The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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"Newcastle. Shower or two. 20", I reported to my son Alex.
He had asked me to look up the forecast on the Bureau of Meterology site. It's not that he's that vitally interested in the weather to be asking such questions just after 6am. His motive was to find out what the weather would be like for his big tennis match today, the final of the Under 12 division of the Newcastle Open.
"What time will the showers be?"
"Ooh, let me see... 11:43 and then at...", I began to reply in my best dead-pan voice. Only when my wife could be heard laughing in the background did the penny drop and my son's face broke out into a smile.
Kids can be so gullible can't they? But I guess adults are pretty good at that too, come to think of it.
Update: The showers stayed away sufficiently for the match to proceed and Alex managed to win in straight sets!
Tea. It has a long tradition dating back, as legend would have it, 5,000 years.
In my case, I've grown up with a love of tea. My first recollection of drinking tea was with my family in a place called Harrogate in England, as we were making our way to Edinburgh in late 1971. I have a clear memory of that cuppa being served with milk although I'm not sure whether it had sugar.
These days I drink my tea black without sugar. For many years Twinings Earl Grey has been a favourite.
Why this sudden urge to write about tea?
Well, apart from the fact that the kettle has just boiled here in the office, my brother Roderic is staying with us for a few days. Rod is a serious tea drinker, like my Aunty Nell with whom he shares both a birthday and a passion for tea. It seems that current research indicates that tea has beneficial health effects... perhaps that has something to do with Aunty Nell still being around to enjoy it at the age of 90!
Tea is associated with civilised culture. To me the ceremony of sharing a cuppa with friends has peaceful and calming overtones and brings back fun-filled childhood memories. Like watching The Goodies Ecky Thump episode, complete with its Lancastrian tea ceremony...
Anyway, my cuppa has brewed and it's time to get back to work...
Sometimes things go bump in the night.
Like the nightly builds we have scheduled at work. Last night, for some reason yet to be determined, at a certain point when a build script was attempting to uninstall an EAR from WebSphere, it got its knickers in a twist and stuffed up a file called serverindex.xml.
Fortunately, after I had fumbled around for a while trying to fix the problem, my colleague David found this clue. It seems that the deployed applications declared in this xml file must exactly match those that are deployed. Makes sense! Except that I'd never heard of the serverindex.xml file before today.
Oh well, you live and learn.
Update: Learnt more the next day. Take care to ensure that serverindex.xml has the hostname specified correctly. This is used when the WebSphere plug-in for Apache is regenerated.
The big news on the home front is that building of our granny flat extension has started. So hopefully it won't be long now before Lynda's mum Heather (affectionally known as "Muzz" to her sons-in-law) will be able to move in.
Here's a photo I took last Sunday showing that the slab was down after the first week of construction:
Here's more news of the crazy world we live in. Cat Stevens engaging in "activities that could be potentially linked to terrorism"? You've got to be kidding!!!
Yet that's the official reason given for him being denied entry to the US. Anyone who has listened to Cat's music or knows anything about him as a person could be excused for wondering whether this was actually April Fool's Day.
C'mon people in the US administration, get real!
I had no idea that somebody could convey so much enthusiasm about a tool that does searching and text analysis in Java. But that's exactly what Matt "Spud" Quail, who hails from Australia's national capital, achieved in his presentation about Lucene and FishEye this evening at the Sydney Geek Night.
Matt clearly digs Lucene. As he was at pains to point out, no matter what search criteria provided, due to the magic of Lucene's search algorithm, it never takes more than 16 milliseconds! Well, that was his plug anyway. As he explains in more detail here, it is Lucene's technique of transforming a search by implementing an inverted index which performs the trick of enabling a search to complete in a time of the order of O(1) rather than O(N).
Apart from the technical details of Matt's talk, which I certainly appreciated, I heartily recommend the Sydney Geek Night to anyone who lives in the vicinity of Sydney, is interested in geeky, Java-related things (strange, no females present in an audience of about 20) and enjoys good beer. The vibe was buzzing after the formalities of the presentation had concluded.
Despite the fact that there has been an exodus of smart Java people from some circles recently, on tonight's evidence there are plenty of active neurons still focussed on Java in and around Sydney.
Update: Matt has placed the presentation and links to other resources here.
