Inklings: a tumblelog

April Fool’s Day is a month away, isn’t it? smack!

A surprisingly balance (considering SWT is their baby) article from IBM.

I don’t know of a single computing system that is attached to you that if it fails it will almost certainly kill you. That’s what happens with jet engines.

I do, one that started working in the plane I was in an hour after I finished reading this article: the autopilot. Here’s another: pacemakers. Or modern ABS systems. Much of what “software engineers” do might no be engineering, but you can’t make that criticism about people who build critical embedded systems.

Standardista Table Sorting is a JavaScript module that lets you sort an HTML data table by any column… It’s unobtrusive. You add a reference to the Standardista Table Sorting JavaScript files in the head of your webpage, add a class of ‘sortable’ to the tables in your page that should be sorted and you’re done.

Pretty cool!

Russell smacks the Web 2.0 crowd with some good, honest truth: if you haven’t a way of making some profit from your grand scheme, give up.

An introduction to category theory.

Heh!

No! This isn’t right at all! This suit was without foundation and deserved to be thrown out. How could they capitulate?

OMGWTF?! :-)

A tiny bit too pro-Groovy and anti-BeanShell for my liking, but an interesting read nontheless.

On the way in which Jon Stewart simply says that the king has no clothes is better than how others pontificate about what clothes the king should be wearing.

An excellent and well-deserved take-off and fisking of Kevin Myers. One of the funniest things I’ve read this year.

Roughly speaking, this thesis addresses the question: How might we provide DSLs that are fast and safe?

…inferior languages and technologies are just as likely to win. Maybe even more likely, since it takes less time to get them right. Java beat Smalltalk; C++ beat Objective-C; Perl beat Python; VHS beat Beta; the list goes on. Technologies, especially programming languages, do not win on merit. They win on marketing. Begging for fair, unbiased debate is going to get your language left in the dust.

Good article. More reaction here and here.

A hypothetical device built by a Type II Kardashev civilization to control a star’s motion.

Think strapping an enormous solar sail to a star to create a literal stardrive.

The Alexander Technique teaches how to recognize and overcome habituated limitations within a person’s manner of movement. […] It takes its name from F. Matthias Alexander, [who] used self-observation and reasoning to make effortless the physical acts of every-day movement: sitting, standing, breathing, working with the hands and speaking.

Ian explains what he meant by:

I want nothing to do with any programmer who would misindent their code. If you want to mis-indent your code you are an idiot. If you want idiotic code to be an option you are being absurd.

As Keith says, some of the commenters are real idiots, especially when the post spells things out clearly. I mean, how could they possibly think it subverts strong typing? All it does is cause the compiler to infer the type from the rvalue rather than getting you to treat the compiler like an idiot-savant and enter the same details twice. Dopes.

Very, very tempting, from my perspective, while Michael McDowell’s Minister for Justice.

svk is a decentralized version control system. It uses the Subversion filesystem but provides additional, powerful features. svk plays well with others, it can mirror remote Subversion, Perforce, and CVS repositories to perform offline operations.

Tight? Damn yeah! Feel free to ditch my EventManager at any time for this.

This article launches a new series by Bruce Tate that looks at ways other languages solve major problems and what those solutions mean to Java developers. He first explores Active Record, the persistence engine behind Ruby on Rails. Active Record bucks many Java conventions, from the typical configuration mechanisms to fundamental architectural choices. The result is a framework that embraces radical compromises and fosters radical productivity.

Well worth a read even if you already think you can code in JS. It might help disabuse you of a few bad habits.

Oooh! From reading the comments, this looks like an instant headache. I was thinking of using content negotiation to decide on whether my blog’s frontpage should return (X)HTML, Atom, or RSS. I think before I do that I’ll track what Accept headers are sent by aggregators subscribed to my feeds right now and make a descision later as to whether this is feasable.

A bloody good O’Caml tutorial wiki I stumbled across. If you’re interested in learning the language, it’s well worth a look.

How Dependency Inversion can make your life much easier. And no, you don’t need a big-ass container like Spring to do it.

FON is a Global Community of people who share WiFi. Share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and enjoy FREE WiFi Access all over the world! FON, share locally, enjoy globally!

Posting this up on the offchance that it might inspire a couple of people to join FON. It’s a good idea, especially if you’re in a built-up area (which I’m not).

Cookieless authentification goodness, though not without its own downsides. Take a read.

A paper by Glenn Vandenburg entitled ‘A Simple Model of Agile Software Processes–or–Extreme Programming Annealed’ works out why the ‘interdependencies’ of the various XP practices are not necessarily a bad thing.

WS-Transfer can therefore be seen as an underlying protocol-independent version of HTTP, i.e. bringing the capabilities and properties of the Web and HTTP in contexts where HTTP is not used. The use of WS-Transfer is not limited to non-HTTP transports, and can also be used when HTTP is used as a communication tunnel.

Ok, so we all know SOAP jumped the shark a long, long time ago, but I can only assume that WS-Transfer is an early April Fool’s joke. Could somebody please explain to me what sense there is in a half-assed re-implementation of HTTP on top of SOAP?

So true, and it applies not just to managers, but to all walks of life. It is, after all, better to do three good hours work than do eight and get nothing done.

It’s good that somebody with a bit of visability in the REST community called bullshit on Don Box’s false dichotomy.

Holy crap! I’m on Adam Curry! Ok, so it’s five seconds, but holy crap!

Here, here. I hate it every time some site does this. It feels so wrong, and it is.

Rejection letters for some of the most important CS papers produced.

If there’s anybody who knows good API design, it’s Joshua Bloch. When I started with C#, the thing I missed most about Java was the collections API. The one in C# feels as if they started half-implementing Bloch’s design, and then just gave up.

And unlike every other bit of code I’ve seen that’s tried to achieve this, it doesn’t absolutely suck!

In computer science, Dancing Links, commonly known as DLX, is the technique suggested and invented by Donald Knuth to efficiently implement his Algorithm X. Algorithm X is a recursive, nondeterministic, depth-first, brute-force algorithm that finds all solutions to the exact cover problem. Some of the better known exact cover problems include tiling, N-queens and Sudoku.

Heh!

No, Cockburn isn’t saying agile methods are harmful, he’s just saying that once you inject machismo into the mix, things will start to go wrong, and that Iterations + user stories + velocity != agility.

We’re getting paid less and less for doing more and more, and our rights as workers to fair treatment are being slowly but surely eroded.

ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind suggests that CRAP or Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, is a catchier phrase than DRM–Digital Rights Management. Why does he think this technology is crap? Once you’ve bought music or other content to play on one device, it won’t play on any other device because of the proprietary layer of CRAP. Everybody should watch this.

This is pure goodness. One bit I loved was that I didn’t know finally could be used like that. Had I known it, it would have saved me quite a bit of coding in past projects. Read it.

Former first lady Barbara Bush gave relief money to a hurricane relief fund on the condition that it be spent to buy educational software from her son Neil’s company.

I cannot sufficiently express how utterly scummy this is.