May 31, 2003
Impossible Performance Art
Inexorable, the harbour is going nowhere, it has nothing else to do. It will beat on this jetty day after day until it was broken, until it is out of its way. Such forces have hewn valleys between mountains, this little structure of wood and steel will be beaten down if the harbour has to wait until the end of civilisation to do it. And what has civilisation been, but a blink in the water's eye, a ripple in history?read... (370 words. Posted to personal, stories at 11:47 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 2)
May 28, 2003
The Ghetto Mini-Pattern
You are in some way subject to architectural, framework or language constraints that force you to write ugly code. For example, your UI framework requires one kind of object, your persistence framework requires another, and you keep having to convert between the two.read... (204 words. Posted to nerd at 11:14 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 5)
This one is Alan's fault
If a tree falls in an application, and nobody is around to hear it, is it logged?...read... (17 words. Posted to nerd at 01:46 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 3)
May 26, 2003
Defining Metadata
I recently posted a definition of Metadata to the XP mailing-list. It's pretty basic stuff, but I figured I'd put it here in case I needed to find it again later.read... (376 words. Posted to nerd at 11:10 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 2)
May 24, 2003
What Bridge?
Anyway, today after dropping into the bakery to grab lunch, I decided to walk across the bridge and take some photos. I should do it again some time when it's more sunny. Meanwhile you can find the photographs in question here.read... (118 words. Posted to personal, pictures at 02:38 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Quality In Depth
Above all, you need a culture where quality is considered important. (This, once again, parallels security.) If the company doesn't value quality, you're never going to achieve it because everyone will be looking for ways to work around whatever measures you put in place, and nobody will ever be called to account for doing so.read... (510 words. Posted to nerd at 11:45 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 23, 2003
Degrees of "works"
1. Compiles on my machine...read... (33 words. Posted to nerd at 09:31 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 2)
May 20, 2003
Respect the Technology
In order for this to happen, though, I expect the people who design toasted sandwich makers for a living to know a hell of a lot about them. This is fundamentally necessary. If it were made by some guy who'd read a pamphlet one evening about how to build an electrical appliance, it'd be just as likely to blow up in my face as do anything useful.read... (475 words. Posted to nerd, stories at 01:18 AM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 0)
May 19, 2003
Mortal Hacking
Sometimes I think it would be really cool to have my working day commentated by the ghostly voice from Mortal Kombat.read... (75 words. Posted to personal at 12:25 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 4)
The Open Source Prime Directive
Getting people to contribute to Open Source is hard. If you do not have sufficient motivation to take the first, important steps yourself, nobody else is going to. At most, you'll attract a bunch of other people who, like you, want to talk about the project instead of coding it.read... (191 words. Posted to nerd, stories at 09:35 AM. Trackbacks: 2 Comments: 2)
May 17, 2003
Passing by on the web
This, of course, took the poor student somewhat by surprise. Not the least because I tend to write rather formally to strangers, and it may have (unintentionally) sounded like I was annoyed. But anyway, you don't really expect, when you reference someone's writings in your obscure school assignment, to have the author write back and correct you.read... (238 words. Posted to personal at 11:18 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
Viral Agents (minor Matrix Reloaded spoiler)
How Agent Smith replicates.read... (55 words. Posted to nerd at 10:46 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 4)
Matrix Reloaded review (no spoilers)
So the really good news is that in the sequel, both the action sequences and the pop philosophy have been taken up a notch. We get delivered more kung-fu, more explosions and more destruction. There are some sequences that had me so caught up in the action that I wanted to cheer the screen.read... (504 words. Posted to personal, stories at 10:29 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 1)
Matrix II preliminary review (no spoilers)
It rocked. More detail tomorrow.read... (5 words. Posted to personal at 01:26 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 16, 2003
Technical Accuracy in a Movie?
