Mitch Fincher: The Distracted Programmer

Automatic Acceptance into Texas Public Universities, the Top 10% Rule.

2012-02-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

Our family met with the College counselor for McNeil High School yesterday, to ask questions about what it takes for a high school student to get automatic admission to Texas state colleges. Here were my questions and his answers; hopefully this will help you.

What does it take to get automatic admissions to Texas public colleges?
In general, the top 10% of a high school's students get automatic admission into state colleges, but only the top 8% get automatic admission to UT.

How is class rank calculated?
Only the four core classes--Social Studies, Science, English, and Math, plus foreign language classes are added into the class rank GPA.
McNeil students have two GPAs, one 4 point based and the other 6 point. The 6 point is used for class rank. (I'm still fuzzy on how to calculate this (4pt GPA * 6/4?)
Often, only the first six semesters of high school grades really count towards college admission, since the deadline for many college applications is before the first semester senior grades are finalized.

What were the GPAs recently to get into those percentages?
For the class of 2012 the lowest 6-point GPA to get into the "top 8%" was 4.89; for the top 10% it was 4.75;
For the class of 2014 the lowest 6-point GPA to get into the "top 8%" was 4.95; for the top 10% it was 4.82;
5.63 was highest 6-point GPA from last year.

Other useful information:
Dec 1st is the deadline for UT admissions, Jan 15th for A&M. Curiously, the A&M scholarship application due date is earlier, Dec 15.
Visit ApplyTexas.org to apply to most state colleges and some private schools in Texas.

Getting Four Screens Hooked Up to a Laptop

2012-01-24T15:07:00.000-08:00

I love lots of screen real estate. With my new dell laptop I got two extra monitors working directly from the upgraded docking station, but I wanted an more. The solution was to install Synergy on my laptop and on a second computer and use a monitor from that second computer. With Synergy I can use the same keyboard and mouse for my laptop and have those inputs sent to the second computer so it feels like four screens.

On my left-most screen, the tiny laptop screen, I always have Outlook open and use it for mail and calendaring (is that a word? - it should be), my second screen I use for Visual Studio, the third for Unit tests and Emacs, and the fourth screen has a browser.
Synergy is a pain to configure, and sometimes cuts out, but for the most part it works quite well.

Photos from Austin Dot Net Jan 9, 2012

2012-01-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

Josh Arnold spoke to the 120 attendees about client-side Continuations. One of the most impressive things was Josh's mastery of the keyboard and shortcuts.

Brandon Satrom gave the main presentation about HTML5, which was well received.
The slides from his presentation are here on github.
My Random takeaways:
Pressing F12 in IE9 will give rendering for older versions of IE of the current page.
jQuery.corner.js is a good polyfill for getting rounded corners in older browsers.
jQuery.Visualize is a simple way to create HTML5 charts from tables.
The excanvas.js polyfill does replicate most of the functionality of the Canvas element, but not all, be careful.

Photos from Agile Austin, Jan 3, 2011 - Kanban System Design

2012-01-05T09:02:00.000-08:00

Julie Chickering, an Agile Coach with Rally Software, presented to 90 people an introduction to Kanban Tuesday night. Here's a few pics of the evening.

Many in the audience were using Kanban and had good comments. One person talked about using swim lanes to ensure that technical debt was actually done, so they had a lane for the usual features and a lane for technical debt that according to their policies had to have something in it.

I know nothing about Kanban. My (probably misguided) takeaways:
Kanban not as perscriptive as scrum
Kanban Focus:
1. Visualize workflow
2. Limit Work In Progress (WIP)
3. Measure and maximize flow of work
4. Make policies explicit
5. Improve the process

A Goal: move work through in predictable sustainable manner.

Advantage of Kanban is you can start where you are. First step is to visualize work flow.
Where does work demand come from? what frequency? what size?
WIP Limits are the number, not the size of tasks.

In the daily standup, walk the board from right to left and see what it tells you. Anything blocked? Unlike scrum, not everyone needs to talk.

Metrics: first one is to measure cycle time.

Dynamically Adding a Style Sheet

2011-12-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at some of Google's code for their Html5Slides project and like the way they dynamically link in a style sheet:

var el = document.createElement('link');
  el.rel = 'stylesheet';
  el.type = 'text/css';
  el.href = 'http://www.Example.com/...' + 'styles.css';
  document.body.appendChild(el);

I think they code it this way so people using their HTML5 slide template don't have to include a bunch of extra css files, just this one JavaScript file. If people get the file dynamically from Google all the time, Google can change the styles without breaking people's links. It's just one less dependency.

HTML5 is not XML, Time To Get Over It

2011-12-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

I feel like Captain Malcom Reynolds who fought for the resistance against the Alliance, but failed and now lives in the shadows of the all powerful Alliance.

I love XML ( ... I know there's 12 step programs for people like me). XML makes it so easy parsing well-structured, schema-verified XML. I applauded the efforts of the W3C to make the next generation HTML to be XHTML2.0 with all the clean syntax.
But the fight for XML championed by W3C.org has failed. WhatWG (re: the Alliance) has won over W3C.org (re: the Browncoats ) and HTML5 is not XML. It's time to get over it.
What does this mean?
1. Well, we shouldn't close void tags like "<br />. (Although some people I respect disagree like Estelle Weyl.) Reading WhatWG docs, I sense they really don't want us to close void tags.

The w3's documentation in section 8.1.2 Elements defines void elements to be

area, base, br, col, command, embed, hr, img, 
input, keygen, link, meta, param, source, track, wbr

2. Attributes do not have to have a value

<input type='checkbox' checked='checked' ...>

This looked a little silly anyway.

3. Attributes values usually do not have to be quoted

<input type=checkbox checked=checked ...>

4. We can't process html5 pages with an XML parser. Really in the old days, you could only parse your pages anyway, and any included files from Google or your ad server would probably break your XML anyway.

In the WhatWG FAQ they recommend not using an XML parser on pages, but using an html to XML parser.

We fought the Alliance and they won. Come on all you XML loving Browncoats like me, it's time to move on.

jQuery just makes life too easy

2011-12-26T07:18:00.000-08:00

One of my most popular pages on my web site is the history of the world timeline. I've always wanted to make if configurable so people could select just certain topics, like "military" or "science" and then concentrate on the topics they love. I did a little research and jQuery just makes this so easy.

This just takes three steps:
1. Include jQuery. We try to get it from Google, but if Google fails us, we get it from a local cache. I got this method from Paul Irish and his excellent HTML5 Boilerplate.

  <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/libs/jquery-1.6.2.min.js"><\/script>')</script>

2. At the top of the page in a form we have this scrap of JavaScript which just toggles the visibility of rows which have the class of "military".

  <input type="checkbox" id="military" checked onclick="$('.military').toggle();">
  <label for="military">Military</label>

3. Lastly we add the class "military" to the row with that topic.

  <tr class="military"><td>70</td><td>After 6 month siege the Romans 
under the direction of Titus destroy Jerusalem killing one and a half million Jews.</td></tr>

Now the user can toggle on categories at will.
One of the nice things about this is that the work is all done on the client side, so the server is untaxed and the user has faster response time.

Agile Exchange at HomeAway

2011-12-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

Agile Austin, a group dedicated to improving software development practices, sponsors an Agile Exchange where developers can visit other companies and hear about their Agile software practices.
Last month's Agile Exchange was with HomeAway and Jack Yang gave a dozen of us a tour of the HomeAway office and a description of their software development framework.
Below are my brief notes:

Initially software was developed in an ad hoc fashion with inconsistent results and a lot of disappointment. Jack ran one team on Agile principles and it was a success. The agile team members were dispersed to other groups to encourage them to adopt agile. It failed to catch on. Two more teams were trained and produced good results with Agile. Slowly other teams started to be interested, but it was a very organic growth. Now all twenty teams are doing Agile, with some of the more advanced doing Lean (Kanban). Software development is more predictable now.
Some teams do twice weekly deployments, others once a month.
Each team implements it's own version of Agile.
Cucumber is used for testing.
Each programmer is expected to do 5 hours of actual "hands on keyboard" programming a day although this varies by project; the rest is spent in meetings and other activities.
BigLever is used for variation management for over 20 brands.
The company, like everyone else, is moving to Git for version control.
Ruby on Rails will be used for the front end of the website, although the front end is expected to be language agnostic - whatever works best for their teams to get the job done well.
Java is used on the back end.
The business people at HomeAway really look at the Business Intelligence reports on how customers use their web sites.
Programmers use Macs.
Rally software is used to handle software issues.
Ruby scripts are created to access the Rally software from scripts.
Problems in Agile are the same - communication with people.

I would encourage developers to attend one of the Agile Exchange sessions; this last one was fun and informative.
Thanks to Brad Bellamy for organizing Agile Exchange.

Shopping for the End Times

2011-11-28T12:01:00.000-08:00

I don't know who the Antichrist will be, but while shopping today at Goodwill, I learned his suit is ready.

