Danny Angus
blog.killerbees.co.uk
Labels
Passim
-
▼
2006
(22)
-
▼
December
(12)
- Oh Please.. who do they think they are!
- Overheard on christmas eve...
- Elves save Santa
- For god sakes blogger...
- Bouncé !
- Mission, what mission?
- And finally the madness is over
- More Xmas decorations...
- Disclaimer nonsense - adapted from an email I rece...
- Cynicism is dead, long live over-enthusiasm!
- Colleagues hide their shame!
- This book changed my life
-
▼
December
(12)
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Elves save Santa
Only in a local paper ... “When I phoned to report that Santa’s sleigh was on fire, I think the girl at the other end thought I’d gone mad." Read the whole thing here (its worth it!)
Thursday, December 21, 2006
For god sakes blogger...
Moan moan...
A) I can't upload images from firefox 2.0.0.1
B) You just created two copies of the same post.
:-(
Mission, what mission?
How about this for meaningless twaddle..
"As the expectations of our customers develop we must be there to meet them. That means always staying one step ahead."
One of my bosses said that :-/
I think he should've run it past his wife first, Nikki wouldn't let me out of the house if she thought I was going to come out with stuff like that!
And finally the madness is over
Yesterday at around two-ish the High Heid Yin of SysDev came round pressing the flesh and schmoozing the troops as he made his decision for the Xmas decoration competition (posts passim).
Worse than that he had two "representatives" from "corporate communications" in tow, taking notes and photos..
I missed all of that though, because we'd gone out for our Team Xmas lunch. Well done everyone, but you're mad, every last one of you!
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
More Xmas decorations...
trophy (watch this space) these are from the CLASS Operations team...
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Disclaimer nonsense - adapted from an email I received
Statements in this blog that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements regarding Danny's expectations, objectives, anticipations, plans, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward looking statements include risks and uncertainties such as any unforeseen event or any unforeseen system failures, and other risks. It is important to note that actual outcomes could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements.
Cynicism is dead, long live over-enthusiasm!
Our department had an initiative to promote team building and morale, and to cut a long story short one of the things we thought would be fun(!) and help to achieve our goal would be to have a lighthearted occasional competition between teams. Small prize. Possibly some charitable activity, where we can work it in.
The inaugural event was to be for home made christmas decorations, Systems-Development having traditionally fallen, scrooge like, well below company standards in this annual nonsense.
Little did any of us imagine the heights of enthusiasm and the total lack of dignity or taste which the competitive spirit would evoke! Not content with making paper chains out of documentation (yes we *did* have some!) some of the teams have gone to extremes in their search for glory. So to record their efforts for posterity, before tomorrow's judging and awards ceremony, here are some photos...
The Front Line Support (FLS) Grotto:
The e-Business Services Winter Wonderland:Monday, December 18, 2006
Colleagues hide their shame!
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
This book changed my life
Update, stardate May 2011 : Its still a great book, and I know that after I read it my writing became easier to understand and more accurate. Those rocket scientists know a thing or two..
The original link has changed find it here now instead:
NASA SP-7084; Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization; A Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors
Original post, stardate December '06:
Well honestly no. But it is worth reading if you write for a living.
Write like a rocket scientist...
http://stipo.larc.nasa.gov/sp7084/
Monday, November 06, 2006
Mailet API
TSS carried this thread about James 2.3.0
Some people have commented about the Mailet API.
I'm currently working on a fork of James (in the James server/sandbox) just for the purpose of examining some proposed Mailet API changes, anyone who's interested in this API should subscribe to mailet-api@james.apache.org and join the debate.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Metal vsConcrete - Demolition II
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Who put the "C" in ICT... and why on earth?
The Greatest Lover In the World and I were talking the other night about how crap the www really is. Don't flame me yet, read on...
I'd just spent time time at work using a spreadsheet, and I'd forgotten what a fantastic thing the spreadsheet is. You can put stuff wherever you want, and generally run riot, the inventors of Visi Calc gave us the ultimately usable playground for arithmetic. If you're into IT archeology you can download visicalc from here.
