Der Freiheit eine Gasse
Archive for the ‘Software, alt’ Category.
I just stumbled across the concept of ZipFileSet in ant. A closer examination confirmed my suspicion. A ZipFileSet can be two pretty different things. We should stop spoiling young programmers using such outflows from a sick minds that are not capable of a single straight thought. The mainstream of java software (including the JDK) is to the software community what Hegel was to philosophy – poison that prevents all sound thinking.
If you are getting your configuration from environment variables you are in trouble. You should always use commandline parameters to make the configuration explicit. On the other hand it seems acceptable to use envrionment variables as default values for those parameters.
To rephrase it: If you have dependencies make them as obvious as your programming model allows you to. Beware of side effects. And Death* to all the motherfuckers using non-constant static fields in java programs!
*) read unemployment
Might just be the post hangover depression, but I woke up this morning with a great longing for meaning. Why do we use all kinds of tools that actually hide the meaning and intention of our programs. I’m talking about fit and fitnesse, which actually does great amount of damage to my respect for Ward Cunningham. I don’t want to hear excuses about the target audience and anything. Eventually you do want to have a full blown programming language for testing, not a macro assembler.
In the point of programming is to create and clarify meaning. Not to obscure it.
I just discovered Anna Ternheim, a nice Swedish Singersongwriter. I am listening to here Album Separation Road and try to call an external process from groovy which after all uses the Java API to perform such tasks.
Given the slightly depressing nature of the music and the slight drizzle outside, I can’t go on ranting I’m just sitting here sobbing about the sorry state of the world and the hardship of having to deal with java.lang.Runtime and java.lang.Process.
Aforementioned idiots do also have strong propensity for crappy batchfiles. The DOS command interpreter is a truly diabolic beast. It forces you to work in a way that we know is sure to get you fucked since the days of algol 60. I just had to realize that del is not setting the ERRORLEVEL when it fails due to locked files. So it is crappy and not even consistent. If you see any wanker writing a batch file, fire him instantly or if thats not possible just shoot him…
I recently witnessed a debate about “agile development” and the fact that you need more generalists than on “waterfall projects”.
Such generalisations make me always angry. My impression over the last years is that it’s mostly the people with the broadest knowledge, who are also familiar in depth with the technologies they are using. While the so-called specialists are mostly people, who only know a single trick (recently met a “build specialist”, who used VB-script and didn’t know that there’s a debugger for it).
I think there is more of a good engineer vs. idiot divide.
Eigentlich wollte ich heute schreiben, was für ein Scheißdreck WebSphere ist, was für Zwergenhirne ant für ein tolles Tool halten und was für eine schwachsinnige Idee es ist MS SQL als Backend für eine Java Anwendung zu verwenden. All das erscheint mir aber zu negativ.
Also schreibe ich über YAML eine nette Alternative zu XML. Diese Woche habe ich das Java-Binding erfolgreich eingesetzt. Optimal für kleine Ad-Hoc-Tools, die ein vernüftig editierbares Zwischenformat erzeugen sollen. Runterladen und Dokulesen nimmt in etwa 5min in Anspruch, so soll es sein. Keine 800 Seiten Spezifikation…
Today I finally signed up for a free trial of dabbledb. It’s a web-wased Database App. It supports multiple users and has sophisticated data import and normalization options. It is aimed at all the non-numbercrunching stuff that is done in excel-sheets, that are mailed around to organize or track things. I tried to model a small business and I was pretty successful. It supports various export media and formats, such as public web-sites, rss, or CSV.
I currently see two problems that might prevent dabble from catching on. The pricing scheme is a bit weird – just number of users and apps is considered, while the volume is irrelevant. As dabble targets collaborative activities the number of users is crucial – even if the volume/ number of transactions is very small. Other thing is the missing localization. Mircrosoft has spoilt us by providing germanized Apps.
Verdict: Dabble is very well suited for stuff we currently do using excel or custom build web apps. Make sure you check out the 7min screencast!
When I started my studies back in 1997 Smalltalk everyone new that Smalltalk would be the next big thing in Corporate IT. So we’ve been taught using this environment. I’ve got to admit, that it challenged many of my preconceptions about programming. I had just done the transition from Turbo Pascal to Java and the idea, that there are no files with the source code of my program disturbed me. Nonetheless I liked the interactive environment, which felt a bit like the Oberon System.
Things turned out differently, but this week I had some time to investigate technologies for rapid prototyping. And I decided to have a look at Seaside. It is a WebApp Framework for Smalltalk. It took me one day to get back into SmallTalk and to build a small two screen app. That’s what I liked:
The Smalltalk syntax is amazingly simple, but elegant. I used Squeak, which is a free implementation that comes with a lot of goodies. The UI looks a bit messy, but there’s a vibrant community. Actually Squeak seems to be a good environment to learn programming. Stéphane Ducasse, who is doing a lot of interesting Smalltalk stuff, wrote a very nice book on this topic.
Today I have been pointed to Venkman the Mozilla JavaScript Debugger. It has all the nice things you expect: Breakpoints, Variables, Watches and can be installed as a Firefox-Plugin.