Arduino Boot Camp III

2011-11-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

We had our third Arduino Boot Camp on Saturday. I got my second project working - a green light that slowly increases and decreases in intensity. It's not much, but it's a start. And programmers love all our babies, no matter how small.
The source code:

const int redLedPort = 11;
const int greenLedPort = 10;
const int blueLedPort = 9;
int minBrightness = 0;
int maxBrightness = 255;
int deltaBrightness = 10;
int currentBrightness = 0;
int wait = 200; //milliseconds
unsigned long previousMilliseconds = 0;
unsigned long currentMilliseconds = 0;

void setup() {
pinMode(greenLedPort, OUTPUT);
pinMode(redLedPort, OUTPUT);
pinMode(blueLedPort, OUTPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println("Started");
previousMilliseconds = millis();
}
void setColor(int red, int green, int blue) {
Serial.print(red);
Serial.print(", ");
Serial.print(green);
Serial.print(", ");
Serial.println(blue);

analogWrite(redLedPort, red);
analogWrite(greenLedPort, green);
analogWrite(blueLedPort, blue);
}
void loop()
{
currentMilliseconds = millis();
if(currentMilliseconds > (previousMilliseconds + wait)) {
setColor(currentBrightness/2, currentBrightness, currentBrightness/2);
currentBrightness += deltaBrightness;
if(currentBrightness >= (maxBrightness - deltaBrightness) || currentBrightness <= (minBrightness)) { deltaBrightness *= -1; } previousMilliseconds = currentMilliseconds; } }

sp_executesql executes extremely slowly

2011-11-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

On a legacy system, we had a query that in query analyzer is very fast, around a millisecond.
But in production it is slower than molasses in winter, up to three seconds.
The table being queried is simple and tall, around 25 million rows, with a clustered index on "bid":

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[BookHistory] (
[bid] [varchar] (64) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS  NOT NULL,
[source] [varchar] (16) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NOT NULL,
[src] [varchar] (32) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NOT NULL,  
[bookCode] [varchar] (32) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NOT NULL ,
[bookStatus] [varchar] (32) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NOT NULL ,
[actionTime] [datetime] NOT NULL 
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX [BID_INDEX] ON [dbo].[BookHistory] 
(
 [bid] ASC
)
GO

The code is trying to retrieve all the records, typically a dozen, for a particular "bid" which should be faster than greased lightening.

exec sp_executesql N'SELECT bookCode as name,bookStatus,
DATEDIFF(DAY, actionTime, GETDATE()) as days  
FROM BookHistory with(nolock) 
WHERE bid = @bid AND source = @source AND src = @src'
,N'@source nvarchar(5),@bid nvarchar(10),@src nvarchar(4000)'

As the more astute of you can probably see now, the issue is with the data type of "bid". In the database it's a varchar(64), but in the trace it's a nvarchar(4000).
In the C# code the type of the parameter of "bid" was left to the default, which is "nvarchar", so...... SQL server was thinking, "I've got this nifty little index for 'bid', too bad I can't use it since the incoming query is an 'nvarchar', oh well, I guess I'll do a scan and convert all those 'bid' thingys to nvarchar on the fly." That's why the SQL statement was glacial.
For the interim, I patched the SQL statement with a cast, since that can be done without a full deployment, to be

exec sp_executesql N'SELECT bookCode as name,
bookStatus,DATEDIFF(DAY, actionTime, GETDATE()) as days  
FROM BookHistory with(nolock)
 WHERE bid = cast(@bid as varchar(64)) AND source = @source AND src = @src',
N'@source nvarchar(5),@bid nvarchar(10),@src nvarchar(4000)'

And the statement that used to take a few seconds now takes a few milliseconds. Mystery solved.
Postmortem: The clue was that the execution plan was doing a scan instead of using the real index.
Moral: Always set the type of the SQL parameter when using SqlCommand directly.
Moral2: Don't use SqlCommand directly. Use NHibernate or some other ORM so it can figure out all that stuff for you (Although in legacy systems you don't always have that luxury).

Sql Server Management Studio intellisense not working

2011-11-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

My intellisense in Sql Server Management Studio (SSMS) stopped working months ago and I finally decided to get it back.
Turns out that installing VS2010 R1 disables intellisense in SSMS. Who knew?
The solution? Install the cumulative update 7 for SqlServer2008.
1. Go to here and select "SQLServer2008R2_RTM_CU7_2507770_10_50_1777_x64" if you are running the 64-bit version (it's fifth from the bottom). Download it. Well, you can't just download it. Frustratingly, you have to enter your email address and then they email you the link.
<grip text="Why can't microsoft just have a menu option in SSMS under "Help" for "Update to latest patches" - even Quicken does that." />
2. Click on it to execute it and wait. Wait some more. Then realize, it's not going to run the installer it just unzips it to a directory.
3. Go to that directory and run "SQLServer2008R2-KB2507770-x64.exe" and that will install the update.
4. Although it doesn't encourage you to do it, reboot your system.
Worked for me.

Aparapi - Accessing the Power of the GPU from Java

2011-11-14T08:19:00.000-08:00

Gary Frost from AMD presented the Aparapi library to the Java Users Group last Tuesday, Nov 8th, 2011. The Aparapi library makes it easy to write parallel java programs on the GPU using OpenCL. Gary has done some very impressive work with Aparapi. Before Aparapi programmers had to code large blocks of repetitive boilerplate code to get their algorithms to be executed on the GPU. Aparapi does that for us automatically.
If a GPU is not present Aparapi will use separate threads to enhance performance.
Gary showed an example of the nbody problem where two galaxies collide to demonstrate the power of the GPU.
Some of the performance hit of transferring data to and from the GPU and the CPU should vanish when AMD's fusion chip, which has the GPU and CPU on the same chip, becomes widely used.
Gary mentioned that we are entering a world of throwaway CPU power. He gave the example of parsing an XML file by dividing it into two parts. One thread would parse the first section, but the second part of the file might depend on the 67 states that the first part might be ending in. The solution is to have the CPU/GPU parse the second half in all 67 possibilities, so that when the first part is done the second part will already be finished.

A Tale of Two Servers

2011-10-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Recently I came across two database servers, one with fast execution times, the other with slow execution times. Both machines were running windows server 2003, both had similar hardware, both had similar disk access speeds, yet one was over three times as fast as the other.
We puzzled over what could be the cause of the difference.
Can you take a guess?

Turns out the fast machine was running the 64-bit version of Windows 2003 and the slow one was running the 32-bit version. The fast 64-bit machine could load entire tables directly into its 8 Gig memory making it much faster. The other machine, when it wasn't hammered by disk thrashing, was probably wondering what it was doing with all that extra memory it couldn't access.

All My Apps Disappeared When Upgrading to iOS5

2011-10-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS5. All my apps disappeared promptly. Here are instructions on restoring some of your apps:
In ITunes, on the left side select your iphone under "DEVICES" (I don't know why they shout at us in all caps).
Then on the horizontal menu bar across the top, select "Apps".
In the upper left corner of the window, select the "Sync Apps" checkbox.
In the app list below, check all the apps you want to restore.
Then in the bottom right select "Apply".

This reloaded all but my apps living in a subfolder. They are still missing. I'll update here if I can bring them back.

Pictures from HTML5tx October 8, 2011 Austin TX

2011-10-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

This last Saturday the HTML5tx conference was in Austin.
The conference was very well organized with good food and good directions around the campus. An Open Space component was running simultaneously with the prepared sessions. To my surprise the Open Spaces were well attended.
To me the major theme of last week's Pablo's Fiesta and this week's HTML5 was "Regressive Enhancement"; with modernizr and pollyfills we can actually start using the features in HTML5 now, even in older browsers, yes Virginia, even in IE6.

Here's a few photos:
Opening session

Mike Taylor from Opera gave a talk on the HTML5 DOM and the associated IDL. I was impressed with Opera Dragonfly, a debugging environment shipped inside Opera.

Alex Sexton gave an excellent overview of modernizr and yepnope and the whole polyfill game.

HTML5 even has its own gang sign (Be sure to remember it if your caught in a dark alley between a gang of Ror guys and those PHP punks)

Estelle Weyl at www.standardista.com presented a very informative session on HTML5 forms.
(If you see her, be sure to wish her a happy Columbus day). Estelle showed how to style invalid input boxes with CSS. I liked her presentation format of using

We ended with a panel discussion

Mike Wilcox gave an interesting history of video on the web, including H.264 (based on Quicktime), MPEG/4, WebM. Some browsers support some video encoders natively, but no video format enjoys support from all browsers. Mike's solution? Upload your video to YouTube and let them figure all that out.

A few useful sites:
CanIUse.com Summary of browser features like HTML5, CSS3 and SVG
html5boilerplate.com examples of best practice in html5 and CSS
schema.org for schemas
microformats.org/

VS2P4 - A Visual Studio Plugin for Perforce

2011-10-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

I've been using VS2P4 for a while and really like it. VS2P4 automatically checks out files in Visual Studio. Dale Brubaker has done a fantastic job with this plugin.

Pictures From Pablo's Fiesta - Open Space Austin TX Oct 30,2011

2011-10-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

I went to my first Open Space Conference, Los Techies's Pablo's Fiesta. Here's a few photos:

Doc Lister started by giving the ground rules of an Open Space Conference. Four ideas and one rule; or was it four suggestions and two golden rules? Whatever.

Matt Hinze was one of the suggesters of sessions for the next day.

Jeffery Palermo suggested a session on how to hire programmers.

Our list of sessions:

We did a "fishbowl" exercise with five chairs, one has to be empty, and people talked about software quality - reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair.

Jeffery Palermo and Steve Done hosted a session on how to hire good employees. Jeffery asked a good set of questions:
How long does it take to learn you've made a mistake in hiring? How can you simulate the process in hiring to avoid making that mistake?
Jeffery did something very good near the end of the talk. He asked everyone who had contributed to the discussion to be quiet so we could hear from those who were quiet. This had the effect, for a little while, of silencing those who had been a little too verbose early on.

