Posts Archive

If you have a Mac and want to use the Proximus wifi at the Metropolis, Safari or Firefox won’t help. I got through using Omniweb.

Martin Fowler writes: “If you only try to provide the minimum, you end up with multiple clients duplicating code for common cases.”

Or one billion jakarta.commons packages

(Via Martin Fowler’s Bliki.)

Whilst on the topic of aggravation:

/**
* Returns the url for the link
* @return the url for the link
* @param oFooUtil the foo util
* @param sSomething the something
* @param iAge the age
*/
public String getRelationPath(FooUtil oFooUtil, String sSomething, int iAge) {
    ...
}

1. Do not name your methods deceptively and keep the correct information in the javadoc only
2. Do not use hungarian notation. It is extra useless in Java as it is an object oriented language which means that many, many variables will be prefixed with o.
3. Do not comment the obvious

When parking my car today at the supermarket to take care of the weekend grocery shopping, I noticed this guy returning to his car that was parked in a spot reserved for disabled people. He was obviously not disabled, and his car did not sport the sticker required in Sweden to use handicap parking spots.

It really gets to me when people think that rules applies to everybody but themselves and handicapped people be damned, so I walk up to him and tells him that he seems to have lost his handicapped parking permit. This guy, in his fifties, loses it and basically tells me to go to hell, get a life and drop dead.

While at Lecando, I was quite proud of the library of computer books we assembled oveer the years.

These days as a consultant for Valtech, my employer does indeed have a library, but as I am almost never at the office it is not really accessible.

I have therefore started to buy the books that I find necessary for my daily digital life out of my own pocket so that I can have access to them whenever I want. These are the ones I have got so far:

After getting the PowerBook, I’ve made quite a few additional switches in my digital life:

• Mac Mini instead of a PC with Ubuntu Linux at home. After a few weeks with a Mac at work, I could no longer live without one at home, so whoops, there it is: a Mac Mini. It is oh so quiet.
• NetNewsWire instead of Bloglines. I have not visited my previous darling Bloglines once since I started using NetNewsWire
• TextMate instead if JEdit, Vi, Emacs … it rocks.
• iTunes and iPod instead of rsync and iRiver. I’m not addicted - right :)

These days when almost every body is doing the agile thing, there is still one part of the software development process that is missing out - the design of the GUI.

Too often some snazzy web design studio is brought in, thumb rings and all, to produce mockups in Photoshop. These are then given to the programmers to implement to the last pixel.

I am sorry, but this is the waterfall process straight up. And it does not help that you implement it page by page or even component by component - that is just dividing the predefined work into smaller bits.

I’ll be attending the conference part of Javapolis. Anyone else?

Lots of people have had problems with Ruby and MySQL. The ever so pragmatic Rails book links to a popular solution which involves installing the MySQL gem and specifying the path to the MySQL. This did not do the trick for me, and I’ve failed trying different alternatives after that. Today I came across PJ Hyett’s idea of installing Ruby-MySQL from source. It worked like a charm.

These days when I talk to people who claim to have adopted agile development, they say they use Scrum. While standup meetings and iterative development with regular demos are good, it is simply not enough. Chris Brown posted the strip below which sums it up pretty good:

(Via Planet TW.)