What has happened since? Well the "C" was added to IT to make it ICT, and the internet was invented, bringing us the delights of clumsyness, crappinness and crooks.
From a people perspective communication is a fine thing. As a programmer I like the internet because it joins computers up and I can have fun with that. But from the "useful-computer for people to do stuff with" point of view HTML and the www has made us take one step forward and a big lurching stagger back.
I know a lot of people are working hard to make up the lost gound, but really, should it be so hard?
Right you can flame me now.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Demolition
They're demolishing a building across the street from our office.
Two of these huge machines are eating that 70's concrete like a mouse through butter.
This is the second building they've replaced since I started working here, this time I'll try to blog some pictures of the more interesting things they do. The last one they did involved digging a huge hole for two or three sub basements, without the surrounding buildings falling in, I can't for the life of me remember what the technique they used is called!
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
FOXOpen - Eclipse plugin planned
I've just heard that the FOXOpen guys are planning to start writing an eclipse plugin for FOXOpen.
This is great news because whilst FOXOpen consists of the framework to describe and deliver applications the full value in terms of productivity will only really be achieved when there is tooling. Because tooling automates repetitive tasks, and reduces the learning curve.
Although it is possible to write applications using an XML editor like XML Spy, a dedicated tool will bring further productivity to teams using FOXOpen, and make it more accessable to new users.
Why am I so keen? Mainly because of this, why do you pay expensive resources to re-create the same general patterns again and again when with the right tooling you can employ more less expensive people to do the job quicker, or for less, and with fewer defects? Using standards based 4GL you can focus your experienced people on adding the real value to the systems the 4GL thing produces. And if you're using open source 4GL you can take this added value and reverse it into your framework and tooling, encapsulating your hard work and making the expensive feature easily reproducable by less expensive people. Come to think of it even though it inhabits a slightly different space Maven does this with its plugins and brings very similar benefits, but it brings them to the development process itself and not the systems which are being developed.
Encapsulating bits of your development processes in your frameworks and tooling so they can be replayed with different parameters means that your reuse is across a general pattern and not a small set of use cases. This is domain engineering, you should read this book. Combine that with truly reusable component elements and you get improved (both faster and more reliable) productivity and ease of maintenance.
All we need now for the FOXOpen plan is for it to deliver all singing all dancing AJAX applications.
Friday, September 22, 2006
foxopen - UK DTi to open source XML based alternative to 4gl
I've been talking to ICT guys at the Oil and Gas department (or whatever) of the DTi, they're starting the process of moving to open source some software which they developed to get around the lack of openness in 4gl RAD .
Its here - http://www.foxopen.net/ There's no code available yet, something to do with checking the legality of it all, but watch this space, and read the docs!
Basically it allows you to use any good XML editor to develop and maintain complex B2B web-based applications quickly and reliably.
What I really like about it is the fact that they've had to make it work for "real" regulatory processes, processes involving complex workflows with many review and approval steps, and because they've had to comply with the DTi's requirement for zero paper processes it also supports electronic signatures for documents.
It is a framework for delivering web based applications which require any of these features:
On line forms data entry
Workflow
Document generation
Web services
Data reporting
User account management
Security (digital signatures)
Statefullness
I think it has great potential, check it out.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Apachecon EU 2006
Hey hey, the hotel is pretty plush, and the seminars are good, lots of steak and not too much sizzle.
Slightly dissapointed with the lightning lottery talks, but hey thats just one thing.
Oh and... could someone find a bag sponsor for next year? The EU '05 bag was much better than this one. Mabey we could get a bag manufacturer to sponsor the bags.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
ClassCastException
Why can't the message from ClassCastException tell us what class couldn't be cast into what other
Class?
I've said it before, but it still does my head in so I'm saying it again..
I know that you can put this into your message, but how many times do *other peoples* exeptions have this information in them?