My random tidbits:
Test your site in IE early. Sometimes IE's JavaScript is so glacial your site is unusable.
Check out Blueprint.css for web templates.
Node.js is a server-side JavaScript library to host simple web sites.
Watin is preferred for Web GUI testing.
Use Socket.IO library for web sockets
http://dailyjs.com/ for your daily dose of JS.
Cloud9ide.com is an interesting site - your browser is the ide. Cloud9 will publish your site directly to github. Cloud9 doesn't do compiling, because the cool kids are writing in scripting languages.
Checkout John Teague's blog. He did a great session on Node.js
coffeekup.org
Use nhprof.com to profile your nhibernate code. Other ORMs: dapper, petaPoco, Massive
Sql 98 GoldParse.txt
CQRS - Command Query Responsibility Segregation
SignalR is an event sourcing library that degrades well over different browsers. It tries WebSockets. If the browser doesn't support them it tries a flash program, then long polling to communicate with the server. (This can be bad if you have a lot of customers using old browser using long polling - can tie up threads on the web server)
trello uses SignalR
NServiceBus

ADNUG: Justin Pope on Advanced jQuery

2011-09-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Justin Pope from Headspring spoke to 70 people at the Austin .Net Users Group last night on Advanced jQuery. Justin started by giving a brief overview of jQuery, which I appreciated, and moved to major components like Datatables and UI. Along the way Justin gave warnings of land mines in jQuery, like always use "thead" and "tbody" in tables. Justin is a great presenter with a good sense of humor.
My jumbled notes:
Use a mirror site for JavaScript libraries so your page loads faster since browsers may limit simultaneous connections to a site.
Put your JavaScript at the bottom of the page instead of the headers so the page loads faster.
Golden Rule: Select by class instead to id.
Use Datatables from Datatables.net
"Flot" is a great free graphing package; High Charts is great, but costs money. (protoviz was also mentioned by the audience.
Diamond Rule: Use special characters, like "-" in naming to make finding JavaScript classes easier.
Platinum Rule: Use separate classes for styles and functionality.
Justin recommended the book "JavaScript: The Good Parts", and Rebbecca Murphy's site jqfundamentals.com

And the winner is ... SmallPox

2011-08-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

Interesting visual about the most deadly diseases in history.
Malaria kills almost 800,000 people a year and yet our first world news seldom mentions it. Few organizations target it. Malaria is the elephant in the room few talk about. Fortunately the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation takes the suffering of millions of people seriously.

Infographic by Visual News

Arduino Boot Camp II

2011-08-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

Our intrepid band of Arduino wannabes met again and Blake Freeburg taught us how to read sensors, this is part two of an eight part series in learning the Arduino way.

Rachel watched "Beauty and the Beast".

Quicken 2010 Cannot Connect to Bank of America

2011-08-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Quicken is so awful in many respects and somewhat competent in others, but I have used it for years and have a lot "invested" in the product.
Recently it stopped connecting to Bank of America and I got it to reconnect by basically disconnecting it from "OneStep Update" and then adding it back. Here's my suggestions:

1. Select your Bank of America account from the navigation pane on the left side.
2. Click on the "Account Actions" dropdown list on the upper right side.
3. Select "Edit Account Details".
4. Select the "Online Services" tab.
5. Select the "Remove from One Step Update" button.
6. Then add the account back by selecting "Activate One Step Update".
7. Bank of America will give you a challenge question.
8. My account then successfully could connect again to Bank of America.

Why Software Is Eating The World

2011-08-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

Marc Andreessen has a great article in the wsj about why software matters more than most people think. (Granted he is heavily invested in software, and it's to his advantage for people to think software is important, but he makes valid points).
"... every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high."
I am currently seeing this in Austin. I bump into old friends in the industry and their companies are hiring not just one software developer but 8 - 10 people. It's a great time to be a really good polyglot software developer.
For the past decade enrollment in software as a major has been falling. I think High School seniors hear the news about all the software jobs going to India and China and they think no more jobs will be left here. The seniors are partially right. The low skilled software jobs are going off-shore, but many of the highly technical jobs go begging for applicants here in the US. So Seniors, if you have a love of programming and technology, heed Marc's advice, go into computer science and write the software that will eat the world.

Austin .Net Users Group Meeting August 8th, 2011 Business Intelligence

2011-08-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Jeffery Palermo spoke about how developers can make their data more usable by Business Intelligence software. He talked about using Fact tables and Star schemas. He gave a great example of some very ugly SQL to produce a report that was turned into clean SQL by using a fact table.

Arduino Boot Camp

2011-08-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

Blake hosted an Intro to Arduino, the open design controller.

At the end I had my Arduino board blinking lights.

Bruce Tate Speaking at Agile Austin August 2th, 2011

2011-08-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Bruce Tate gave a talk on "Languages and Leverage: The impact of programming languages on high-leverage programming". I'm a big fan of Bruce since he wrote Beyond Java, Bruce has been willing to move on to new technologies after making a huge investment in Java.
Bruce took old movies and identified each one with a language making the time more fun.

My random notes (which may or may not be what Bruce actually said):
Complexity is expensive; oversimplification leads to complexity.
Scala is good for java developers to come to the functional party, but perhaps not a good language for those not vested in java.
Lisp is the most powerful language with possible exception of Haskel.
Every 3-5 years Lisp makes a comeback.
The language matters a lot in a project, especially since it affects communication with team members. The community around a language matters.
Bruce uses RubyOnRails for his company.
We are all polyglot programmers now - javascript, css, html, and our main language.
Don't put in more languages on a whim, make sure adding a new language buys more than the overhead it costs.
Every 10-15 years programming goes through a paradigm shift - we are starting the transition to functional programming to take advantage of all those cores that Intel gifts us.

Austin on Rails, July 25, 2001

2011-07-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

Eighty-five people packed into the space at Datran to hear speakers talk about the basics of Ruby on Rails. Six people were looking for jobs and nine companies were looking for people - pretty good odds for good Rails developers.

Saw My First Nissan Leaf in the Wild in Austin

2011-07-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

While Frank and I were taking an afternoon walk, we came across the first all electric Nissan Leaf I've seen in the wild. I've been reading about the Leaf and think it has great promise. Awkwardly I decided to take a picture just as the owner walked up with four guys. I introduced myself and the owner, Drew, said he loved the Leaf, got about 100 miles/charge and would buy one again.
The big drawback of course for electric vehicles is the cost of the battery. The Leaf has a 24-kilowatt-hour (KWH) battery rumored to cost between $1,000 to $375 per KWH. This gives the battery pack a cost of $24,000 to $9,000.
The Leaf gets about 4 miles per KWH giving the range of 96 miles. My electric bill is 11 cents per kilowatt-hour giving a cost per mile of about 3 cents. My Camry gets about 27 miles/gal, with gas at $3.60 per gallon that gives a cost of 13 cents a mile for the gas.
Although the Leaf costs significantly less to operate (23%), the extra capital costs of the battery makes the economics a bit murkier - all depending on the future cost of gas.
The future of cars will be electric much faster than most people appreciate. The lithium-ion batteries are getting much better each year with a better price/performance ratio and these batteries will be the bridging technology to a new generation of super-capacitors, the ultimate power storage unit.
Super-capacitors do not store power in chemical bonds, but purely electrical. Super-capacitors can be charged very quickly and will easily last the life of the car. Currently, our capacitors are too expensive, too bulky, and do not store enough power, but that will change. Although it looks like eestor will not pan out, other super-capacitors are being researched and will be brought to market in the not too distant future and we can say goodbye to oil imports. More on the particulars of that in a future post.

In Visual Studio 2010 the "Find and Replace" Panel Keeps Disappearing

2011-07-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but some days you wake up and things have just changed overnight. You may find yourself in love with a co-worker or realize you really like jelly donuts for the first time.
For me a change happened one morning when the "Find and Replace" panel in Visual Studio 2010 started disappearing after its first use. Very annoying. After a while, really, really annoying. The fix in my case was to open "Tools/Options/Environment/Find and Replace" and uncheck "Hide Find and Replace Window...". I don't know how it got set in the first place, but some mornings you wake up and things are just different - now where is my jelly donut?

"You do not have sufficient privilege to access iis web sites on your machine."

2011-06-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

While upgrading a solution from VS2005 to VS2010 in XP I got this error:
"You do not have sufficient privilege to access iis web sites on your machine." which was puzzling since I thought I had enough privileges to access iis web sites.
The "solution" to the problem was to execute this command:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -ga aa\fincher

which satisfied IIS and the upgrade worked great, well, after I went to IIS, right-clicked on the web site, selected "Properties/ASP.Net" and set the "ASP.NET version" to 4.0.

Austin Java Users Group: Google's GWT and Google App Engine

2011-06-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Daniel Guemeur gave a talk to 70 people at last night's Java User's Group. Pizza was provided from Das Keyboard, which was invented by Daniel. (I've used a Das Keyboard for the last few years and love it).
Google Web Toolkit translates Java code to JavaScript so it can run natively in browsers. The advantage is that you can program in a friendlier language and environment than in javascript - debugging with 'Alert's is not much fun.
With Google App Engine (GAE) you can take applications written in Java, Python, or Go and immediately deploy to Google's cloud servers without the hassle of managing and configuring servers.
Interestingly, Daniel said he was moving one of his applications, app.typrx.com, to GWT and GAE from Ruby on Rails. Daniel thought RoR is good for smaller deployments, but that large enterprise software should be done in something like Java on a robust platform. If you have the staff and machines, you can deploy to your own servers in a traditional way, or you can just use GAE. He estimated that RoR development to be three times faster than Java, but that in the end Java is easier to maintain and scale.
An audience member commented that GAE has been a disappointment to some for its lack of robustness. Daniel agreed that its a problem, but that the advantages still outweighed the downtime.
Gerald Cantor talked in the Technotizer time about the CamelOne conference.

