Ever had a hard time explaining the crux of the cluetrain? Here is a nice anti-example to help with the visuals. - via Simon.

Just rephrazing (and joining in) Steve's view.

Just finished reading (dutch version of) Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh. I just found this website covering the same topic, but still need to heavily recommend the book: it reads actually as a whodunnit and succeeds very well at transferring a sense of 'passion' for the numbers. The story also involves prizes to be won, an almost suicide and a duel at dawn.

Apparently this book seems to be a textual rundown of a BBC Horizon series. For which I only found this 404 (linked from here). Would be nice to ever get to see the VHS copy of this.

In any case, the book also had this nice little riddle said to be originated by Bachet (who was the author of the translation with the way too small margins...):

What is the least amount of (and which are the) reference weights that you need to be able to weigh any discrete kilogram between 1 and 40 kg on a balance with two scales?

Yesterday I read this article and felt my fud-meters go tilt at the carefully positioned thought-link between piracy and open source. They surely know how to play this drum and are probably hoping to benefit from a decent share of minds resonating around the induced association... Makes me remember: Some years ago I remember this survey on how many people actually believed that microsoft had invented the Internet. Hm, don't remember if the asked group were exclusive gullible US citizens.

Today however I read up on the association between MDA and AOP Bill was implicitely making (see the quote, or the article) and that was recently injected in my own mind as well. (people wake up with the weirdest thoughts)
Given the fact that roundtripping is *the* biggest thing in te MDA setup that makes me doubth the whole approach the most, we might consider mixin in AOP to save the day! Generate from UML the obvious and simple, then add-on the aspects using AOP, and not relying on reverse engineering nor highly advanced/unnatural/ tool specific UML addiditions to let the generator produce your specific implementation nuance on the standard/basic UML.

One last thing: Adrian, be sure to let us know when the book hits the shelves and try to keep doing this montly digest even when you are back into regular blogging mode :-)

I got trapped in explaining the basics of the Content Management System idea to the missus the other night. Before I even got started she showed me her exquisite humorous talent by remarking that: "given the fact that the System's aim is to 'Content' the 'Management' we should not be surprised that by design that upper layer of any company would show a genuine interest."

con·tent  ~ adj.
   1. Desiring no more than what one has; satisfied.
   2. Ready to accept or acquiesce; willing: She was content to step down after four years as chief executive.

(as snatched from my online dictionary)

Mmmm long talks going over this that and the other, jumping wholes and back about everything and nothing in particular...

We quite unexpectedly ended up with riddles, which is absolutely the kind of mental gaming I crave for. Ah blast now I remember how we got there: jumping in from the mentioning of the prisoner's dilemma and never got to actually talk about it any more :-)

In any case, I was confronted with this (new to me) classic sounding one:

Someone was sentenced to death, but since the king loves riddles, he threw this guy into a room with two doors. One leading to death, one leading to freedom. There are two soldiers, each one guarding one door. One of the guards is a perfect liar, the other one will always tell the truth. The man is allowed to ask one soldier one yes-no question and then has to decide, which door to take. Which one question can he ask to find the door to freedom?

I hope you like it as much as I did.

Yesterday I stumbled accross an enteresting read about time in general by drifting off after learning about some DST problem with cvs on windows. Actually drifting all the way up to adding a title to the eternally growing lookslikeanicereadlist.

In any case, looks like my recent time investment hasn't really left that much time to blogging.

Actually I'm in the middle of a big framework-selection, combination, adaption and watchamacallition for a long time customer of ours. The work needs to stretch all the way from selecting, customizing, simplifying, normalizing as well as training and supporting their developers up to co-working on some projects. A refreshing long-term focus after some years of hopping in and out some random doors (which keeps being fun, but is somewhat limited by this new sustain)

In any case the work is leading me along the lines of Spring and AspectJ (of which I blogged before recently) and their likes. (coincidentially Sylvain seems to be looking around in similar regions)

Some of my random findings to date (no other order then the association driven popup in my brain

• Spring is refreshingly simple to start off with and resonates big time with how I've largely seen CBE and OOP mingle and match. It's fun to recognise own old ideas and findings (even if you modestly have to add you lacked the extra vision to actually build something from them) in an very well done implementation. A good example of 'no simpler then the simplest you possibly can' (which I find the far nicer variant of the dreadful 'less is more')
• The Spring community seems to be lively and busily working on the next round of big features. (and was quite responsive in smashing the first reported bug)
• First of all I'm still somewhat struglling with an optimal choice for persistence. The required flexibility in combination with the Spring's great JdbcSupport kinda makes me doubth if Hibernate should be added to the mix? Spring's RowMapper's are very easy to write and use and seem to leave more under our own control.
• On the long term I'm still missing some support for mixin' classloaders in Spring's appcontext mix. Maybe what Merlin (hm, like the new skin!) offers is just the perfect match. Specially the maven-repo reuse there is a huge selling point. Although a full combination of both frameworks seems a bit of an overkill at the moment, possibly by then we can find an elegant way to cut out just what we need from there.
• On the mid term we'll also have to get into the distribution and remoting, possibly by jotting in some axis and/or activemq. And my mind is silently growing some common development approach for both Web and FatGui apps by abstracting InteractionScreens (JForm or Cform) and UseCases (controllers or flowscripts).
• AspectJ will be kept out of sight of the actual app developers until a lot more water has run under the bridge. However, I realize how this is another one of these 'life-changing-thingies' not to be stopped. To be compared with refactoring IDE's (looking at how they changed my life over vim, while none of the previous IDE incarnations pulled that off) and on a larger scale (understandable to non developer-geeks) the emergence of the Internet over running of to the library. That kind of impact.

Yeah, still some road to go.