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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So Daniel has been enjoying skiing in Vermont and Jari reports that there's a fresh cover of of snow in Helsinki.
Well here in eastern Australia we've had a scorcher of a day (37 degrees Celcius here in Canberra and 40.7 at home on the NSW Central Coast). So I have an icy cold beer at my side as a write. That's the closest to winter I'll be today!
I love it when the Aussies beat New Zealand. And they've just wrapped up another Test series win.
My lack of contributions to this weblog over the last week is due to taking a few days off work to watch my son Alex represent Sydney North in the NSW Primary Schools Cricket carnival.
I am aware that enthusing unduly over one's child's achievements can be boring. But after Alex's team won the carnival and he was selected in the NSW team to contest the Australian Primary Schools carnival in Bundaberg in January, I feel compelled to say that his parents are very proud.
Now I need to negotiate more time off work!
Alex bowling against South Coast
That's it, I'm buggered (to use the Australian vernacular; in other words I'm very tired).
Having finished a week of teaching, I am reminded about one of the things that I was told early on after first joining a consulting company: the best way to learn is to teach. I'm talking about learning content here, not learning how to teach or discovering higher philosophical truths about life, the universe and everything.
This week I was co-teaching. Yesterday I had the chance to teach a couple of topics that have been relevant since version 2.3 of the Java Servlet specification: Filters and Servlet Event Listeners. I knew a bit about Filters having actually used them in anger. But what were these Listeners all about?
As it turns out there's not much to know about them and they are potentially useful devices. Need to monitor how many concurrent sessions are being used in your web application? Well, Servlet Event Listeners are for you. They allow the developer to monitor events in two contexts: the ServletContext and the HttpSession. For each context there are two interfaces that the developer has it his or her disposal. In the case of the session, the HttpSessionListener facilitates monitoring of the creation and destruction and of sessions whilst the HttpSessionAttributeListener allows monitoring of adding, replacing or removing attributes from sessions.
I can imagine these event listeners would be useful for debugging code that monitors session attributes to ensure that the application is cleaning up attributes that are no longer required. I wonder what other uses that they have been put to?
Anyway, back to my original point. Teaching is a good way to learn. Even if one knows the bulk of the course material, it is not uncommon to have to teach topics that one has never before needed to know about. And when there is an imminent deadline and you want to at least give the impression that you know what you're talking about, it's amazing how motivating that is!
... I don't anticipate much in the way of blogging as I'm busy teaching a class about Java Servlets and JSPs.
In some of my spare time I have been dabbling with Ruby on Rails, which I can already say from experience allows a quick and dirty web app to be created very quickly. I'm yet to be convinced about anything more complex yet but I have, as I say, only dabbled so far.
One curious coincidence though, is the similarity in syntax between dynamic content of Rails rhtml files and JSP page syntax. Not sure if that's a good thing...
"Yes!", my son exclaimed having realised that he was holding the winning ticket to the raffle.
The kids and I were at the dogs, the Gosford Greyhounds to be precise, at a fund-raiser for the local cricket club. We'd won a huge fruit platter as well as a tray of meat and vegetables. Mum, at home studying for an exam, would be very impressed later on in the evening.
I even backed a couple of winners too. And the kids had fun watching the dogs chase the mechanical hare around the track. So, a good night was had by all...
So, where was the catch? Well, when I awoke the next morning my upper back near my neck was in agony whenever I tried to move to get out of bed. I must have injured it when lifting the fruit platter from the other side of a counter the previous night.
Without going into an extensive exercise in self-pity, the couple of physio sessions to help me recover were more expensive than buying the produce in the first place!
But I would have had one less story to tell.
Laurent notes that he appreciates the following quote:A bad, naive instance of the other guy's way of doing things always looks worse than a refined, thoughtful instance of your way of doing things.
He found it in a thread within SHAPE, a forum provided by Gerry Weinberg.
I agree. There are so many opinions in the world of software development, so much hype from salesman selling snake oil (dressed up as the latest new thing), much of it unsubstantiated. I certaintly advocate thinking for yourself, before jumping on any particular bandwagon, be it Web Services, JSF, .NET, Spring or anything else being proposed as a good solution.
But don't take my word for it! What do you think?
I wonder whether Dominic Thornely and Stuart MacGill ever had visions of breaking the record First Class last wicket partnership as they piled on the runs following the fall of the 9th wicket in the current Pura Cup match against WA.
Their partnership ended on 219, which was very commendable but well short of the record of 307 set by Kippax and Hooker back in 1928.
Still, not a bad effort! Thornely finished on 261 not out when MacGill was finally dismissed for 27.
"Passengers for all stations to Wyong, there is a train on platform 10 leaving in three minutes", came the stern announcement.
The rail system was, yet again, in chaos. I had been sitting on the 5:56pm from Central to Wyong for well over an hour when that announcement came. It seemed like a good bet. The previous announcements had all indicated that we must wait "until a driver turned up to make the train work". So the faint promise of a train leaving any time soon was a sufficient lure for me to pack up my laptop and rush across to platform 10. Alas, too many had beaten me to it and the train was full! The few of us that had missed crowding onto that train then quickly rounded on a platform attendent, her bright orange railway-employee-identifying top acting like a magnet.
Fortunately for her, within minutes there was an announcement that the train on platform 14 would form the late-running 6:47pm. So, off we went, not entirely convinved. We were, after all, being directed back to the train from where we had come! But yes, this train, which had been waiting since at least 5:45pm (when I first joined it), did finally make its way slowly out of the platform at 7:05pm. And, as I write this, it is still making its way towards the Central Coast.
I'm wondering what time I'll end up arriving home. I don't think it's ever taken me four hours to get home before. Normally, I'll accept anything up to two hours each way. After all, I have chosen to live on the Central Coast and work in Sydney. But when I left the office at 5:10pm this evening and descended the nearby escalator to Wynyard station only to discover that the trains were again stuffed, my heart sank. Another lengthy trip home beckoned.
It's now 7:53pm and we've just stopped at Berowra. This sad excuse for a railway system is getting boring.
Later: I did eventually make it home to Kariong a mere 3 hours and 40 minutes after leaving the office.
Maybe there's something nasty in the air today here in Sydney.
Mike notes that the word "just" has been outlawed in his team's stand-up meetings. I've had something to say about the tendency to use lullaby words before. Then earlier today, in a discussion with a colleague, I caught myself saying "should just"...
Aghhh!!! Mike and Charles work in an office a very short distance, as the crow flies, from ours. So, I'm blaming them.