Next thing would be to make some mozblog look-a-like to actually edit the thing...

There is by the way, more reasons to read Matthew :-)

Tom just gave a more accurate explanation about where my fundamental dislike (or rather inability to think | discuss | consider) is coming from.

Knowing him in person, I'm quite sure he's only half as lazy as I am :-)

Maybe it's just misplaced optimism, but the recent fiest of flames we had over at forrest seems to be over... Utterly misplaced: this makes me think of our trip to Canada almost 3 years ago: the devastating view of a complete area that suffered from a forest fire the year before... an overwhelming look that was only hiding the detail of new life emerging just about everywhere...

Reading this, I finally got the idea I could unerstand what these ever lasting licensing discussions concerning open source are about.

Basically my vision would of have been the one of utter astonishment: Why and how could it matter? Isn't the whole fuzz about the licensing/copyrighting a clear example of 'If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.' ? This response of me would basically focus on pointing out the absurdity in trying to messure the quality of 'modern' ideas with 'old and classic' benchmarks. (My -old- anwser by the way is of course far less argumenting then what Peter is offering)

All in all... In my head the decission for being an oss-believer-software-engineer versus a non-believer is pretty much based on the same obvious evidence as the "Why am I not a carpenter/birdwatcher/cook/lawyer/anythingelse ?"... If your lucky (like me), you'll find/create 'your' job so it synchonizes the most with having fun.

We had a silent going live of xreporter (and cocoondev to some extend) last week... for those that were still hanging on that cliff after my previous'flow' posting... You should be able to grasp the most out of the *different* approach in xreporter from reading these documents

• Report definitions Defined.
• HTTP (ReST) interface.

.. is where my ADSL is working. (What a way to blow the dust from these new wires...)

On the more relevant side: informal medical statement announced Steven's back surgery as a success today. Hope to hear more from the man himself tomorrow. Hopefully he'll get home to the beloved ones next monday.

I recently gave up on my lurking mode at the xml-cocoon-dev mailing list. [Ah, youghtfull enthousiasm, you know how it goes... specially when your my age, and still want to pretend :-)] So I joined in a flow discussion, basically because Ovidiu's great explanation on the topic at the cocoon-gettogether gave me the feeling I actually knew what I was talking about... In any case... a weblog is no place for all this misplaced modesty (So lucky I'm not alone: [ {g#4560} == google hits]), so let's take revenge for not understanding the topic of the thread any more :-)

Flow is great. I love it, but my brain fails to place it... The basic conceptual mismatch in my head is that the web as I know it is purely *reactive* to the user... If you'ld ask me part of it's sociological success is in the pure PULL nature of things... or in other words it puts ultimate control at the end-user, and he/she likes that. (Is this the social translation of what is technologically refe(r)red to as ReST?) So, you all out there seasoned web-programmers... in stead of complaining about the back-button (you too? { g#368000}) you should understand that it's very existance probably lead to you having a job at all :-P

It's hardly an argument, at best a philosophical observation, but the flow thing seems to fundamentally collide with this by putting the control-feeling over at the developer-side. [I know there is more like this going on in our world so it really isn't an argument: stuff like TCP over IP and all, but then again a thought like 'leaky abstractions' comes back to memory] Having all these remarks based on a semantical discussion is probably a sign of my mental weekness (or overactive imagination), only thing I'm sure is that the last word hasn't been said yet. I guess the world should have a view on how Bruno solved things inside xreporter (which is every day more near to publication on cocoondev.org) Then someone out there could probably explain me why I *think/feel* the XML-flow describing in there is more passive (and thus more in sync with the -reactive- web) then the javascript inside the flow solution.

[side-note] Much of my demonstrated thought-inability here has to do with my (sorry, born with it) skepticism concerning any (sigh already {g#187000}) web related technology using the 'MVC-paradigm' wording in their motivations, objectives or manuals... In my vision of MVC it builds upon a rather thight observer-pattern-based event-coupling that is round-tripping the M->V->C->M... So while any of those efforts might be in the best possible SoC tradition, I would only go naming them MVC when I have something like a 'BackButtonPressedListener' and a 'BrowserWindowClosedListener' (not to mention a ClientsNetworkConnectionDeadListener) -- I just hate it when P.R. and marketing abuses technical terms to the extend that they become near to scientific incorrectness, aid in overall confusion and deteriorate world wide education (was that dramatic enough?)

*late update*... some six months later I get to understand I should lower my tone here... new insights during this thread (June 2003) -- hm, these kind of updates come close to revisionism

Since showing off the fruits of your genetic material seems to be en vogue...

