Een Kortijkenaar geeft commentaar op wat Antwerpse cultuur. Dit ontketende enkele vrijdagnammiddag-associaties(ik was het in een comment-boxke aan het typen, maar het werd wat te lang):
Die zanger van Camden, da's Axl Peleman. Toevallig ook in vroeger jaren de frontman van Ashbury Faith. Van "Rage against the machine" naar "The police" - 't moet toch zijn dat een mens milder wordt met het verstrijken der jaren.
Om op hetzelfde elan verder te gaan: Axl heb ik de eerste keer in levende lijven gezien ergens in een industrieterrein in Herentals, hij bovenop het podium, ik eronder druk doende de massa bijeen (of was het nu uiteen) te harken. De tweede keer heb ik hem gezien een Antwerpse speeltuin, hij achter zijn zoon aan het lopen, ik achter de mijne. 't Moet toch zijn dat een mens zijn interesses veranderen met het verstrijken der jaren.
Overigens heb ik iets te danken aan Axl: mijn kennis van het fenomeen "tandengel". Dat is verdovende zalf voor kindjes die tandjes krijgen, zodat ze er wat minder van afzien. Gehoord van Axl dat dat bestond, tijdens een StuBru-interview. Goed spul!
Koz Speaks: Where's the Domain?
While I fully understand the pledge for a more active object model, I've found myself backing away from it lately, too. The problem is that many objects seem to have so many roles, and are used to perform so many operations, that it just becomes unfeasible to put all those methods in one class. For example, you have a tree you want to have all leaves of. Ah, call Node.getChildren() recursively, you say. And when the node at hand is a leaf, it returns itself. But: sometimes I want all the leaves. Sometimes I only want the leaves of certain branches. And sometimes, I don't only want the leaves, I want the internal nodes too. What's one supposed to do? Implement Node.getChildren(), Node.getChildrenOnCondition(Condition), and Node.getChildrenIncludingInternalNodes()? Or get some hefty Visitors, and have those "external" classes decide which logic to use? Which object model will look cleanest, do you think?
I'm all for the naked objects approach, but I'm having trouble to keep all the "aspects" of an object cleanly separated.
Writing that last sentence, makes me wonder of the word "aspects" there is the same as the word "aspect" in "AOP". Stuff to ponder ...
Het nieuws van 14u op jongerenzender Studio Brussel:
Camilla draagt een hoed met veren, alles in gebroken wit.
Verdekke. Dat is informatie die ik niet behoefde. 'k Heb toch Radio Story niet opstaan?
Hierbij is de paus-hype wel officieel voorbij: ik geloof niet dat ze net verteld hebben of ie al een beetje begint te ruiken in zijn nis.
Ik draag trouwens een groene broek, en een grijze golf. Mijn sokken zijn een soort afgewassen zwart.
I've been struggling with a legacy application for a while now. It has all this bloated and non-OO-minded code in it, that I wonder: "What was this architect thinking?" In order to get some "guru insight" in the problem, I bought "Core J2EE Patterns" (Deepak Alur, et al., Prentice Hall, 0-13-064884-1). I was hoping to get a solution to the problems at hand. I was just browsing it, when it hit me: the legacy app we're dealing with, is following exactly the methods described in this book. It is great if you have a can of non-thinking Java-typers, to whom you can say "type me 500 lines of code by tomorrow, and if I want to refactor something, you'll be present again". But it doesn't work if you have a small team of (more or less) intelligent people, who want to get something done, instead of mindless typing.
On second thought, the problem most likely is the underlying J2EE (and, more specifically, all that EJB stuff) architecture that's causing trouble. You can't build a good house if your fundamentals are weak.
Just for fun, another unedited draft, from March 14, 2003. I still didn't quite finish that book.
My life consists of working on "the 'Net". My dream: worldwide connectivity, people working around the globe together on great and impressive projects, for the well-being of mankind. Reality: I spend 1 hour every morning to get to work. I get mails from people in India in 5 seconds, but getting to work takes me 1 hour. Usually, the commute back home takes about 30 minutes. So let's calculate: A day is 24 hours. You spend 8 hours (at least) at work. To be healthy, you need another 8 hours to sleep. That leaves you 8 hours of "your own time", in which you can do interesting stuff like eating, washing up, and whatnot. Of that 8 hours, 1 hour and a half is taken away from me. Every day. That is 20% of my "free" time. Let me repeat that: I spend one fifth of the time that is "my own" in traffic. And what for? To log on on the same Internet as I have at home. It is getting to me. I must be mad.
Another draft I found, authored on 1 October 2003. I switched jobs to somewhere I could commute on bicycle to on March 1, 2004.
From VentureBlog: Accelerating Acceleration:
But suffice to say, marketers who understand how to sell into a certain market trend will have increasingly more say than technologists who understand what can be developed.
Weird. It is my belief for quite some time now, that this is the case already, and not only on the consumer electronics market either. Whatever you do, you have to sell something. If you do a terific job, but you can't communicate it, you can forget getting praised for it. If, on the other hand, you can't do shit, but are a master in selling that, you will be "a successful entrepeneur".
I just found this post as "draft" in my MT. Originally drafted on 21 November 2003, but still true... I didn't change a word, either.
'k Heb net voor de sport eens gezien wanneer ik me voor het eerst op usenet heb laten zien: dit is het oudste dat ik vond. Wel blij dat het een min of meer helpende en beleefde post is, god weet dat ik er een paar minder euh... helpende heb ingetikt.
Wat me wel lichtelijk verbaasde: dit is de eerste post die min of meer met Java te maken heeft. En ik die dacht dat ik daar al veel langer mee bezig was. 'k Zal mijn archieven toch eens moeten nakijken.
Comparisons like this give me the creeps. It just doesn't make any sense: what is "language", and what is "library"? For instance, I once saw such a comparison between Python and Java. The Python program was using something like HTTP:: (forgot the right syntax), while the Java counterpart implemented the http get by itself. Using commons-httpclient would have reduced the lines of code tremendously.
Anyway, I suppose people are still looking for useful metrics in the programming world. Not an easy job, but I thought that we all already agreed that "LOC" is not a very good one.
Via Shinzui.
Eindelijk zijn er foto's van: er is water op Mars!