techno.blog("Dion")

Jon Stewart REALLY is my hero. Now more than ever.

STEWART: In terms of absurdity and their world matching up to the one that — you know, it was interesting. President Bush was saying, John Kerry’s rhetoric doesn’t match his record.

But I’ve heard President Bush describe his record. His record doesn’t match his record.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: So I don’t worry about it in that respect.

But let me ask you guys, again, a question, because we talked a little bit about, you’re actually doing honest debate and all that. But, after the debates, where do you guys head to right afterwards?

CARLSON: The men’s room.

STEWART: Right after that?

BEGALA: Home.

STEWART: Spin alley.

BEGALA: Home.

STEWART: No, spin alley.

BEGALA: What are you talking about? You mean at these debates?

STEWART: Yes. You go to spin alley, the place called spin alley. Now, don’t you think that, for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag, that you’re literally walking to a place called deception lane?

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Like, it’s spin alley. It’s — don’t you see, that’s the issue I’m trying to talk to you guys…

BEGALA: No, I actually believe — I have a lot of friends who work for President Bush. I went to college with some of them.

CARLSON: Neither of us was ever in the spin room, actually.

(BELL RINGING)

BEGALA: No, I did — I went to do the Larry King show.

They actually believe what they’re saying. They want to persuade you. That’s what they’re trying to do by spinning. But I don’t doubt for a minute these people who work for President Bush, who I disagree with on everything, they believe that stuff, Jon. This is not a lie or a deception at all. They believe in him, just like I believe in my guy.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: I think they believe President Bush would do a better job.

And I believe the Kerry guys believe President Kerry would do a better job. But what I believe is, they’re not making honest arguments. So what they’re doing is, in their mind, the ends justify the means.

(CROSSTALK)

BEGALA: I don’t think so at all.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans…

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

(LAUGHTER)

CARLSON: Now, you’re getting into it. I like that.

STEWART: Yes.

CARLSON: OK. We’ll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

There was Microsoft Bob, and now there is Google Bob. Congrats on the move. It shows once again that Google is doing something fun! Now I need to get Bob or Cedric drunk enough to let on :)

I also just downloaded the Google Desktop which is really nice. It will be interesting to see how it fairs against Lookout (which is what I use now).

Here here to Steve Vinoski.

He has another entry on the WS-* specs.

I personally think that although some of the individual specs are good, there definitely is a lack of a PLATFORM. I guess you could argue that there are the WS-I profiles, but it isn’t as clear as a nice WS-Architecture that really details how these guys play together.

If someone walked into this arena they would see WS specs which seem to be duplicate. Unless you are in the know you may not even understand which are supported, which are dead in the water, etc.

Ted has discussed avoiding the EJB fate in Indigo.

He gets into lightweight containers, and how he wants a “Pay as you go” situation (sounds familiar from the debates ;).

He has a feeling that the current crop of lightweight containers are already heavy and don’t allow this.

I have to disagree. If I want to start of with a minimal system I can literally create a a container (e.g. new SomePicoContainer(), setup a Spring applicationContext) and have minimal configuration for my needs (e.g. XML config, or in code).

Then, if you find yourself wanting to add functionality you grow your configuration and start to use more functionality. You don’t have to grab the full jar files if you don’t want to (if you are worried about that). You do pay as you go.

Pico/Nano may be even better in this regard. Each project has its own goals. PicoContainer is just that. It stays lean and mean and just does the one thing. Then Nano builds on top of that. It manages trees of PicoContainers, has support for services such as Hibernate, NanoWar, etc.

I am enjoying pay as you go right now!

Well, that was a boring 90 minutes wasn’t it?

We heard the same ole same ole. I understand that messages need to be hammered home but geez.

The choice on questions was awful at times. How in the world do we get time to spend on whether a candidate thinks homosexuality is a choice (er, hello), and have NO time to spend on the environment?

Terrorism is a danger and has the potential of harming us.

Harming the environment IS harming us, our kids, and the future of the world. Why isn’t this one of the leading issues? Dubya and his buddies don’t care of course. They just want to get their coffers full and have a good day.

Argh. It drives me nuts. Look around. How have the last 4 years been? How in the world could you want another 4?

Come on Kerry. Let’s bring it home!

After working with a DI container such as Spring, Pico, or HiveMind, it is hard to look back.

However, the real world means that you often can’t just be playing in the sand box with your DI container. You have to talk to the big kids who don’t play as nice.

I run into this all of the time when working on a web application where I need to do something such as setup a <listener>

You have to say in the web.xml:

<listener>
<listener-class>myproject.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Ok, so now I have got a listener, I may want it to do something. Chances are that I want it to talk to a service that I already have to do that thing. Fortunately, I can grab the context for the container and query for services that I want:

public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {
ApplicationContext appContext =
WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(event.getServletContext());

CacheManager cm = (CacheManager) appContext.getBean("cacheManager");
cm.shutdown();
}

This is OK. It is a lot better than having to have: CacheManager cm = new MyParticullarCacheManager(); However this isn’t ideal.