I'm going to see The Matrix Reloaded in about two and a half hours. Just now, I was reading JWZ's blog and discovered that it contains evidence of the first ever technically accurate computer-hacking scene in a movie.read... (114 words. Posted to nerd at 07:53 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 1)
Closures and Java: a Tutorial
A closure is an anonymous function that `closes' over its surrounding scope. Thus when the function defined by the closure is executed, it has access to all the local variables that were in scope when it was created.read... (726 words. Posted to java, nerd, stories at 06:32 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 6)
May 14, 2003
JBoss vs JDJ Celebrity Deathmatch
The JDJ awards are a joke anyway. For the big-ticket items (databases, IDEs and Appservers) they're basically a measure of market-share, as the majority of people work in a homogenous server environment, so they'll just vote for the one they work with the most. (With a few open-source or cheap nominees getting votes disproportionate to their usage because more people are exposed to them)read... (418 words. Posted to nerd at 09:19 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 13, 2003
Cross Platform or Native Widgets?
There's a lot to think about in this for Swing programmers, too. If your application has been laid out on a Windows box, chances are it's going to look wrong on OS X. At worst, you're going to find a lot of widgets fighting for space, and cropping text because the OS X widgets are just that much bigger and rounder than their Windows counterparts. Even if the layout isn't breaking, you're still not going to look comfortable on the platform because the Apple Human Interface Guidelines are very strict about how applications are laid outread... (307 words. Posted to apple, java, nerd at 09:58 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 2)
L Ron Jobs and the Church of Macintosh
Since joining the Church of Macintosh, I have found peace and fulfilment. Finally, after years in the computing wilderness, I finally feel I have found somewhere that I belong. Don't you want to belong?read... (252 words. Posted to apple, nerd, stories at 06:11 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 7)
May 12, 2003
Quote of the Day
No, procrastination week is next month.read... (64 words. Posted to personal at 12:50 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 10, 2003
Driving While Black
I really don't like living in a world where this sort of shit happens....read... (15 words. Posted to personal at 08:52 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 08, 2003
Linux and Selling Out
"...it's funny that it's now become possible to use Linux and still feel like you're selling out, but there you go." --- Kief, on being forced to support RedHatread... (143 words. Posted to nerd at 10:41 AM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 07, 2003
Go I...
It's a sobering thought. There, but for a few reversals of fortune, go I.read... (84 words. Posted to personal at 11:09 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 06, 2003
Short Attention Span
After eight years of being an Internet nerd, I've finally completely lost the ability to concentrate on one thing at a time.read... (261 words. Posted to personal, stories at 11:43 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 3)
Weighing into the Static vs Dynamic Typing Debate
Static typing is declarative. Testing is procedural. Thus, when your program fails through types, the exact location of the error can be immediately ascertained: it's the point at which your type declaration becomes untrue. When your program fails a regular test, you only find the point at which the testing procedure detects the resulting misbehaviour.read... (974 words. Posted to java, nerd, stories at 10:56 PM. Trackbacks: 1 Comments: 2)
Quote of the day
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. ---Ripley, in Aliens.read... (23 words. Posted to personal at 12:45 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 05, 2003
Dear XML Programmers...
Charles discovers Lisp. Again.read... (604 words. Posted to java, nerd at 05:47 PM. Trackbacks: 4 Comments: 10)
May 04, 2003
Schemix - Scheme Kernel Hacking
The intended use of Schemix is for exploration of the Linux kernel and for rapid, interactive prototyping of Linux drivers and other new kernel features. To achieve this, Schemix will attempt to make a large subset of the kernel functionality available to Scheme programs. Interactivity is via a character device, /dev/schemix which presents a REPL (Read, Eval, Print Loop) to anyone having access to the device.read... (181 words. Posted to nerd at 03:20 PM. Trackbacks: 0 Comments: 0)
May 03, 2003
Movie Review: X-Men 2 (no spoilers)
X-Men 2 had a good plot, strong villains, good F/X and action sequences (both unfortunately overshadowed by Matrix Reloaded anticipation), and good performances by all the lead characters. What it desperately needed was a decisive, ruthless script editor.read... (323 words. Posted to nerd, personal at 08:35 PM. Trackbacks: 2 Comments: 0)