The Goldfish Chronicles

An article at Java.net contains an interview with Richard Gabriel and discusses the idea that Coding is an art/craft and not a science.

So who is it that argues with this? The brainwashed minions of the education system?

It’s why I like to call myself a ‘Coder’ and not a ‘Software Engineer’, ‘Programmer’ or ‘Data Analyst’ or such. Coder’s are artists, the rest are brainwashed misplaced engineers.

[Additionally, I have the same beliefs of Mathematics. It is an Art not a Science].

public class IterarableIterator implements Iterable {     private Iterator iter;

    public IterableIterator(Iterator itr) { this.iter = iter; }       public void iterator() { return this.iter } } 

and live with the fact that iterator() can’t be called twice. SimpleIterator should implement Iterable.

Looking forward to these:

Code Generation
JUnit in Action

To be honest, I think the RIAA sueing individuals by grabbing their information from the ISPs is a good thing. The US has next to no real public interest in personal privacy, so getting people interested in this would be nice.

Having got a mortgage a year and a bit ago, I find myself phoned constantly trying to sell me crap. We’re on the do-not-contact lists etc, but it doesn’t stop them. So now I don’t answer the phone, even though I’m paying for the damn thing.

The US needs a privacy act making it illegal for people to just hand people’s data around. Still amazes me the amount of data I had to give over to get a mobile phone [Social Security #, Driving Licence], and giving my telephone number out when I do something as simple as writing a cheque.

Just read the latest at James Strachan’s blog. Yet another convert to the Apple way. Thought I’d list the nice tools on my mac today that make me happy:

Safari. Rocking browser.
MacStumbler. It amuses me to hear it speak out the wireless network names.
SSH Agent. No more passwords for me.
CodeTek Virtual Desktop. Payware that might be less needed with Expos頯ut.
OmniGraffle Pro. I love this app, though it’s having increasing trouble saving my complex Home Network diagram.
KisMAC. Another wireless amusing app.
NetNewsWire Lite. Erik Hatcher put me onto this. Not sure if I like it or not, still find myself using the web out of habit.
Eclipse. The new 3.0 finally runs on my powerbook rather than crawling. Still can slow-down a bit and sometimes cpu-hog.
JProfiler. I haven’t used this in anger on the mac yet, but it ran happily in my tests and I love using it at on Windows. Want to use it more.

It’s been 2 years since I switched [more from Linux than Windows though] and I’m very happy with my 2 year old powerbook. I heard the other day of a powerbook that was run over by a jeep/suv. Damaged the screen/keyboard but the rest of the components were happily salvagable to fight another day. My friend was even considering transplanting the mobo/cpu to an older laptop.

Only unhappiness? I can’t afford to keep up with all the new cool things.
I WANT AN XSERV GODDAMNNIT.

So Mike…. when will I be able to get a 50 dollar, 1 user, version of JIRA?

Something I could really use is a personal-licence to JIRA to allow myself to manage my own list of todo’s and stuff. I use JIRA for osjava.org and at work and it’s quite nice. While I’m sure Bugzilla has most of the features, I still feel dirtied whenever I use it, while JIRA leaves me feeling happy.

It would include such wonderful things as ‘Mow lawn’, and maybe even lead to some requests for new ideas such as recurring issues. They’d be cool in JIRA. An Issue which is never closed but merely has a date-stamp for when the issue was last performed.

ie) Download monthly data from organisation, parse it and prepare report for analysts. [This is something we do at work and I’ve noticed people using JIRA to request the latest quarter be downloaded].

another would be: Pay the Colo bill. Not seen that in the post recently. Getting a bit worried that it got lost and my servers will be cut off. Maybe it turns up near the end of the week.

Wow, a new book by Richard Bartle, the guy who created the first MUD.

FindBugs, a project mentioned on Cafe-au-lait, is yet another java bug-hunter. Here’s an example findbugs output for the latest HEAD of Commons Lang. Not sure it really provides a lot of food for thought.

I don’t know why, but early last week I hit a book buying spree. [also an XBox. Evil Dead - Fistful of Boomstick is a riot].

In no particular order:

Text Processing in Python
The Little Schemer
Bug Patterns in Java
Software Configuration Management
Patterns
The Pragmatic Programmer [read this, but the book belonged to a previous company]
Naked Objects

I’ve been focusing on the Scheme and SCM books so far. Both have not dissapointed.

Very happy to see that Andy is getting closer to unravelling the LGPL/Java issue in that someone at the FSF has actually responded to him. It’s also very amusing reading the clueless comments on /.. I especially liked the comment that queried if LGPL was safe for Python/Perl, nice to raise some panic, and the person who blames Sun for creating the Java language so it will have a clash with the LGPL.

Also nice to see the FSF Dave Turner reply on there [I’m assuming /. themselves have confirmed it is he etc]. The problem is, he’s still speaking the wrong language:

“you need to allow people to relink your code with new versions of the library”

WTF does that mean to me? I have to allow people to reimport my code? I’ve never heard of such a concept, he’s clearly not understanding his audience.

Personally I think the solution here is for the ASF to consult the FSF on exactly how the ASF can distribute LGPL’d code. If it involves lots of odd coding [ie) using reflection as in JDBC] then it’s as good as a no.

Previous blog entries on this. I especially like the fact that Stallman wants to kill the LGPL:

23rd February

5th February