years' bad deals with Sidney Ponson and Damien Moss and bad luck Rob Nenn have taken away payroll that coulda been used more productively -- those situations are more blameworthy. But hope springs eternal and this spring we should see Jessie Foppert and Jerome Williams in the rotation and if some good luck (and payroll availability is on our side) Moises should be a Giant and batting behind Bonds. ( Oct 04 2004, 10:04:14 PM PDT ) Permalink