I would love to see DI leaking into standards. E.g seeing something in the web.xml like:

<listener>
<listener-class>myproject.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
<property name="cacheManager">spring:cacheManager</property>
</listener>

It would be really cool to define prefixes such as spring, hivemind, pico, etc… which can tie to that particular container. Or, there could be another place where you plugin the container and the web.xml would go to those services to look up the cacheManager.

I was at a friends wedding, and late in the night his boss and I were chatting. At first we were dueling with jokes which start out with “There was an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman”.

Somehow we got onto the subject of Tony Blair, and he asked why the English are “such pussies” since they are against the war.

I knew that this was a crossroads. I could just shut up and move on. But I am sick of idiots like this. This is a successful business man, who doesn’t see reality.

So I step up to the plate this time and try to explain how RIDICULOUS this “war”on Iraq is. Needless to say he didn’t understand me, and thought that you have to go into these countries to make sure that they don’t have “WMDs”. I wonder how he would feel if someone came into THIS country and occupied it to see if we have these weapons. Well, that is stupid. We are the GOOD GUYS :/

The third debate comes around tomorrow. The worst part about it is that it is at the same time as my poker tournament…. but I will have to skip it :)

Come on Kerry. We need change so badly!

A bunch of the PicoContainer guys are getting together to write!

The book is on Constructor Dependency Injection.

Quite a few of the committers are have banded together to write a book on Constructor Dependency Injection and its title will be just that. It’s subtitle is is likely to be With PicoContainer.

The book is going to be 50:50 science to practical. That is half a commentary on the pattenns, anti-patterns and history of CDI, IoC and COP, and half a how-to for PicoContainer and NanoContainer.

The book is going to be written by as many people as we can get to help. We intend to share credit thoughtout. The committers (or a list of individuals for legal reasons) are likely to retain copyright. While the book may developed from CVS at Codehaus, it is not in itself Open Source. It will one day drift into print (publisher to be announced) at the direction of the committers (or that list of people again). No other group or individucal is alowed to breach our copyright by printing the book.

From time to time significant contributors may be invited to be join the list of people directing the destiny of the book, and share in its profit, but that is at the discretion of the committers.

Although Paul and Aslak are kicking off the book as an effort, they fully expect to be marginalised by the content produced by others. The book is likely to rank contributors in order of contribution.

We’re using http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net for the source of the book. Why?

It works with CVS.
It is diffable/mergable,
It is editable by lowest common denominator tools like Textpad without hurting your eyes with exposed angle brackets,
It renders to HTML,
Has an escape route to publisher friendly forms like Abobe Pagemaker. Tis open to debate tho.

Our CVS for the book is http://cvs.picocontainer.codehaus.org/viewrep/picocontainer/book (see the copyright.t2t file for the full rules).

The rendered product (always a work in progress) will be hanging here – http://www.picocontainer.org/cdi-book.html

Great stuff.

I was really surprised to read that JDO 2.0 to Be Included in CocoBase(R) Enterprise O/R Dynamic Object Relational Mapping(TM) Tool From THOUGHT Inc.

Why was I so surprised? CocoBase was very “anti” JDO. The start of the first JDO 2.0 expert group meeting even discussed a letter that CocoBase had sent which asked to disband the group else they would SUE based on patents!

They haven’t been a part of the JDO 2 process at all. Hence the surprise.

I guess this is a good thing for JDO 2, as they realise that it is gaining ground.

Dan Moore is talking about Coding Standards. The good old religious war :)

Ken Arnold has an interesting post where he recommends that coding standards be integrated into the language specification, and enforced by the compiler.

His reasons:

1. There’s no real productivity difference between one coding style and another.
2. There’s real productivity lost in setting up pretty printers, re-formatting code manually, and arguing about the better style.
3. If programmers have latitude, they’ll use it. (See perl.)

So, take away the freedom of programmers to format their code in a non standard manner. Make coding style part of the compiler–not as a warning though (as Bruce Eckel says “when you discover you can ignore them [warnings], you do”)–actually have the compiler error out if the formatting is incorrect.

If you want this, then use Python.

Although I do understand that if you go with an approach like this, you get productivity gains from the fact that everyone can read code…. I also think that there are downsides from taking away style.

Imagine how boring it would be if we all wrote the same way.

What I think is a better solution, would be to have smart systems where you read code “how you want to read it”. You set up your personal coding standards, and when you view anyones code you see it how you want to. And of course, anyone else can do that too.

With this in place, Cameron can do his weird braces trick, and I would see it like normal ;)

Of course, there are the coding standards such as where the braces go, and then there are other style issues (e.g. while(…) vs. for (Iterator ….) [which goes away a little with JDK 5]. A really smart system would be able to change a lot with the view.

For now we can use source munging tools.