It was the final over before stumps. I had survived so far and was intent on being not out at the end of the day's play. And I had every right to feel confident having showed a sound defence to the first two balls. The bowler moved in and delivered the ball on a good line, forcing me to play. Unfortunately for me I feathered it to the keeper and was on my way.
The venue? My back yard. A serious encounter with my twelve year old son who had asked about twenty minutes earlier for a game of "cricket with a stump". That's where we bowl with a tennis ball and bat with a stump. And of course we have back yard rules such as an "electric wickie", six and out if you hit it over the fence, automatic dismissal if you hit a window on the full.
Yes, the cricket season is almost upon us here in Australia. The Sydney Grade competition starts this Saturday and here on the Central Coast our local competition starts the week after. Can't wait.
This morning I was accompanied on my drive to the station by the catchy sounds of Michael Franti singing on the radio.
I enjoy his music not just because it is tuneful but also because I admire him as a popular musician who is prepared to make a political statement in the name of promoting the good side of humanity.
The song was Crazy, Crazy, Crazy.
Then this evening I read about the continuing violence in Iraq, which reminded me of the chorus:
It's crazy, crazy, crazyAnd just before the song concludes:
No stoppin' to this warfare
It's crazy, crazy
We're breathing in the same air
It's crazy, crazy, crazy
Don't tell me that you don't care...
No life's worth more than any otherPeace. Worth singing for.
No sister worth less than any brother
"It should just take a day or two." How often have you said or thought that about how much effort you think will be required to complete a software development task? Only to discover later that there is more involved and it takes longer.
Estimating software development activities is a skill that deserves more attention. So I was pleased to see Ben Hogan and Mike Williams share their thoughts on the subject. Ben writes about the importance of using estimates constructively whilst Mike gives his opinion on the benefit of the XP style of estimating in units not clearly related to days.
Both comments touch upon the tendency to be optimistic and over-confident when estimating. And what Ben has to say appears to concur with what I've written previously about schedule pressure.
So why do I think estimating is so important? It's pretty obviously a key consideration for successful projects. Especially when you're involved in a fixed price project.
I don't think it is surprising that Robert Glass devotes a whole section to Estimation in his Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering book. And it's hard to argue with what he says. Here are three of his "facts" on the subject:
Fact 8: One of the two most common causes of runaway projects is poor estimation.I don't know about you, but these statements ring true with my experience.Fact 9: Most software estimates are performed at the beginning of the life cycle. This makes sense until we realise that estimates are obtained before the requirements are defined and thus before the problem is understood. Estimation, therefore, usually occurs at the wrong time.
Fact 10: Most software estimates are made either by upper management or by marketing, not by the people who will build the software or their managers. Estimation is, therefore, done by the wrong people.
There are no easy answers. The XP Planning Game is one attempt to deal with estimating problems but it isn't suited to fixed price projects. I think what is needed initially is an honest acceptance that building software is a complex business and inherently difficult to estimate.
And then a preparedness to do something constructive about it.
I've heard good things about Velocity over the last few years. Just the other day Alan informed that it has much in common with Cheetah, a Python template engine that he has enthused about.
Meanwhile, back in J2EE land, I've delved into Velocity a little more over the last few days and I'm in a quandry. Despite the good things I can see about Velocity as a Java-based template engine, including Velocimacros, I remain unconvinced about the merit of choosing Velocity instead of JSP/JSTL. Particularly when the team is already accomplished in using JSP and JSTL.
After all, one of Velocity's selling points is that it separates Java code from web pages. Well, so does JSTL. So I can't see the justification for investing in the learning curve.
Am I missing something?
Results like this are what make one-day international cricket too often an irrelevant joke. Bring on the Australian Test tour to India!
Design choices in J2EE inevitably involve making choices between tools. When considering tools that a development team hasn't used before, caution is warranted due to the learning curve and the lure of learning new tools at the expense of the project's goals.
As Robert Glass asserts in his Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering:
Hype (about tools and techniques) is the plague on the house of software (Fact 5); andNevertheless, I have read good reports of Velocity and SiteMesh, both candidates to be combined with Struts, which the team already knows very well. Additionally, Sing Li has written about how easy it is to integrate Velocity with Struts. And SiteMesh supports Velocity decorators.
New tools and techniques cause an initial loss of productivity/quality (Fact 6)
I need to explore this more. Meanwhile, I would appreciate feedback from anyone who has tried this combination.
