techno.blog("Dion")

I got an email about my Yahoo! Mail account… and I now have more space than I ever need there. I am sure it has nothing to do with Google’s GMail ;)

Not only did Yahoo! just give us more space though. The interface is a little fresher and cleaner, however I didn’t notice anything really different.

I am still waiting for the ability to tag pieces of metadata to any email which I can query/sort (a la GMail), and for my email client to be smart. If I mention the word “attach(ed)” ask me why I haven’t before the email goes out :)

The new Yahoo! was running fine for me, but not everyone apparently: Yahoo Chokes Upon Offering Additional User Storage

You can go on a bad diet and still lose weight. It happens all the time. The reason is due to side effects of going on the diet, NOT the diet itself.

When you go on a diet you are often saying “I want to take control of my health”. You will often look at what you eat (the diet part), and also look into exercise. Since many people do NOT watch what they eat OR exercise much, just doing those means that you end up losing weight! It could have nothing to do with the particular diet.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that diets are bad, or that they never work… just that they don’t HAVE to be the direct cause.

What about outsourcing? I was talking to someone today about how they company says they have a failing project. The reaction is to outsource it. As part of this decision they are going to hire a project manager, technical writer, etc… and they will be focusing more on getting the requirements done and on paper. My reaction is: Why wouldn’t you do that NOW??? The project could in theory end up being a success NOT due to the direct cause: outsourcing; but due to the fact that they actually ran the project the way they should have done!

I would guess that a lot of projects have gone this way. The side-effect creating the success rather than the direct change itself. Of course, as with the diets, this doesn’t mean that there are no reasons to outsource… and that it is intrusively bad… but we should start doing the right thing and giving out current projects the best chance of success today.

At New York Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule and a calculator.

Attorney general John Ashcroft believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-gebra is a very fearsome cult, indeed”, Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in a search of absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like ‘x’ and ‘y’, and, although they are frequently referred to as ‘unknowns’, we know they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country.”

As the great Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, ! “There are 3 sides to every triangle.”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.

thanks to David for passing this over

I had a bizarre email which talked about an information week article.

I saw:

Hardware considerations can muddle the seemingly lower cost of Linux ownership, The Advisory Council says. Also, aspect-oriented programming needs to mature before it’s ready for prime time.

The way the claim about AOP came into the sentence surprised me so I took a look.

The question asked was “Question B: What is aspect-oriented programming, and should I be interested?”

The answer gave the usual…. but my eyes opened when I saw the phrase:

… and coding “cutpoints” for each aspect…

Maybe I won’t listen to the judgement ;)

Read: What is aspect-oriented programming, and should I be interested?

Scott Ferguson reminds us to look at history, and remember the discussion on whether XPath should be its own spec, or path of one huge spec.

Fortunately XPath was seperated from other technologies that needed it… and we had great reuse, and all specs were better off for it.

Can history repeat itself here? :)

How could they do it. Watching it you felt it was going to happen… and it did.

Beckham misses a penalty, Gerrald kicks the ball in the only bad place in the park. Oh my god. This is like life as a Red Sox fan. At least we have 2 more games to catch up.

All the family was in. Flying in from all over, fighting delays based on weather, and making it just in time the night before Emily’s graduation day.

The day was a great one, and I was so proud of my wife! Having excuses to get people together like this is always a pleasure (like weddings etc).

After the ceremonies, we got to listen to Kofi Anan, secretary general of the UN. The speach was fantastic. He discussed his thoughts on what was happening in the world now, how the UN is needed more than ever, and the direction we need to go in to aim for more peace and equality in the world.

He managed to put down Bush… but in such great subtle ways. For example:

All great US leaders know that you can’t just take your forces and take over a country just because …..

What a pleasure to listen to him. I wish his address could have been on mainstream T.V. Surely there were a few seconds where they could slip it in between the Reagan coverage?

There has been a lot of buzz about JavaServer Faces. Since its release, people seem to love it, or hate it. A lot of the hatred revolves around the JSP tags that you have to work with. Hans Bergsten shows us the flaws, and then shows us, what he thinks, is a better way.

This kind of article is great. I totally agree with Hans that the JSP approach is really clunky, and have mentioned some of these reasons in the past. Just look at a fairly complicated JSF page and you will wince. Show that to a designer and they will cry.

The component model itself isn’t that bad, and Hans gets to that. JSF also really needed to lift the bar and give us some awesome components right off of the bat, rather than leaving them to the community/third parties. If they could have wowed us with amazing controls, then more people would be jumping for it IMO.

JSF: Promising
Tapestry: Today

Improving JSF by Dumping JSP

TSS Discussion on the article

Scott Ferguson of Caucho (Resin) likes to think of IoC as an assembly pattern, and this makes the choice of constructor-based versus setter-based versus getter-based small fry… in the implementation… as apposed to the big picture.

Working through some dependency injection documentation, I’m finding it better to think of the IoC/DI pattern as an “Assembly Line” pattern.
As an Assembly Line pattern, the setter vs constructor issue looks like choosing between metric and British measurement or Phillips vs flat screws. The choice does matter, but it’s a minor decision compared to choosing IoC/DI in the first place.

The point of the Assembly Line pattern is that the Parts and Chassis are decoupled from the choice of Assembler. The parts need to conform to some rules: like Phillips screws, but otherwise it’s straightforward to switch Assemblers from a container to a test suite.

Resin IoC Tutorial: Dependency Injection for Resources

I recently talked about how I was at a whiteboard session with Anders Hejlsberg.

One of the last points made was an answer to the question:

“What are you working on now? What are you excited about?”

The item that really caught my attention was that he mentioned the large mismatch between the relational world of set theory, and the object world. He understands that almost EVERYONE is doing something with a database (at least on the server side) and that there is a LOT of room to help developers out in that area.

Unfortunately he didn’t/couldn’t go into details, but it definitely peaked interest. What could he add to C# to help with the mismatch? :)