I vaguely remember mine, but I surely don't remember seeing a challenging job-opportunity like this waiting to be filled back in '93.

Just got a dense and narrative rewording.

Of course the event at the base of this made me rethink the recent local display of anti-web-clue (report in dutch) on the Flemish blogging scene which essentially got into the more fundamental version of the same thing: See if you don't have an RSS feed you can still act as if you didn't know. You're really in a different league of fundamental and exclusive right on correctness if you do provide one but then start complaining if people actually start using it :-)

Linking to todays news maybe the US should send over some other people to get the cluetrain rolling over here :-)

By the way... We had another display of exclusive right on correctness (dutch again) over here in Flanders... There's been a whole load of thoughts crossing my mind on this topic that leads to one concerning this spot on the web: I really should get into local language blogging...

More for the flemish: two recent discovered samples of great home grown blogging that I instantly added to my blogroll: De PeterWeter and KoeBus.

Made me smile and think about:

• a really old cartoon where Calvin convincingly explains Hobbes that "manuals are for sissies"
• my own way of dealing with IKEA furniture :-)

9.41 am, the missus on the phone complaining about the ADSL not functioning at home. This is weird. We've been flawlessly I-connected through the perfect ISP services of xs4all belgium for the last 4 years. Being at a rough 70km from home there is little I can do but confirm that she's indeed cut off from the net, and send an email to the helpdesk to let them investigate some deeper...

9.14 pm, the missus declares me her life-time hero when I siwftly observe, plan and act in less then 30 seconds (just putting the plug back into the wall). What a display of efficiency and fearless action! Incredible

Yesterday 5.15 pm I park my car on the side of the N60, and call in the VTB/VAB for assistance. A patient hour later the service peep on duty (a man with a real mustache and flickering lights on the car!) needs less then 15' to re-attach some tube on the turbo exhaust to get me wheeling home again...

I guess, every now and then we deserve the support of a little hero just as much as we deserve our moment de gloire in doing that (little) thing that makes all the difference.

Hey, they are, but Martin wrote them down! (and I surely couldn't have done it in such a clear way)

Starting at the first paragraph from his 'UML distilled' (and surely throughout his 'Refactoring') I've been easily digesting what Martin observes, suggests and advises.

Today I just clicked around over these

• AbundantMutation
• MetaphoricQuestioning
• Separation of Design and Construction

... and found myself nodding the head again.

Note to self: Maybe I should be looking out more for the times when I (totally) disagree with what is said. However I'm not the kinda guy that assumes the most interesting information-sharing and overall progress is to be found in conflict.

Scary issue with Mozilla Firefox. Below is the quick guide to applying a workaround in Mozilla Firefox.

Thx to Bertrand.

*Update* While above did the trick on my ubuntu/hoary with firefox 0.9.3, of course YMMV. Looks wise to check this more elaborate fix too. # Posted by mpo at 03:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A long time ago I wrote about the software-reuse-paradox which basically says that reuse is achieved by throwing stuff out the door.

The last month I've been poking around in hibernate-land over a smaller personal project that started quite some time ago and only every now and then needs my attention. Back then it sounded like a good idea to use hibernate, today while wondering why I keep fighting with it, I started to discover another software-paradox.

The more ways there are to show you are wrong, in fact the more bugs you can list, the more confidence people will have about you being right.

Or reversed: Providing evidence of stuff working is done through offering (ways to) prove that it is failing.

JUnit tests live in this category. If you write them well they're a whole bunch of statements about when and how your software can/will fail. The more of those you provide, the less the actual result will actually miss out on new use cases.

Public, searchable support-mailinglists and bug-archives do an equal job in a less formal way. Even if they provide no fix or workaround, they tell you that you can stop poking around and even trying with the current release of things.

Of course this developer-self-control (junit) and social network (lists and archives) is, in terms of confidence building no match to the peek/poke behind the scenes that the end-user can perform himself (ego amplified assurance).

Obviously it's this last thing I miss with hibernate. In each problem I face I miss the easy assesment that can help me make the distinction between me being the stupid jackass again, or hibernate not supporting. It doesn't help that hibernate keeps being the only implementation of their own 'standards'. The end result of this is confusion, 'trial and error'-cycles (I hate those) and thus general discontentment. With all those people on the planet raving about hibernate this generally makes me feel rather stupid, right before my ego fighting back with the observation that in all my stupidity I'ld been done with the problem already if I just wrote everything from scratch. Maybe it is just that dreadful 80-20 rule, mixed in with the honest truth about (open source) software that you can (really) only (really) appreciate the works of the 'black-box' if you can easily hold it up against the light and have a look through. Having access to the source in this respect proves to be less interesting then having the time to digest it fully, or even better having been involved from the start.

If ever you wondered why there are soo much frameworks doing the same out there :-)

Anyways, taking the knowledge from the new software-confidence-paradox just laid down, this would suggest that JDO implementations have a brighter future then hibernate just cause one would be able to swap one implementation with another (in any case I (like to) see vague signs of the pendulum swinging back from havoc OR/mapping to some more DIY coding on the basics of something like Spring's JDBCtemplates).

I like to believe it also affirms part of the reasoning behind our REST focus in the architectures of daisy cms and xreporter enabling you to look behind the scenes of distributed programming with a simple wget or standard browser.

The local 'union' of small and middlesized enterprises here in Flanders is organizing an inquiry amongst his members on the awareness of the issue of software licenses and the legal consequences of an inattentive position in this matter.

The questionaire is so clear in institutionalising an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt (Am I not at fault on any of the machines? Who can I trust to check? Are they out to get me? How much is this going to cost me?) that I have started doubting if there really is any other goal to it being held at all :-)

The one really to be accused of 'guilty by neglect' is unizo itself, no? In their eagerness to help draw a clear line between paying for your licenses and disrespectful piracy they utterly miss out on the legal open source option. Why is there no decent guide to their members in the quality, cost-effictiveness and assured legal possition given by the open source alternative(s)?

In fact: Why is an organization that should speak up for local small enterprises the precursor for the big (foreign) software companies?