Daughter, Fien is 4 years -- Son Tuur is 2 and a bit.

So I was thinking: let's end this 'trial' thing here and now. After all I've had more then the $40 worth of fun by now (fun adds up fast in my model)

...Instead: I spent 25' looking for the continuation button or something of the sort 'proceed' | 'checkout' ... in the Mozilla 1.2.1 window I have.

Lucky me: Somehow I haven't managed yet to remove IE from my W2K system (Heck, I haven't even been able to remove the icon from the desktop) ....

I'm quite sure, that if I let the people at customerservice@userland.com know about this they will ship me a nice bottle (if they come in pairs, I don't mind) of wine to me, that would somehow add up even faster then fun...

WellWadaYa... I'm actually considering to become a switcher. Hardware|OS can only make me so (luke-)warm so I'm not talking about the PC|Apple switch here... Still preparing my eclipse based Java course for next week and have to admit it's growing on me. I'm actually considering not to switch back to IDEA.

All this just because I'm dreaming about Forrest and Pollo plugins maybe (not an option in IDEA) In fact for

• Forrest there is no real issue: using Ant I just ran the babe from within Eclipse... works like a charm.
• Pollo I can probably keep on dreaming: The SWT|JFace threshold doesn't make this a natural fit, unless Bruno sees different after reading this.

• Simon Phipps on Guiding Cranes. (Can't seem to link to his actual blog-entry on December 1st)
• Andy C. Oliver on Emergence vs Distrust.

Today I cracked up some heads to poor in some OO thinking.  A number of daring lads and lassies (youngest with +12y Cobol programming experience) sent off by their boss to this day of "OO introduction and awareness" and to next week's Java intro, heard me introduce OO concepts, place UML diagrams, and tell (hopefully eye-opening) "why OOP" stories.

In every case the "why UML" didn't come out as the classic "a picture says more then a thousand words" cliche... I found myself prooving how pictures succeeded at doing this in terms of exploiting 2 dimensions in stead of only one in the case of the classic sequence of words...

Actually this was triggered by a student's question: "Where in the [class-]diagram do I start reading?"  A sure primer in my training experience to date... Hiding my astonishment I responded with a question (a decoy technique that is one of my favourites in the list of tips-and-tricks-for-bluffing-your-way-out-at-seminars, another one being pretending you have a big list of tips, but you never get past the second one, by then nobody remembers anyway) 

In every case here is my counter-question:  "If you look around in the big world (e.g. when driving your car), where do you start looking/scanning the image?" 

It bought me enough time (and already even satisfied nodding students) to produce: "It's often a good idea to start off with the thing that has the most lines to it, that's often the leading role in the story that diagram wants to tell." (personally I would find myself writing my diagrams in such a way that these are placed in the top-middle to centre of the diagram's rectangle, wondering if that actually matches human's common optical-interest-hot-spot)

The 2D story idea surely triggered some memory-synaps. Check out the picture diary of ex-colleague Karen.  Actually knowing how she *lives* Color.  I would guess she would credit 'color' with at least one more dimension in story telling...

... or was it perception is reality

[1] (see pic) This weekend I exposed my kids to culturally accepted collective lies. (at least I'm honest about this).  Apart from the lies, this is a great time to come to Belgium: it is spekuloos-season.

[2] This is news :: I watched TV :: The canvas program Nachtwacht succeeded in grabbing my attention with a (for this medium quite unseen) intelligence-depth in a uttermost simple format: broadcast wise men talking. (Steven would call them clueful people)

There was to learn that:

• 'Empowerment' is false by design: power that is offered to you can never be true power. Self-organized emancipation is the only alternative.
• Succesful emancipation means you're left to control yourself in a way that there is no-more-some-one-else-to-blaim. Scary.
• Regarding the above the concept of *borders* be they national, geographical, cultural or social exist often if not only in the mind of those that stop in front of them.

[3] Along my zap-adventures I even saw Burgemeester Bart Somers of Mechelen make some politic-incorrect statements in the light of the current news-dominating immigrants-topic in Belgium. A seldom relieve.  In the light of the above this guy basically was stating that the immigrant-community should stop asking for empowerment (through jobs) and just start working to get what they want for themselves. Oh yes, that might mean on the way up: learning (there is even a choice here) the national language, and cut some of the sharp edges on the heimat-culture that prevent all too much the social-work-fit-in.

Of course life is just not fair for those having a culture without Sinterklaas.