Free Programatic Interface to Excel in C# - EPPlus

2011-05-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

Needing a way to programatically create Excel spreadsheets, I found EPPlus and it works great. It took about 10 minutes to create my first multi-workbook excel file.
You can download it at epplus.codeplex.com.
My toy code:

private static void WriteExcelBrandsList(BrandAndCodeRepository brandsRepository, Choice choice)
{
  using (ExcelPackage pck = new ExcelPackage()) {
    //Create the worksheet for each list
    foreach (var listName in brandsRepository.GetLists())
    {
      ExcelWorksheet ws = pck.Workbook.Worksheets.Add(listName);
      ws.Cells["A1"].Value = "Brand";
      ws.Cells["B1"].Value = "Fieldwork";
      var brandAndCodes = brandsRepository.GetList(listName);
      int i = 2;
      foreach (var brandAndCode in brandAndCodes)
      {
          ws.Cells["A" + i].Value = brandAndCode.BrandId;
          ws.Cells["B" + i].Value = "2011-01";
          i++;
      }
    }
    string fileName = string.Format("C:\\BrandLists_{0}_{1}.xlsx", choice.Category, choice.Locale);
    Console.Out.WriteLine("writing to fileName = {0}", fileName);
    pck.SaveAs(new FileInfo(fileName));
  }
}

Austin on Rails, May 24, 2011

2011-05-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

I drop in on the Austin on Rails community occasionally to get a taste of what's coming to .Net in a few years. Eighty people crammed into a stuffy room to catch the latest in Rails technology.
Matt Thompson gave an overview of CoffeeScript, a semantically more pleasant version of JavaScript that gets translated into real JavaScript.
Adam Michela, aka soopa, presented Sass, Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, a layer of abstraction above css which get translated into real css files.
The pairing of the technologies was a nice touch by Damon Clinkscales since both will be in the next version of Rails and both are essentially the same thing - a more human language that gets translated down to a tried and true web component.

Agile Austin May 3, 2011 - Steven “Doc” List: The Agile Lego Game

2011-05-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

Steven "Doc" List of ThoughtWorks led the Agile group in a fun game of learning agile principles by playing with Legos. One member of each team volunteered to be the "customer", our team was fortunate enough to have Scott Killen. The customer provided each team with a set of user stories like 'your animal should have wings'. We walked through three iterations of estimating, planning, building, and retrospection. The game was a fun way to learn Agile and get to know other members better.

C#: Does a Close() automatically call a Flush()

2011-05-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

The following C# code always looked a little clunky to me, because a Close() should probably perform a flush as well. I quickly Googled around and my suspicions were confirmed that the Close() method would automatically do a Flush().

Response.Write(qdbXml);
Response.Flush();
Response.Close();

So while cleaning up some other code I removed the Flush() call. Then everything stopped working. I thought it was the other changes I made at first. Chrome gave this helpful message:

Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.

I restored the Flush() and everything worked great again. The Response object above is a System.Web.Mvc.Controller.Response object which doesn't necessarily work like some other stream objects and needs flushing before closing.
TIL not all stream objects behave alike and I can get in trouble by assuming hastily gathered Googled results apply to me.

SQL Server: Joining on NULLs

2011-04-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Today I learned you can't join tables on NULLs because SQL Server deems a NULL to be an ambiguous quantity so two NULLs are not the same NULL. You can force SQL Server to do the join by doing something like this

... colors c JOIN points p ON (c.color = p.color OR (c.color IS NULL AND p.color IS NULL))

This example assumes only one team will have a NULL color.

CREATE TABLE colors (
  team      varchar(16) NOT NULL,
  color     varchar(32) NULL,
)
CREATE TABLE points (
  color     varchar(32) NULL,
  points    int
)

INSERT INTO colors VALUES ('lobsters','red')
INSERT INTO colors VALUES ('swans','white')
INSERT INTO colors VALUES ('jellyfish',NULL)

INSERT INTO points VALUES ('red',100)
INSERT INTO points VALUES ('white',90)
INSERT INTO points VALUES (NULL,80)
SELECT * FROM colors c JOIN points p ON c.color = p.color
-- returns:
--lobsters         red                              red                              100
--swans            white                            white                            90
SELECT * FROM colors c JOIN points p ON (c.color = p.color OR (c.color IS NULL AND p.color IS NULL))
-- returns:
--lobsters         red                              red                              100
--swans            white                            white                            90
--jellyfish        NULL                             NULL                             80

Austin Java User's Group March 29th, Android and OSGi

2011-03-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

We had a great meeting - it never hurts to start with free pizza.
Only five of the fifty two people attending were looking for jobs, and lots of jobs were being offered. Charles Schwab had a few dozen jobs available; HP and NetSpend also had positions to fill. Jeff Hennigan from KForce was also present - it's always a good sign to have recruiters come to the JUG.
Sam Griffin gave an excellent introduction to Android programming. He gave a demo on how to create and publish an app to a phone. Sam said it was very easy to access features like GPS, Speech Recognition, TextToSpeech, OpenGL for 2 and 3d graphics. Android also has SqlLite builtin.

Simon Chen talked about the basics of OSGi - which is a good thing since before the meeting I couldn't even spell OSGi. Simon described OSGi as a fancy classloader that manages components of a java application. It's like Service Oriented Architecture within an application; you call components embedded in bundles and you only have to load them once.

Thanks to Georgina Chen for the pictures.

How to prevent NUnit from running some tests on the build server

2011-03-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

Certain NUnit tests you only want to run on your local machine and some you only want to run on the build server. To make this easy NUnit offers the "Category" attribute.

[Test][Category("DoNotRunOnBuildServer")]
public void ReadFromLocalWebServiceTest()
{
    var qdbBrandHttpReader = new QdbBrandHttpReader();
    string xml = qdbBrandHttpReader.ReadFromLocalWebService();
    ...
}

On your build server, when you invoke NUnit console add the option "/exclude:DoNotRunOnBuildServer", then it will not even try to run these tests.
Typically this is used with a category like "LongRunningTests" to prevent tests from running on your local box.

Where do good ideas come from?

2011-03-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

Good RSA video. Reminds me that our tech culture needs more "coffee house" type meeting spaces.

Also see the TED Talk.

AutoMapper for C#

2011-03-21T14:30:00.001-07:00

I finally got around to using AutoMapper from fellow Austinite Jimmy Bogard. I watched Jimmy's helpful video and the rest was easy.
AutoMapper is a Data Transfer Object (DTO) helper framework that can map your domain objects to view objects.
In my case I wanted to add extra formatting to render my domain objects as HTML, but realized a "ToHtml()" method on the domain object doesn't smell so good. I created a View Model directly from the domain model via Automapper (with only the attributes I needed to display) and added the HTML rendering code there.
Is that the smell of a pine forest after a Spring rain?

Pine Forest a photo by ®DS on Flickr.

David Anderson in Austin - "Driving a Kaizen Culture Using Regular Operations Reviews"

2011-03-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

David Anderson on March 17, 2011 spoke to a joint meeting of Austin SPIN, Lean Software Austin, IEEE CS Austin, and Agile Austin about a missing component of Kaizen culture, the Operations Review - what can your department do, how much of it did you do, and are you any good at it.
(I thought it appropriate since he espouses lean methodologies that he was wearing skinny jeans.)

Now this picture is not creepy because the girl in the cartoon is hugging David.

The Agile-Lean-CS-Spinners:

The main benefit of the standup meetings at a job was the after-meetings that allowed small teams of people, instant quality circles, to discuss and solve problems. This also struck me as a real benefit of this meeting - a chance to catch up with long-lost tech friends in the Austin community.

My random jottings:
Since academic software is seasonal, they share "Classes of Service" with car racing.
At the StandUp meeting only manage exceptions.
Many organizations only have a shallow implementation of Lean.
Real Kaizen is people just doing their jobs.

The meeting was a success - thanks to John Heintz for buying meals for everyone.

Good Idea From Outgoing Chairman of the FDIC

2011-03-17T13:02:00.000-07:00

In a recent speech outgoing FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair says,
"I would like to propose to you a radical-sounding notion. And it is that increasing the size and profitability of the financial services industry is not - and should not be - the main goal of our national economic policy."

Pragmatic Programmers' Magazine

2011-03-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been over to see the Pragmatic Programmers' magazines lately, I'd highly recommend them. The concepts are usually applicable to many languages and development environments. The tone is upbeat and the articles are easily read in a sitting.

Austin's Microsoft WebMatrix to ASP.NET MVC Web Camp

2011-03-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

Last Monday Scott Hanselmann and Jonathan Carter presented a seminar some new Microsoft technologies to a packed, standing-room-only crowd.
I love Scott's podcasting so I was eager to hear him in person and I was not disappointed. Although the technical details were sometimes dry, Scott's personality and the banter with Jonathan were fun. Scott has the rare ability to be very technical and yet sociable.