Come to think of it why didn't Sun make ClassCastException have a constructor with arguments for two classes and a message:
ClassCastException(Class from, Class into, String message)
I mean, this one thing would probably save billions of man hours worldwide as people wouldn't need to compile in extra debug output or step through their programmes in the debugger.
Further Reading
-
Is Verisign a monopoly? Does it matter? - Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler recently wrote a latter complaining that VeriSign overcharges for for .com domains due to its market power...2 weeks ago
-
[ANNOUNCE] Apache NetBeans 18 Released - The Apache NetBeans team is pleased to announce that Apache NetBeans 18 was released on May 30, 2023. What's in the Apache NetBeans 18 release: https://...1 year ago
-
-
ApacheCon Europe 2019 – Day 1 - Plain Schwarz has added a photo to the pool: [image: ApacheCon Europe 2019 – Day 1] Day one of #ACEU19 kicked-off with a Barcamp and a couple of exciting...5 years ago
-
-
Export to JSON from MySQL All Ready for MongoDB - This post walks through how to export data from MySQL® into JSON format, ready to ingest into MongoDB®. Starting from MySQL 5.7+, there is native support ...6 years ago
-
ApacheCon Seville 2016 – Building a Container Solution on Top of Apache CloudStack- Steve Roles - Building a Container Solution on Top of Apache CloudStack- Steve Roles Cloud native applications running in containerised environments look set to create a...7 years ago
-
Nóirín Plunkett - https://www.flickr.com/photos/robertburrelldonkin/5729816462 smiles and socks retreating in co. wicklow now empty whiskey and secrets bar camping in ox...9 years ago
-
Hello world! - Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!9 years ago
-
Debugging MySQL Slow Queries With Many Joins - This week I encountered an issue that I hadn’t seen in a while. The ORM in a CMS project that I work on automatically joins to many subclass tables, causin...11 years ago
-
You’re invited to help us celebrate an unlikely pairing in open source - We are just days away from reaching a significant milestone for our team and the open source and open standards communities: the first anniversary of Micro...11 years ago
-
Boat For Sale - Boat For Sale: Price: £150 Terms and Conditions Oracle reserve the right to alter the web price of this acticle even after purchase. Price does n...17 years ago
-
-
-
-
I know nothing, I'm not a fortune teller, and you'd be insane to think that I am. This disclaimer was cribbed from an email footer I once received. It is so ridiculous I had to have it for myself.
Statements in this blog that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements including, without limitation, statements regarding my expectations, objectives, anticipations, plans, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward looking statements include risks and uncertainties such as any unforeseen event or any unforeseen system failures, and other risks. It is important to note that actual outcomes could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements.
Danny Angus Copyright © 2006-2013 (OMG that's seven years of this nonsense)
That assumption is that people should need to read and understand XML programmes or data, and that size and efficiency are always core requirements.
"These sorts of XML “programs” are unreadable, unmaintainable, an order of magnitude larger than necessary, and audaciously inefficient at runtime."
I'm sure that comp sci students, academics and kernel hackers all care a lot about size and speed, and that anyone who has to read and maintain code will care about that too. But I'd counter his opinion by saying that XML is an easy to understand and powerful two dimensional technique for describing arbitrarly complex relational data, and that his "program" is my structured data.
Seems to me that the author has ignored the fact that ICT is moving towards a world in which people don't write programmes by hand anymore.
I don't mean low level stuff, I mean Big business and government Systems that have insanely short deadlines and dire consequences from defects and delays, people have enough trouble just Making These Things Work.
Tools are what deliver these things, and the tool's data is the system's programme.
XML allows you to describe and validate large and complex data structures in an open, standardised and accessable way, and if your valid data structure is also a programme it will be part of a system which is easily susceptable to being maintained by tools, and tools from many sources, not exclusively from your current supplier.
Ant's XML might not be a great example, for one thing there's no schema or DTD, but it is an example, look at all the IDE's which offer tool support for maintaining build.xml's.
I have no doubt that the use of XML in this way once again blurs the distinction between data and programme which is a key feature of really adaptive systems.