Weblog by month (August 2003)
ARGH
For some time now in addition to the day job, I've been holding another position, a role that is not paid, that receives little thanks, and is painful in the extreme. Many of you will be familiar with it. I am talking, of course, about the role of "Miscellaneous Family Computer Support". Around six weeks ago our household was hit by something bad. Something very bad.
We got our first Windoze PC.
Shudder. Yes, this house has always been a Mac shop, and as such, the study has always been a hive of productivity, calmness, and gentle language. Not any more. Oh no. You can find me swearing as Win98 crashes for the umpteenth time, plug 'n' pray goes tits up, or the machine refuses to see the network. I won't drag you through all the pain, suffice it to say that yes, at the moment Win98 is the only option, yes, we have re-installed, and after the latest security service pack for IE6 (you know, those things M$ insist you install if you're to be a good citizen), my wife's PC now looks like the image above. I don't know how tech. support people do it — this kind of stuff just drives me up the wall.
Bag o'shite. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Windows sucks.
Further reading:
Mark Pilgrim: How to install Windows XP in five hours or less
Russell Beattie: Family Technical Support
Eric Albert: Computer problems
LotusTips
Frankly, I'm surprised no-one in the "Notes blogsphere" has linked to this site before now:
API for RSS in JSP (!)
Via colleague and Java guru Triga, Using RSS in JSP an article looking at how one can incorporate the Informa API to parse and therefore present RSS material in one's own Java Server Pages. Interesting stuff!
Stupid code tricks
You'll never catch me doing anything like this. Oh no.
StupidCodeTricks wiki over at the Pragmatic Programmers site. Splendid. Ranks up there with the old favourite, How To Write Unmaintainable Code.
This week...
... I 'ave mos'ly bin doin' object-oriented design. Mainly in Java, but with some Lotusscript-style OOP to follow. I got to re-thinking some of my past code (it's pragmatic programming you know: don't live with broken windows!) after a brief discussion on Rocky's site. Cool beans (no pun intended). More soon.
Meanwhile, miscellaneous coding link of the day: Javascript error handling. Well I never!
Sametime for OS X: looking good Ed!
Get over to Ed Wrenbeck's site if you fancy trying out Sametime on your Mac one day. He's not in alpha with it yet, but what's he's achieved so far is very impressive!
Doh
Just fixed my categorised RSS feeds (they're listed to the right near the bottom). The category column had gone awry. Sorry about that!
Alternate versions at benpoole.com.
How long to become a programmer?
Rogers Cadenhead reacts to Peter Norvig's rant, Teach Yourself Programming In Ten years. Peter takes exception to the rash of publications offering to teach people the latest programming language in 21 days / 24 hours / whatever. It's a fair point, but like Rogers I believe that someone can become a perfectly competent programmer in far less than a decade! Mind you, I'm mindful of the fact that I have only been seriously coding for around five years: I have stacks to learn.
There will always be "dabblers" — especially in the "easy" realms of Notes and VB — but similarly, a whole load of us out there are keen to learn our craft and become the best coders we can. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt say it best with one of their tips entitled "Care About Your Craft":
Why spend your life developing software unless you care about doing it well?
searchDomino
Fast work! Mark Baard's article on weblogging for searchDomino has been published.
And some bloke called "Benjamin Poole" contributed. He has a name like mine!
Benedict.
DrJava
New to me: DrJava, an "educational" Java IDE, in that the novice Java coder can evaluate their code "at a glance" as they pootle along. It also integrates with JUnit and there's a beta Eclipse plug-in available. You can download DrJava as a JAR file, or, for OS X users, as a self-running Java application. I intend to check it out forthwith!
From mighty Oak trees...
Anyone remember the pre-cursor to Java? 'Twas called "Oak". You may find Heinz Kabutz's article, Once Upon an Oak... an interesting look back.
Via artima.com.
Well that sucked
Spent six hours on the road, mostly stationery, on a journey that should have taken 1.5 hours, tops. Why? Driving to see Robbie Williams at Knebworth House. Absolute cack organisation. Roads a joke. You'd think that by leaving at 3pm you'd get in for the start at 8.30 eh? Not so. We turned round at 9.15 and came back — as did hundreds of others, with reams more cars justing sitting in the "special lane" (yes, that's right, just one lane for a 125,000-strong gig) still, as we turned for home. There was no way we were going to get in, parked, and walk the half hour to the arena in time to see the gig, which finished at 10.30. What a farce.
And to cap it all, I can't scrape the "priority parking" sticker (hah!) off my windscreen.
Update: judging by posts in the forum on his site, quite a few people were disappointed tonight. And all because the organisers couldn't get the car parking sorted out. Ah, only in England...