Especially humorous were the Windows7 popups declaring, "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting."
My jumbled notes:

The emerging standard with jQuery is to present metadata about an xml element as attributes prepending "data-" so jQuery can easily pluck it off the element with the "data" function.
```
... data-xvalue="30.0" ... $(taget.data('xvalue')
```
Modernizr is a package to help simplify writing javascript for older browsers.
preface fiddler's url with "ipv4.fiddler" to use in a browser.
elmah is a usefullogging framework supported by nuget. See nuget.org.
VS2010 now has a Package Manager
PM>Install-Package AddMVC3ToWebForms
WebActivator
PackageMangerConsole has MVC Scaffolding
PM>Scaffold Controller Post
Linq to SQL is now complete. No new features planned. The future is Entity Framework.
Web Platform INstaller
Razor is a minimalist templating framework. Viewbag is dynamic.

Scott and Jonathon made the day fun, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "with all this new technology the .Net community is now only five years behind those cool Ruby-on-Rails kids."

Book Review: "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

2011-03-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

This is a great story about the collapse of the sub-prime housing market and how clueless the Wall Street mavens were. Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, makes the story eerily compelling. Three items stood out to me:
1. How the fund managers were paid well to be ignorant of the true details; they were making lots of money with no thought to the future ramifications of their actions other than their annual bonus.
2. Almost all the people responsible for this terrible catastrophe actually came through the debacle making tons of money, which, for the most part, the taxpayers ended up paying.
3. The problem really was OPM - Other People's Money. Once the brokerage firms went from partnerships to publicly owned companies, the risks they were taking were not with their own money, but the stockholders money. Hence the temptation to gamble with Other People's Money in a way they would not have done with their own. If they bet right, they'd make a ton of money, if they bet wrong, well, they will lose their bonus and the stockholders will lose money.

Emacs selection scrolling too fast

2011-02-17T08:53:00.001-08:00

Something that annoyed me for a while was selecting a region that spanned multiple pages and emacs scrolling too fast. An easy fix is to slow down the mouse with this in your .emacs file:

(setq mouse-scroll-delay .25)

Viewing Canon RAW files, .cr2 extension, on WindowsXP

2011-01-30T19:40:00.000-08:00

Today I started using the RAW format for photos. The normal XP thumbnail viewer didn't know what to make of the .cr2 extension, so I downloaded Google Picasa to edit them and the Microsoft extension to see them in Windows Explorer.

A way to download an Aspose Word document to a browser using MVC2

2010-12-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps there's a better way, but here is what I did quickly to get an Aspose Word document down to a browser. In the controller class use a MemoryStream to feed a FileStreamResult.

//Controller
public ActionResult MergeAndDownload(Choice choice) {
 MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
 Document document = ... // get your Aspose document
 document.Save(memoryStream, SaveFormat.Docx);
 memoryStream.Position = 0;
 var fileStreamResult = new FileStreamResult(memoryStream, "application/ms-word");
 fileStreamResult.FileDownloadName = "MySuggestedFilename.docx";
 return fileStreamResult;
}

In the View just do a Model.Save()

//View
<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Aspose.Words.Document>" %>
<asp:Content ID="Content1" runat=server ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent">
<%@ Import Namespace="Aspose.Words" %>
<% 
    Response.setContentType("application/msword"); 
    Model.Save(Response.OutputStream, SaveFormat.WordML); %>
</asp:Content>

If you know a simpler way, please post in comments.

Google Docs Revisited

2010-12-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

I watched the Google Docs videos this morning. The Visio replacement, "Drawings", looks very useful, and I didn't know they had a PowerPoint replacement, "Presentations". If I were a company that made 32% of its income from office software, I'd be nervous.
I didn't even know about their online survey tool:

Can't wait for 3D programming environments

2010-11-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm a big fan of 3D movies and waiting patiently, (OK, not so patiently for TimeWarner to rollout its Discovery3D channel), for mainstream 3D TV.
I've seen a few computer 3D monitors advertised and pondering what that will mean for programming environments.
I have a pair of prescription glasses with a prism effect for easing eye-strain. Oddly enough the glasses present a 3D effect based on color. Key words colored red float about an eighth of an inch off the screen, key words in blue sink into the monitor.
It will be great when we all have 3D monitors for coding and can tell VS2014 to make the inner loops of program float a little off the monitor. Not as great as when color coding made its appearance, but it'll be welcome just the same.

The Future of Arial Dogfights?

2010-11-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

This could well be the future of dogfights (not with virtual missiles, but real ones). It could also be the future of attacks on individuals, like the Predator strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan - or terrorist attacks.

Waze, a crowd-sourced traffic advisor

2010-11-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with Waze, an iphone app, for a few days. I love the promise of Waze - it gets traffic conditions in real time from other Waze users. Waze could see that several of its users are traveling at 3 mph up I35 and can redirect you automatically to another route. No need to have a human traffic seer to punch in recommendations.
Waze can learn how fast different routes get you to work on different days and times; then advise you on the fastest way to work - taking into account how fast all the other Waze users are traveling.
Alas it shows much potential, but its still in growing pains. Several times it directed me in the wrong direction and had trouble locating the destination I typed in.
I'd love to see the product when it matures - it shows so much promise to reduce fuel consumption and make our travel times shorter.

IPhone with a 3D Camera

2010-11-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

This is what I'd like for Christmas, a 3D IPhone. Softbank is launching a 3D phone that can show 3D pictures and video without the special glasses. Surely an IPhone that could take and show 3D pictures and play 3D games is not too much to ask for? The width of the IPhone is perfect for a second camera to mimic the distance between the Homo Sapiens' eyeballs.

Agile Austin Meeting Nov 2, 2010

2010-11-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

At this month's Agile Austin meeting 60 people came to hear Jeffrey "Party with" Palermo and Matt Hinze both from talk about "Iteration Zero", setting up a project's source control, build environments and deployment. Below is my jumble of takeaway items:

They recommended the book "Configuration Management" by Aiello
When the audience was asked which version control they used the raised hands indicated percentages like this: Svn 30 git 30 hg 20 Visual Source Safe 5 other 15
Don't centralize libraries for all your projects; each project should have its own hibernate libraries so they can upgrade individually.
You can get hosted version control for about $10 per month
Headspring uses bitbucket by Atlassian for source control, Psake for building, TeamCity by Jetbrains for Continuous Automation (other popular ones are Hudson or CruiseControl.Net), Watin for GUI testing, Rackspace cloud for servers
Matt: "We are digging a pit of success and pushing you into it."
Developers should have their test database on their own box so development can continue without a network
The USPS hosts some sort of Address validation
In batch files include an "& pause" so the windows stay open for inspection

I was surprised how much Headspring uses the cloud for their servers. Jeffrey said they like the pay-by-the-hour usage model of spinning up a server, doing their work on it, and then closing it.
Headspring is an interesting company in that they do training, but they also develop software commercially for profit. I like the fact that their advice is not some academic thinking of a subject, but hard-won knowledge based on what really works in the trenches.

Scott Bellware was present to add the Lean perspective to the evening.

A Signpost to the Future - Genetically Engineered Silkworms Spin Like Spiders

2010-10-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

Spiders have very strong silk, but it's difficult to obtain commercially. We can gather silk easily from silkworms, but its not as strong as spider silk.
Very interesting article at discovery.com about injecting dna from a spider into silkworms to create stronger silk more easily.
This is a signpost to the future. More and more of our products will be made this way. Chemical factories could be replaced with vats of bacteria churning out desired chemicals much easier, safer, and more environmentally friendly.
Do you think this is a good thing?

Austin .Net User's Group, October 11, 2010

2010-10-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Brandon Satrom presented "Testing the right thing: Behavior-Driven Development in ASP.NET using Gherkin, SpecFlow and WatiN" to a crowd of 70 developers. Brandon started by saying this was his journey of testing for his projects and not necessarily the way to test all projects. (I do appreciate his humility and think he will be a good Microsoft Developer Evangelist).

After his presentation, Brandon graciously allowed Scott Bellware to present a counter point - basically that the "customer readable" scripts were too detailed and customers would not read them anyway and that the overly-detailed scripts just get in the way of the total process. The discussion between Scott, Brandon and the audience was refreshing.
(BTW, TeKSystems opened the session saying that $60/hr was a good contracting rate, business is heating up in Austin, and Silverlight is getting some traction.)

F# has Units of Measure

2010-10-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about F# it that it allows you to annotate values with Units of Measure. (Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter burning up because all subcontractors used metric except Lockheed Martin?) F# will do limited testing to make sure your units are consistent. Units of Measure doesn't really understand the concepts of length, volume, force, or currency, but used wisely can be a great help. A little example:

[<Measure>]
type cm
[<Measure>]
type inch
val cmPerInch : float<cm/inch> = 2.54

> let length1 = 1.0<cm>
let length2 = 1.0<inch>;;

val length1 : float<cm> = 1.0
val length2 : float<inch> = 1.0

> let length3 = length1 + length2;;

  let length3 = length1 + length2;;
  ------------------------^^^^^^^

stdin(41,25): error FS0001: The unit of measure 'inch' does not match the unit of measure 'cm'
> let length3 = length1 + length2 * cmPerInch;;

val length3 : float<cm> = 3.54

Wonderful "Paper" Cartoon of Star Wars

2010-10-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

I don't often post videos, but this one is just too well made and clever not to share. The video is made with just paper cutouts, something anyone could do. Enjoy.

