techno.blog("Dion")

Christopher Reeve passed on today.

I hope that we keep pushing for the changes that he was fighting for.

Let’s get stem-cell research on the front burner and help save lives.

The Spring guys have allows us to clean up the Spring XML files quite a bit recently. First, they added the notion of building a “template” which you can inherit from which is cool.

Now, a more simple change is in the works.

Take a look at a normal bean setup:

<property name=”user”><value>admin</value></property>
<property name=”linkFormatter”><ref bean=”linkFormatter”/></property>

There is talk of changing to something such as:

<property name=”user” value=”admin”/>
<property name=”linkFormatter” ref-bean=”linkFormatter”/>

A big +1 from me. Small things like this make a difference.

I also think that the Spring XML config can learn from that of Hivemind.

A solid performance from England. Wales are a good team, and you never knew how it would turn out. England dominated though, and should have had more.

Beckham’s goal was fantastic, but then he did a typical footballer thing.

He went in on a stupid tackle which ended up injuring him a little. I with he was taken off now, but instead he went back on and retaliated. Dood, YOU were the idiot! Now he has another yellow card which knocks him out of the next game. Good job. Worth it.

Rio and Sol at the back. How solid can you get? I can’t wait for Germany 2006! :)

Although Bush wasn’t as much of a baboon in this debate, I still think Kerry did a good job.

Bush comes across as someone who is angry

Kerry came across as someone who would explain things and was there for you

I wish Kerry would hit harder sometimes though. Bush KEPT saying “if you showed up” type comments.

Mr. Bush:

• Why didn’t you show up for duty at the national guard?
• Where were you when the memo was put on your desk saying that something like 9/11 was in the works?
• Why are you always in Crawford, TX and not in the White House?

There are five people left at the table.

I have A Q with A X X from the flop.

I know the other guys has A – Y.

We are all-in.

He has A 8

What card do you think he gets on the river?

I hate bad beats. :)

David Hannson (creator of Rails) talked about Dave Thomas who is showing Amazon Rails, Ruby, and more this week.

Man, if Amazon starts getting into the Ruby wave there would be a bunch of folk who could go up and get some work done :)

If you don’t know much about Rails, you have to check out the Setup Movie.

Picture having someone video you as you start a new web application. Picture having something done in 10 minutes. Watch the video, and you will see how cool the web framework is!

Have you ever left something too long? The laundry pile gets larger and larger. Every day you look at it and think “why didn’t I do the damn laundry last week?”.

Once when that happened we put everything in a bad and dropped it off at the laundrette (which was literally at the end of the road in London). A few quid later, and we came back to nicely packaged, folded, clothes. Money well spent.

The same effect has happened with refactoring code on projects. You run into the “I don’t have time to refactor this right now, we need to move on and finish the next feature”. You would think that we have learned. Building on a foundation that is a house of cards. Knowing how much more work it means for the future. But we still haven’t always learned.

I am trying really hard to run a wash as soon as the laundry basket is full. And, I am trying hard to refactor my code on the spot, and not let time go by. Keep wishing me luck :)

Wow. Laszlo Platform Goes Open Source.

This is really cool news, and is smart from Laszlo in my opinion. Before this they were competing with traditional app development, and more expensive frameworks such as Macromedia Flex.

Now that their platform is open source, many more people will take a look and find out how good the platform is.

It is interesting to watch companies make the move from:

“We provide commercial software. Pay us per seat”

to:

“The software is free. But we can help and add value that way”

I really hope Laszlo is successful. If you want to check out the wave of Rich Internet Applications give it a try.

As I recently said, I love tools like del.icio.us and gmail where I can tag things with metadata.

I think with one more level of tagging I would have almost everything that I need.

For example, I would love to be able to link tags in del.icio.us. With a web of many-to-many relationships between a tag, I could build a folder setup, or more interestingly… a structure that suits me better. With this facility, I wouldn’t just have a list of tags that I can click on, but I could see the relationships.

It would then also be really nice to be able to say “if I tag it with java, also tag it as dev and programming”.

Tags are nice, but for some tasks value could be had with setting name:value pairs of metadata. This could especially help with searching via the lucene/google fields.

Great stuff!

Dion

Do you like to travel?

A lot?

Really a lot?

Enough to spend $3M to go whenever you want?

If so, get this.