Aug 31

Luca (new C# PM) doesn’t like: x+=x++;

Tech No Comments »

I saw Luca Bolognese speak at TechEd. Then he was talking about ObjectSpaces, and how it was being pushed back AGAIN by Microsoft (this time it was paired with WinFS).

It seems that Luca is taking over from Eric Gunnerson as C# Product Manager. He seemed like a great guy, so good luck to you mate. Hopefully, in this role, you will be allowed to put something into production ;)

As he gets settled in and looks around, he has run across a nice piece of code:

x+=x++;

After discussing what happens with this code he finishes with the statement:

Does it matter which of the previous options is the correct one? Not really because

Aug 31

Movie: Garden State is Quality

Personal 1 Comment »

I feel like I am following in a bit of a tradition here… talking about seeing a movie :)

I saw Garden State, and thought it was the best film that I have seen in a long time.

Zach Braff is the main guy from Scrubs, which I have always liked too. Not only did he do a quality job acting, but when the credits came down, I saw that he wrote and directed the damn thing! I am very impressed.

The music was top class too, so I had to grab the soundtrack (which was produced by Zach too. Where does he find the time???). I really love Zero 7 “In the waiting line”.

Great stuff. I am looking forward to his next.

Aug 31

Wayne Rooney at Manchester United

Personal, Sport 10 Comments »

So, Man Utd finally got Wayne Rooney to join the club.

I wonder what Alan Smith, Paul Scholes, Louis Saha, and Ruud think of that. How do you find room for all of these people? Can Alan move back to mid field?

Great to have quality like Wayne… but he is young, and I hope he can pull it off!

Aug 31

Getting into some space, and not having the team charge around after the ball

Sport, Tech No Comments »

I was feeling Bruce Tate-ish when I was watching a kids game of football (soccer if you are a yank :).

Last year, all of the kids were using the “bee” pattern. Everyone of them would race after the ball whereever it was. Things have changed a lot this year. Now some of the kids are starting to get it. Since they don’t have “offside” rules yet, one has realised that if he charges towards the goal, then if a friend passes up to him, he will have an easy goal.

I often feel like too many of us in the IT world are like kids playing soccer. We are all running around a ball, but the ball happens to be a Insert Latest Fad Here.

When I think I am being pragmatic, it is normally because I am spreading myself out, and my teammates are doing the same. We aren’t all clammering around the latest technology. Rather, since we are now spread out, we can be in position to help eachother, and to focus on our strengths.

Those with more front-end expertise can play up front, and others can be in the back end. However, since we are a team, we all still work together. Everyone defends, everyone attacks.

If you are really lucky you get to play like Brasil :)

Aug 30

Public Schools vs. Charter Schools: Facts not Myths

Personal 57 Comments »

A new national study re-ignites the debate over the promise and limitations of charter schools. Created as alternatives to failing public schools, charter schools were supposed to offer more innovation and less bureaucracy. But what about academic achievement?

A new AFT study came out: Charter Schools Underperforming, Results Repeatedly Delayed

The study argues that IN THE WHOLE public schools are doing very well compared to charter schools.

This is just one study, but it is important to have the debate. Charter schools are GOOD alternatives to “mainstream” public schools (since charter schools are public themselves).

We definitely need to support all of our public schools. We need to take charter schools on a case by case basis. There are amazing ones, and bad ones (like anything else). Since a charter school can run things how they want, you have to take even more care.

Aug 30

Viewlet of ADJT in JDeveloper

Tech No Comments »

Oracle put together a viewlet of ADJT running inside of JDeveloper.

Although not one of the primary ADJT platforms it does outline the basic functionality. It is worth a look even if you are going to use Eclipse. Sadly the example uses logging, perhaps something more useful will be used in a future version. :-)

Good to see other IDEs come in and offer AOP support. Hopefully this will only increase. A lot of people won’t work with something unless there is a plugin for their IDE ;)

Aug 27

Why does Jonathan care so much about Nokia, Vodafone, and Mobile

Java, Mobile, Tech No Comments »

Is the mobile industry large? massive. However it feels like a broken record when you read press releases such as: Nokia, Vodafone Collaborate on Mobile Java.

Jonathan and Sun seem to really want to talk about this stuff too.

I am not trying to say it isn’t important, but there are many other fish in the sea too. How about innovating in those areas? How about seeming like you care about the other communities (e.g. enterprise java in general, not just when accessing it via a phone :)

So much could be done.

Aug 27

Streamlets and updates via hacking the web :)

Tech 2 Comments »

James is talking about Streamlets, which “are a web streaming mechanism integrated into ActiveMQ reusing the Jetty web container”.

This is kinda cool, especially for those times when you need a nice simple way to go back and get data.

For example, we have used approaches like this when building a page which has to access various sources to get prices from many vendors, and we don’t want to “wait” for them all to come back before anything goes to the client.

In the past you would do weird things like displaying items, and then at the end, keep printing to the client, and print <script>// update that div with output now.

Streamlets are a lot nicer, however isn’t the industry ALL ABOUT Rich Internet Applications? ;)

Aug 27

Annotations, Aspects, and POJOs

Tech No Comments »

There has been a lot of talk on how annotations and AOP can combine.

Bill Burke talks about this in his article Aspect-Oriented Annotations and JBoss AOP RC1.

Then Adrian Colyer speaks up in When is a POJO not a POJO? …. when it’s an APOJO.

Here Adrian shows a proposed declare annotation addition to AspectJ:

aspect Notices {

declare annotation : org.xyz.myapp..* : @Copyright(”(C) XYZ 2004. All Rights Reserved.”);

}

It is going to be interesting to see how the cycle goes as we get to annotation hell.

“I want to just annotate my classes”
“Man, there are now a bunch of annotations in my classes. How about I take out the cross cutting ones and make them aspects”
“Man, I need my IDE to show me where these annotations are kicking in”
“Why don’t we just have an XML config file that defines these guys. We could call them something like: deployment descriptors

I can’t wait :)

Aug 26

IDEs and their Projects

Tech 1 Comment »

Tim Bray is talking about IDEs and their Projects.

He is definitely right about how project subsystems can be a pain in the arse. It would be really cool to have a project subsystem standard API which could be used in all IDEs…. and could be a bad lowest common denominator? ;)

The system could be based on Ant, or something more abstract (so you could use Maven or Ant or Anything else).

Mostly, I was surprised that Tim uses NetBeans. Do you have to if you work for Sun?