Austin Java User's Group September 28th - Cassandra, MapReduce, and Roo

2010-09-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Forty people heard Jeremy Hanna present integrating Cassandra and MapReduce. My jumble of notes:
Cassandra, a horizontally scalable key-value database, was born at facebook.
It has no "master" node, just a bunch of peer databases.
Very fast for writting, fast for random reads, not good with ad hoc queries.
"Pig" is a scripting language used at yahoo that compiles down to MapReduce.
"Hive" used at Facebook is similar to "Pig", but more SQL like.

Ryan Stewart demoed Spring Roo, a scaffolding system that builds common code blocks like screens for create, edit, delete and data access functions for java; much like scaffolding pioneered by Ruby on Rails. I was very impressed by the intelligence built into Roo. My notes:
Roo accomplishes its magic by creating AspectJ files that are blended into the java objects. (C# has a more straight forward method with partial classes).
Roo is a process that runs in the background that can update its AspectJ files when it detects a change to a java object file.
Roo has a great help and guidence system.
Eclipse can be used to access Roo commands.

A few years ago our Java Users Group had demos of amazing code building tools shown by companies that charged thousands of dollars per seat for their software, now the amazing software is mostly free open source projects.

Playing with AutoHotKey

2010-09-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

After reading so much about AutoHotKey I decided to take the plunge and tackle one of my annoying manual tasks - toggling the text and background colors in Firefox from normal to my most coveted, easy on the eyes, "white-on-black" theme.

With AutoHotKeys handy recorder I saved this script to c:\home\mfincher\bin\toggleff.ahk:

Send, {ALTDOWN}{ALTUP}to
WinWait, Options, 
IfWinNotActive, Options, , WinActivate, Options, 
WinWaitActive, Options, 
Send, {TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{ENTER}
WinWait, Colors, 
IfWinNotActive, Colors, , WinActivate, Colors, 
WinWaitActive, Colors, 
Send, {TAB}{TAB}{SPACE}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{TAB}{SPACE}{TAB}{ENTER}
WinWait, Options, 
IfWinNotActive, Options, , WinActivate, Options, 
WinWaitActive, Options, 
Send, {TAB}{TAB}{ENTER}

Then in "My Documents\AutoHotkey.ahk" startup script created a mapping for "Windows-f" to run my script:

#f::Run c:\home\mfincher\bin\toggleff.ahk

Now if Firefox is the active window, and the Options panel has "Content" preselected I can just enter "Windows-f" and my colors are toggled.
Next, how to auto select Firefox and set the Options tab to be "Content".
Cheers.

Java User's Group August 31, 2010

2010-09-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

My jumbled take-aways from the JUG meeting:
The meeting started with Jeff Hennigan from Kforce answering questions about the local job market.
Employers are looking for Spring, Struts and Hibernate framework experience.
Knowing syntax is still important for interviews
Technical tests are common
Experience is better than certifications
Good degrees like physics and EE from top 25 schools still matter
More database experience the better.
Cloud computing is taking off
Few android or iPhone jobs being requested
Enterprise skills in high demand
Upper 80Ks to 90Ks good salary for senior java developers

When asked who was looking for a job only 4 people out of 45 raised their hands.

Peter Donton, who has won the free pass to NFJS two years in a row, talked about his thoughts on two talks from the NFJS conference.
The first was Smart Java - systems using rules or Bayesian logic. Peter demoed a java library for using Bayesian logic, Classifier4j.

Neal Ford said programming java is like smithing in the 21st century. Once blacksmithing was a secure job, but with the rise of the industrial revolution, demand declined. In the same way we need to upgrade our skills for the next revolution. Can you say functional programming? Groovy?

Peter's second topic was Nosql databases.
He said you can pick any two: Consistency, availability, and partition tolerance
Instead of ACID, nosqler's are fond of the acronym BASE - Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventually consistent

Chris Aniszczyk talked about the latest in Eclipse technology. The items that struck me:
Dependency injection is big
Git really is better than svn
Eclipse is trying to get into the web development business

Resharper's Code Style Sharing

2010-08-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

One of the problems working with a team of programmers is personal taste in variable naming and general code style. Now Resharper comes to our rescue with the "Code Style Sharing" feature. Now all the developers on a project can share the same style if you export your preferred settings to a file called "<SolutionName>.resharper.xml", check it into version control under the same directory as your solution, and everyone selects to use the "Shared across the team, per solution". Enjoy.

Small Remote-Controlled Helicopter Can Pickup Objects

2010-08-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly the first bank robbery in the United States did not occur until 13 February 1866 at Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri.
With remote vehicles like this how long until someone commandeers one from a hospital, puts a bomb on it, flies it to a bank and demands money?

David Smith at Austin SPIN and IEEE Meeting

2010-08-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

The always entertaining and thought provoking David Smith talked to a crowd last night of the Austin SPIN and IEEE.

Some random thoughts I jotted down:
The world in increasing real time
Continuous integration is moving to continuous delivery of software
No system is 100% secure, you just make your tradeoffs
David recommended the book, "Does IT matter?"
His mantra through the night was "Digital content + ubiquitous communication + ubiqutious computing" is changing the world - are you ready?
Network communication used to be "People to people", then "People to things", now most traffic on networks is "Things to things".
The future is in biological computing.
"My geek is more powerful than a nuclear bomb" Cyber-warfare is incredibly powerful.
"Go" is the fastest growing language in Tiobe's history of tracking.
David said we passed "Sarnoff's law" on the way to "Metcalfe's law" and are now in the territory of "Reed's law" which says the power of the network of N nodes is equal to 2 raised to the N power.

TiVo Blue Screen of Death

2010-08-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

My TiVo crashed the other night and left me this instead of a Blue Screen of Death (BSD). I was watching a talking head show when TiVo froze and then randomly started changing colors on the screen.

Works great in Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome - looks awful in IE

2010-08-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

Realizing that an HTML tag was really just a placeholder for some css code was a 'Eureka' moment for me years ago. So while doing some maintenance on my web site today I wanted to style all the elements semantically with css code backing them, not with "<p class='quote'> ... </p>", but with "<quote> ... </quote>". This would be like a Domain Specific Language written in css,

quote {
  display: block;
  margin: 2em 0.5em 0 0.5em; 
  padding: 0.5em;
  text-align: left;
  background: #bbbbff; 
  border:1px solid black;
}
author {
  display: block;
  margin: 0 0.5em; 
  padding: 0.1em 1em 0.1em 0;
  text-align: right;
  border:1px solid black;
}

so, in the HTML it looks like this,

<quote>
Everyone thinks of changing the world, 
but no one thinks of changing himself.
</quote>
<author>
 Leo Tolstoy
</author>

Sadly, this works in all my major browsers, and the iPhone, but alas, not in IE.

Good "one sentence stories" from http://www.onesentence.org/

2010-08-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about the web is aggregating and voting on user-generated content like these.
Good "one sentence stories" from http://www.onesentence.org/ :
Bree
After seventeen years of feeling like a disappointment to my mum, and writing a story about how she screwed my life, nothing feels as good as deleting the story after over hearing her exclaim to strangers about how proud she is of me.

Daughter
She cried as her daughter and her best friends shaved their heads too, so she wouldn't have to be bald alone.

Dear Sis
I watched her vomit blood for an hour and assured her she was fine because I was too high to drive her to the hospital.

Hollie
At 22 my father carried me to my old bed, and cried as he tucked me in minding not to touch the bruises that were a road map of pain and abuse I had hidden from him for almost two years.

Randy
Waking in the street after the motorcycle accident, I knew it was bad when I saw one of the paramedics throwing up.

SQL to find non-consecutive numbers in a column

2010-07-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

We had a need to find non-consecutive numbers in a sequence of numbers. This snippet of SQL finds userIDs which are non-consecutive.

SELECT A.userID + 1
FROM MyTable AS A
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
    SELECT B.userID FROM MyTable AS B 
    WHERE A.userID + 1 = B.userID)
GROUP BY A.userID;

Who's to blame for the recent economic meltdown?

2010-07-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

A good summary from an interview with Nouriel Roubini at Amazon

The Fed kept interest rates too low for too long in the earlier part the past decade and fed — pun intended — the housing and credit bubble. Bankers and investors on Wall Street and in financial institutions were greedy, arrogant and reckless in their risk taking and build-up of leverage because they were compensated based on short term profits. As a result, they generated toxic loans – subprime mortgages and other mortgages and loans – that borrowers could not afford and then packaged these mortgages and loans into toxic securities – the entire alphabet soup of structured finance products, so-called “SIVs” like MBSs – Mortgage-Backed Securities, or CDOs – Collateralized Debt Obligations -- and even CDOs of CDOs. These were new, complex, exotic, non-transparent, non-traded, marked-to-model rather than market-to-market and mis-rated by the rating agencies. Indeed, the rating agencies were also culprits as they had massive conflicts of interest: they made most of their profits from mis-rating these new instruments and being paid handsomely by the issuers. Also, the regulators and supervisors were asleep at the wheel as the ideology in Washington for the last decade was one of laissez faire “Wild West” capitalism with little prudential regulation and supervision of banks and other financial institutions.