Learning a new programming language is good for challenging one's approach to writing software. And it's fun anyway.
In my case, Ruby is a language I'd like to learn more about. As luck would have it, the organisers of the weekly Sydney Geek Night have called Charles Miller's bluff to talk about why his brain likes Ruby.
Oh, and there's good beer available too so I might just be tempted.
Strange. Today's Word of the Day at dictionary.com reminds me of someone.
"You're obsessed!", exclaimed my wife. Or was it my son? Or my daughter?
I was obviously too engrossed in the wonders of my new iBook and iPod mini to focus on external distractions.
I think life is returning to some degree of normality now that I've been an Apple owner for several days. On the other hand, will it ever return to normal?
And what is normal, anyway?
I was warned that becoming a Mac owner would bring profound changes. I guess I'll have to let time pass to see how lasting the effects are.
For now I can report that I am thoroughly enjoying the experience of becoming aquainted with my Mac and it's OS X. Experience. I knew before that it made such good sense to use an operating system with the best of both worlds: a slick, well designed windowing UI with candy that truly delights the eye built upon the basis of UNIX. But experiencing it first hand gives one a whole new appreciation.
Another delight is iPhoto. Having stuggled and failed several months ago to get Linux to cooperate with my digital camera, it has been pure pleasure to plug it into the iBook and see the upload just work!
And now to the height of my obsession so far. The iPod mini and iTunes. I now have a full two days worth of music transferred, covering many genres. Just now I copied the five CD set entitled The Baroque Experience featuring The Academy of St Martins in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. I am simply lost for words to describe the iPod mini. Any adjective seems inadequate. I'm sure other iPod owners know what I mean.
Obsessed? Guilty as charged!
I love the Australian bush.
For one reason and another I don't get to experience it as much as I would like. But yesterday I managed to persuade my kids that a short bushwalk would be a good idea. They're not normally that keen but I guess they were being nice to me on Father's Day.
As it turned out, the walk was shorter than intended. About twenty minutes along the track, thunder and lightning convinced Alex and Rosie that returning to the car in a hurry would be a good thing to do. I consented and then took them to the bikie's cafe at Mt White for milk shakes.
Fortunately I did take this photo before the storm came.
Mooney Mooney Creek near Kariong.
Before I focus on my own day, I hope that my Dad has enjoyed a happy Father's Day. He and Mum are in Western Australia at the moment and I reckon there's a good chance that Dad will have enjoyed today despite the fact that his beloved Demons (that's the Melbourne AFL team) bowed out of the finals race with their fifth loss in a row yesterday.
As you can see, my own day started well. Enjoying breakfast in bed, listening to the wonderful singing of The Tallis Scholars on my new iPod, having already been treated to some lovely cards and presents from my kids.
As a father, it is a delight when my children surprise me with their talents.
My son Alex has many talents but art has rarely come to the fore until now. However, this morning he gave a colourful "fold-up" card that included three photos, one of himself taken by his teacher, one of him bowling in last season's Cawsey Shield cricket grand-final and another of me, his sister Rosie and him at Lismore last January. He gave his teacher some of the credit, but to me it still demonstrated some artistic talent peeping through.
On the hand, my daughter Rosie has an undeniable artistic flair, which she showed with the following acrostic poem that she whipped up on the computer this morning:
Have a happy Father's day
And enjoy your gifts,
Poems and
Polish to make
Your shoes shine.
Flop down onto the bed
And sleep
Till you're no longer tired.
Have a great day and
Enjoy yourself 'cause Father's Day comes
Round only once a year
So just relax and have fun!Dad, Thanks for everything, I really
Appreciate it (especially you BBQ fry ups!)
Yum!!!
Thank you Alex and Rosie, you're great kids.
They have arrived!
This is just a brief note to say that my copy of Hibernate in Action has arrived. I've had the PDFs of the chapters for a while and already appreciated some of the advice therein but I find the good old-fashioned hard-copy format hard to beat.
So I look forward to dipping into the book in more depth over the coming weeks and months to deepen my understanding of using Hibernate effectively.
What drives an estimated crowd of 20,000 people to publicly celebrate the death of 16 people as a result of suicide bombings?
This continuation of the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is tragic. Each side has their grievances but when there is such spontaneous public celebration of killing I am left wondering what hope there is for lasting peace in Palestine.
I certainly don't expect to see it during my lifetime.