Default length of Delicious RSS feeds is 15

2010-07-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

I use GoogleReader to keep track of interesting news stories, but I also use Firefox's live bookmarks combined with tagging at delicious.com.
As I find a site I'd like to add to my daily news reading I tag it with "news" and "daily". Long ago, I created a live bookmark in Firefox named "news+daily" to "http://del.icio.us/rss/fincher42/news+daily". I also have one for "energy+daily" and "blogs+daily".
In the morning I select in Firefox "Bookmarks/news+daily/Open All in Tabs" and it churns away and opens all my daily news sites in their own tidy little tab.
The problem I noticed lately is that the maximum number of tabs showing up was 15. After a little investigation I had to change my Firefox live bookmark source to append "?count=100" and now everything is rosy and "news+daily" has up to 100 bookmarks.

Emacs lisp code to backup current buffer

2010-07-16T12:54:00.001-07:00

I've upgraded to the latest emacs and doing a little cleanup work. Just wrote this tiny elisp method to backup a file and embed the current date in the new file name. I use this right before I start making major changes in a file not under version control to have a temp file to go back to when things go awry - and they always go awry.


(defun backup-current-file ()
  "backs up a file with date embedded. e.g., '.emacs' is copied to '.emacs-2010-07-16'"
  (interactive)
  (let ((backupfilename (concat  (buffer-file-name) "-" (format-time-string "%C%y-%m-%d" (current-time)))))
  (message (concat "copying file " (buffer-file-name) " to " backupfilename) )
  (copy-file (buffer-file-name) backupfilename)
  ))

Using Emacs Tramp with Dreamhost

2010-07-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

I finally got Emacs 23.2.1 to work using Tramp, a remote editing utility, with my hosting provider, Dreamhost. The secret was to use plink, which connects to PuTTY, as the transport. I had been using Ange-Ftp, but it transmits passwords in the clear, which is not safe in today's world. Now I can edit files on my hosting site in the comfort of Emacs, knowing my password is encrypted. In my .emacs file:

(if (string= emacs-version "23.2.1")
    (progn   
          (require 'tramp)
          (setq tramp-default-method "plink")
          (setq tramp-verbose 10)
          (setq tramp-debug-buffer t)
    )
)

The Petroleum-Electric Myth is Alive and Well

2010-07-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

The International Business Times had an article today referenced in slashdot which starts:
"As the U.S. moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process."
The introductory paragraph is just wrong because it implies if we just had enough electricity we wouldn't need as much oil, but we don't use petroleum to generate electricity. If Prometheus came down to earth and created enough new nuclear power plants overnight to supply 100% of the electricity in the US, do you know how much this would cut our oil dependency? Zero, zilch, zip. We need the oil to run our cars. Having all the electricity in the world won't power our cars - yet. The real path to energy independence is electric cars that we can power with nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, or solar. Then we can use our domestic oil for industry.

source

A Fun Retro HTML5 Game

2010-07-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

HTML5 holds plenty of promise - drawing directly on a canvas via JavaScript with GPU acceleration. A glimpse is an asteroid game here.

.Net User Group Meeting June 14, 2010

2010-06-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

The topic was ".Net Build Tools", but the theme was "Diversity".

John Teague talked about using Nant. He said it's a really mature product and it's so successful support is on simmer since most things have already been done. XML is the downside. He showed how to use the tag "Xmlpoke" to inject into config files and Mkiisdir to create virtual directories.
John demo visual studio on a Macintosh which caused quite a buzz; he is using VMWare's Unity setting to have VS act like another Mac window. About half of the laptops at the meeting were Macs.

Derick Bailey talked about using Rake for building and deploying. Since XML is a declarative language, we have to shoehorn in programming. He has an article about Albacore, a series of Rake tasks for building .Net projects here.

Jorge Matos talked about the Psake project, a PowerShell dsl to help build .Net projects. It is based in Github. A few notes:
PowerShell has remoting so you can easily execute commands on other machines
Psake just a script.
Exec shows errors.
Jorge showed a suite of tests functioning just like NUnit
You have to modify the Executionppolicy to get Psake to run. Enable-PSremoting on remote servers

Eric Hexter presented Pstrami, a PowerShell module for deploying projects.

For future meeting topics everyone was encouraged to go http://adnug.uservoice.com and vote for their favorite topics.

Some projects were hosted by Google, some by GitHub, some laptops were Windows and others Macs, build systems were presented based on Ruby, PowerShell, and C#.

Fears of a Microsoft monoculture are overblown. Diversity is the word.

Sumatra PDF Reader is Fast, Free Alternative to Adobe

2010-06-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

I just upgraded to Sumatra 1.1, a free PDF reader. Sumatra is very fast compared to the glacial Adobe PDF reader. I've only had one PDF file that Sumatra did not handle correctly. Sumatra is definitely worth using on a windows machine.

RSA Animate - A Great Way to Reinforce Speaking

2010-06-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Miller had a link to the following video. I loved the way the cartoon artist reinforces the speaker via quick drawings.
(I'm not sure if what the speaker is saying is true, but it's a marvelous medium.)

Agile Austin Celebrates 501C6 Non-profit Tax Status

2010-06-03T10:49:00.000-07:00

This last Tuesday's Agile Austin meeting was kicked off by Matt Roberts talking about Agile and Leadership. Matt's extensive experience in the industry gave extra weight to his talk.
He started off by talking about Self Leadership and knowing how to motivate yourself before motivating others. Sprinkled throughout the talk were good boating analogies.

Matt recommended these three books:

Random bits which caught my attention:
Seek first to understand then to be understood
Leadership for dummies
Stop doing stupid stuff like annual reviews and collecting crazy metrics
Pragmatic agilist
Do fun crazy stuff like Karoke on bus
To take pride in their work people need control
Talk to Teddy bear
Leaders must get rid of "Virus", people who preventing work getting done.
Responding to change is good, but too much can be crazy
Every team needs a dragon to slay otherwise it will slay itself
Listers law: People under time pressure don't think faster
Leaders must clearly articulation the short-term pain of new processes
Leaders must followup,followup,followup on projects
Change is hard. Some people will not like it. Be prepared.

Alan Bickerstaff talked about mistakes startups often make. He had practical solutions like founders should get vesting common shares and use the corporation not a llc.

At the end of the meeting we had a party replete with sparkling wine and cheeses.

.Net Uses Group Meeting May 10, 2010 - Optimizing SQL

2010-05-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Wes Brown talked to 55 attendees about how to optimize SQL queries. My random notes:
Your DBA should be updating the STATS at least once a day for databases with changes.
Before running trial queries use "Set statistics io on" and Set statistics time on"
A Clustered index is a must for any table, whether it really needs it or not.
Optimize Logical Reads first, before looking at cpu.

The usual .Net crowd was noticeable by their absence; perhaps a sign that NHibernate is doing all the optimization people think they need.

Java User's Group: Flex and ForkJoin

2010-04-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

Three companies said they were hiring java developers and only 6 people were actively looking for work. This is quite a change from a year ago when dozens of people were looking.
David Sheth talked to the 80 attendees about the new Fork-Join coming in Java7 and when to use threads, the executor, or Fork-Join. He gave a great overview of the problems in optimizing parallel operations in multi-core cpus.
James Ward flew down from Denver to talk about Adobe's Flex. He recommended visiting www.flex.org/tour to see samples of flex programming. Flex has a free IDE available for download along with unit test and mocking library.
Adobe AIR is a superset of the flex api designed to run outside the sandbox as a native application so it can do things like access the harddrive. AIR can run on Android, but oddly enough not on the iphone or ipad.
James talked about a data transfer protocol, Amf, which was 10 times faster than transferring raw xml; works like gzip to compress xml. A version of Amf is on the .Net platform.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Becoming More Wikipediaesque

2010-04-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online is starting to beta test new functionalities to become more democratic. Now, if you are a member of EB Online, you can submit comments or suggest edits to articles.
A very positive step. Wikipedia is useful, but you can never fully trust it. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online at least you can reference in school work and not be ridiculed.

Software has the shelf life of bananas

2010-04-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished Eric Evan's Domain Driven Design book (see my notes here).

I'm struck by his Epilogues section about how most of the great software he and his colleagues sweated over is quickly brushed aside in a few years as business needs change. All that work lost, like tears in the rain.

That's the thing about software. It's so easily discarded. Most of the software I've written in my career has been used for a few years and then thrown out, or never even put into production. As software professionals we don't have the satisfaction of our friends in Civil Engineering or literature as Robinson Jeffers so eloquently says:

To the Stonecutters

Stone cutters fighting time with marble,
you foredefeated challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.
The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly,
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years,
and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

-Robinson Jeffers, 1887-1962

Great PodCast on the American Auto Industry

2010-04-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

This American Life has a great podcast on NUMMI; searching for what is wrong with the American Auto Industry.

Two useful utilities: Console and SpaceSniffer

2010-04-06T12:26:00.001-07:00

I download two interesting Windows tools today.
Space Sniffer tells you where your disk space is being used. It's entertaining as it scans your disk.

Console is a replacement for the 70s style Windows Cmd.exe windows. Console has tabs and real text selection.

Java User's Group: REST tools in Java

2010-04-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Srini Penchikala presented "REST Web Services Support in Java EE 6 and Spring 3.0" to about sixty java enthusiasts last Tuesday.
The meeting was sponsored by TEK who provided the pizza. The TEK spokesman said Agile skills would probably become a de facto requirement for most jobs within a year.
Srini talked about the different syntax for supporting REST within EE6 and Spring, with examples of doing things in both frameworks.
A small discussion centered around the movement of configuration data from code, then into XML, and now a trend back into code with the use of annotations. John Heinz made the point that annotations, although in code, are really declarative programming.
Srini mentioned that with Spring3 annotation in the code can be overridden by XML configuration, which seems to be the best of both worlds. He also used RestClient from Wiztool.org to test his demo code.

Taking the Pulse of Shopper's Identity

2010-03-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

A great story about the future of shopping and identity management using finger vein patterns instead of credit cards is at NewLauncher.com.
We need to use credit cards less since they are so easily stolen or forgotten at home. I like the finger vein method or iris pictures to confirm identity, although neither is perfect, it takes criminals a lot more work than swiping a credit card blank through a magnetic writer.

A related story on using finger vein identity in a coke machine is here

VeinID - Finger Pulse Vending Machine from CScout on Vimeo.

Agile ATX Lunch Crowd at Central Market

2010-03-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at the Agile ATX lunch today at Central Market on 38th and Lamar. The group meets every other Thursday at 11:30.
Some of today's topics were Mercurial vs. Git vs. Subversion, Domain Driven Design, SSIS and RhinoETL, and raising babies.
As usual I didn't understand many of the conversations, but its good to be humbled sometimes.
Come join us if you enjoy talking about the latest trends in software development especially in the Agile arena.

Can You Name the Most Popular Programming Languages?

2010-03-13T08:53:00.001-08:00

Fun Quiz to test your knowledge of the most popular programming language (well, fun if you are a languages geek).

Java User's Group on March 2, 2010

2010-03-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

Norman Richards, long time java guru, gave a presentation to about 40 people on JSR 299: "Contexts and Dependency Injection for the JavaTM EE platform". It was very interesting to hear about the merging of Spring, Seam, and other technologies being baked into the latest version of Java.

EventBrite Integrates Amzaingly Well With Twitter, Facebook, and Calendaring

2010-02-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

In Matt Hinze's tweets this morning was a link to Austin Code Camp registration at EventBrite. While registering I noticed a myriad options for publicizing the event - you can click on convenient links to post on Facebook, your Yahoo or Google calendars - or even Twitter which is how I got to EventBrite in the first place. It's an amazing self-reinforcing process.

Wiping Disks Clean with Free Software from dban.org

2010-01-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

Recently I needed to wipe the hard drives of a few machines. I was very pleased with Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN"), a free program from dban.org. Before you donate your old computer, or even put it out at the curb for trash pickup, be sure to wipe the drive clean; even erased Quicken data can be read from your old hard drives.

Agile Austin - Peer Code Review – An Agile Process

2010-01-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

At last night's Agile Austin meeting, Gregg Sporar gave an excellent talk on Peer Code Reviews to seventy attendees. Here are a few of my cryptic notes:

Professional writers have editors, why shouldn't coders? In fact, in the US we are blessed with twice as many professional editors as writers.
We need to move the feedback closer to origin when writing code. The earlier the code is peer reviewed the better. Should code be reviewed before being checked-in?
One of our Agile principles is Collective Code Ownership. Peer reviews aids this process by helping everyone understand the code.
If coders know their code will be reviewed they code better.
Peer reviews help everyone learn new techniques for programming.
Michael Fagan, the founding father of code reviews encouraged lots of meetings. Is roi there for lots of meetings? Only 4% of bugs are found in meetings.
Types of Code Reviews:
1. Over the shoulder code review. Just grab a friend and have them look over your shoulder at your code.
2. email
3. pair programming
4. Automated tools
How long to review code. Studies show most bugs found in 60-90 minutes. On average 1 bug per 10 min.
How many lines of code to review? 200 loc per hour seems to be the sweet spot.
Regarding checklists: Don't put too many items in a checklist. 5-9. Error handling would be a good item for a checklist.
One way to review code is to only review unit tests to make sure they are thorough, and then the code should be fine.
A few suggestions for not letting the reviews get to heated: Remember it's the tone that counts. Also "Ask don't tell", (e.g., Why did you use this API?)
Smartbear offers a free book at Codereviewbook.com
Gregg blogs at Blog.smartbear.com.

Embedding date and time into a file in windows - "But it worked last night"

2009-12-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

I'm patching a tiny project at work with duct tape until we can get an enterprise solution. A small batch job runs on the windows scheduler doing something like this:

MyCommand.exe  --output=Saturday1201amUS_%date:~10,4%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%-%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%-%time:~6,5%.txt

I ran it yesterday afternoon and it worked great. It created a file named
Saturday1201amUS_2009-12-21-15-46-00.21.log. This morning I did another test with my client and it failed miserably after creating a file named 'Saturday1201amUS_2009-12-22-'. A little investigation turned up that windows does not prepend a zero in front of the hours before noon so my executable file was getting a space in front of 9 oclock:

MyCommand.exe  --output=Saturday1201amUS_Saturday1201amUS_2009-12-22- 9-47-20.31.log

It worked great after putting quotes around the file name.

MyCommand.exe  --output="Saturday1201amUS_%date:~10,4%-%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%-%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%-%time:~6,5%.txt"

One Stock Trading Company Claims Compute Power of Lawrence Livermore

2009-12-21T08:16:00.000-08:00

Interesting article from Technology Review about the computing power of the high-speed stock traders:
The explosion in high-speed automated trading has engendered a massive buildup in technology; Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund based in East Setauket, NY, boasts that its computing power is equal to that of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

NHibernate Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008

2009-12-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

From the NHibernate distribution, I renamed nhibernate-mapping.xsd to nhibernate-mapping-2.2.xsd and nhibernate-configuration.xsd to nhibernate-configuration-2.2.xsd. Then I copied those two files to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas and immediately intellisense started working for me in Visual Studio 2008.

Bitter Refactoring

2009-11-24T07:44:00.001-08:00

Kimberley Bitter
Originally uploaded by kamoda

After reading Martin Fowler's book on Refactoring I've been a big fan of the practice. We all know that adding in tests to insure the refactoring doesn't change the results is essential.
But this last week the real world crept into our world of programming paradigms. We refactored a complicated section of code to make it simpler, more readable, and faster - a big win; except that after the code was fielding, one of our customers reported a problem.
Their use of our product actually depended on a bug in the old version. Refactoring the code fixed the bug and caused our customers grief.
I'm still a big fan of refactoring and continue to do it, but now I'm a little wiser that refactoring carries more risk than I'd thought before.

Simian - a code duplication finder

2009-11-13T11:27:00.000-08:00

Today I downloaded simian, a code duplication detector. It's very easy to download and run. Simian detected a few chunks of duplicated code, which need to be refactored into a single method, or pushed up into a parent object. Simian is worth a quick download to test your code. Eval copy is available for free.


C:\opt\simian\bin\simian-2.2.24.exe -reportDuplicateText -threshold=5 *.cs > simian.txt

Agile Austin - Domain Driven Design and the Naked Objects Pattern

2009-11-04T13:40:00.001-08:00

Last night at Agile Austin Eitan Suez explored the relationship of Domain Driven Design and the Naked Objects Architectural pattern to a packed house of 60 people.
The thing that struck me the most was how using the Naked Objects concept of having the objects themselves create the GUI forces a Ubiquitous Language on the developer since the user will see the object and method names on the screen.
Eitan gave a great example by having the jMatter framework autogenerates a permissions table with objects and their actions on the vertical axis and the types of users on the horizontal axis by reflecting the code and dynamically discovering the objects, their methods, and the types of users.

When Will We Have Enough Computing Power?

2009-10-29T13:44:00.001-07:00

DNA rendering
Originally uploaded by ynse

At the last Java User's Group meeting here in Austin, Gary Frost mentioned that if he took his $300 Gateway computer with its $300 graphics card back in time 6 years, his computer would be in the top ten fastest super computers in the world. Which got me thinking, "How fast do computers need to get?".
Well obviously a lot faster. I'll be happy when computers can do either of the following (I'm not picky):
1. Store every person's DNA and their medical history. That's 3 billion base pairs per person times almost 7 billion people gives 2.1 × 10^19 base pairs or about a Zettabyte. Then compare and contrast every person's DNA with their illnesses with everyone else and produce a report showing which diseases are related to which DNA differences. For example, asthma could be related to any of 307 combinations of 24 genes being different. Then we should be able to design drugs to compensate for the "defective" genes, or perhaps tweak those genes with a small bit of DNA from a friendly virus.
Storing a Zettabyte seems reasonably straightforward, diff'ing all the genes will take enormous computing power- but that's the power we need.
2. Predict the future health issues of a fertilized human egg based on its DNA. We would need the power to replicate division of all the cells grow the egg into an adult and simulate the running of the biology in each cell and predict the health issues.

Austin Java Users Group

2009-10-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

Random Notes from the meeting (entered via my shiny new IPhone):
Big Mike is starting a Certification group.
Gary Frost from Amd talked about OpenCL, the Open Computing Language. This provides binding to Java via C for running parallel operations on Graphics Processing Units. Gary's demo showed the n-body problem being accelerated by using the GPU to do calculations, while the GPU was also updating the screen.
The demo was very impressive, but the OpenCL seemed a bit clunky. I think the masses of programmers will need a much smarter compiler to inspect the java code and imply what the GPU can do in paralle.

The second part of the meeting Deb Ayers talked about Oracle's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). She said ESB is a natural progression from client Server. Many of her clients don't use soap, just Plain Old XML (POX) over http.
For a dozen services you don't need an ESB, but some Telcos have hundreds of services and need an ESB.