Nelz's Blog

“Why I Love Everything You Hate about Java“: It’s nice to see Java getting some love as a language.

“The Anatomy of a Whale“: A nice write up on problem-finding and -solving within a large-scale operation.

For all the code samples that I put into my blog, I’ve been using this handy-dandy online tool to convert from code to HTML:

http://www.palfrader.org/code2html/code2html.html

One of the ways that I keep myself organized is by sending myself emails in GMail… I usually put links to things I want to look at later, and since I’m now doing a cleansing of my "note to self" emails, you get to benefit!

Mockito – The New Mock Framework on the Block:

• I haven’t used it (yet), but the whole Test Spy concept (as being a half-way point between stubs and mocks) is very interesting
• I’m actually going to forward this around work a bit to see if this is easier for people to swallow, because EasyMock is being choked on (because it’s so heavy) by some of our developers.
• Here’s the home page for Mockito

Post-Redirect-Get:

• I haven’t been doing a lot of front-end work lately, but this article on Wikipedia discusses a pattern that we were sorely lacking at my last gig.

The capture-recapture code inspection:

• I haven’t yet found the right set of words to convince an employer that systemic organization-wide code reviews are a Good Thing, but I’d like to submit this article as another point of reference in the code-review effort.

Ajax testing with Selenium using waitForCondition:

• Here’s a helpful bit about using Selenium to test AJAX apps

Tom Brady on Software Management:

• I gotta say that one of the most powerful ways of showing me that my efforts are needed is when my employer seems thirsty for my code. At my current job, I put in a weekend working on a pet, side-ish project… And when I got back the next week, it was already planned to get used. That is the kind of substantive feedback (more than talk) that makes me feel needed and appreciated.

Urgency is poisonous:

• Interesting… Now that I am working in a startup, it seems like we are always just on the edge of being late or behind the curve. I wonder what a 4-day work week would look like, considering I usually do about 5.5 or more work days a week…

Use your singletons wisely:

• This is really good advice.
• I think it’s funny, but I’ve had fewer and fewer inclinations to create a Singleton since I’ve been getting so involved with Spring.

JSONVid: Pure JavaScript Video Player:

• Ooh! An alternative to Flash for video in a browser?!? It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

I had to install the ‘git’ utility on my OS X (Leopard) box.

I found this blog post to be really helpful… (I just copied and pasted the command-line script, and it just ran and installed fine!)

Compiling Git for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

WOW! This article is fantastic! I was so psyched after reading this article that I even sent it to my Luddite-ish mother. (After printing the article out and reading it, she said it was ‘cute’ and reminded her of me… <sigh!>)

I have so much to say about this article, it will probably come out all jumbled… But I hope the reader will be able to pull out some salient points.

Participation

In the vein of where I am going with my ruminations I had actually named this blog post "Participation Culture" before re-reading the article and seeing that "Tim" (O’Reilly, I’m assuming.) has some concept called an "architecture of participation".

Participation has been a big theme in my life in recent years. About 6 year ago I fell in with the Burning Man community, whose 10 Principles specifically address participation as a founding pillar. A little over a year ago, I came to the Bay Area and was immediately impressed by all the Makers, teachers, and BarCampers. (As I write this, I am impressed that I continually fall in love with ideas that are only a degree or two away from Tim O’Reilly…)

History of the Participatory Audience

While reading the "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" article, you might be lulled into thinking that audience’s radical demand for participation’ is an artifact of recent past. Then I got to thinking about the history of our culture’s move towards encouraging participation and how little bits of interactivity have made themselves known before the current incarnation of internet culture.

Yeah, I agree magicians have been pulling people up on stage forever, but this doesn’t count. These types of stage shows are more of an exercise in social engineering than in interactivity.

But, think back to the late-70′s. There was a very persistent subsection of our culture who were not willing to sit back and passively watch a show. These people, considered "crazy" by some, would don fishnets and garters and high heels and feather boas to go to a theater to throw bread and yell at the screen and sing along to the music, and some of these people even tromped right up to the front of the theaters to re-enacted exactly what was happening up on the screen at the exact same time. There were, and still are, entire communities built around the pomp and circumstance of late-night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

It tickles me pink that Dr. Frankenfurter, the "sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania", could be a material ancestor for every tweet I Twitter or every Yelp review I post in this "participatory internet".

Epilogue

The Dr. Frankenfurter bit from above is about where I wanted to end up for this post. However, in writing it, I came up with a couple more links for events or shows that I think are incredibly relevant to the article above or to the rest of this post.

One of the first shows I ever saw that took a fun step out of the passive-audience experience was the Blue Man Group. My family went to one of their shows in Boston during Christmas time, and I was blown away! At the end of the show, they start unrolling streamers off of toilet paper rollers, covering the audience, getting them to move the streamers forward while strobe lights flash and loudly blaring techno music surrounds you. You are covered and involved in a moving black-lit sea of white streamer paper. I have a distinct memory of jamming out in my seat, looking to my right with the biggest grin on my face and seeing my grandmother get all tangled up in the streamers as they were moving forward. It was a sensory overload, but still one of my most fun memories from my teen years.

I dabbled a little bit in Dungeons and Dragons but it never really ‘stuck’ with me. However, I don’t think anyone can debate that it totally serves as the ancestor of the phenomenon described in the above article as ‘sitting in your basement and pretending to be an elf’.

Since I’ve been in San Francisco, I have totally fallen in love with The Extra-Action Marching Band. Though the Blue Man Group involves the audience at the end of the show, Extra-Action not only breaks, but DEMOLISHES the fourth wall. Through an incredible alchemy of sounds, sweat, and audacity they involve the audience as an integral part of the show. (Disclaimer: not for the claustrophobic.) To friends, I have described the experience of being right up in the front row as being in a mosh pit without any of the anger.

"Unadulterated Java is so groovy"

• This side-by-side and step-by-step look at Groovy totally makes my mouth water. I’ve really been getting tired of all the boilerplate BS in Java, and Groovy looks to be the lightweight way to combat it!

"Groovy-power automated builds with Gant"

• Since I’m looking into Groovy, why not look into Gant as well?!?
• Java builds could DEFINITELY use some help!
• One point of contention: the author says this several times: "Groovy has a steep learning curve for Java developers — meaning that we can actually pick it up quite quickly." (Mr. Author, you keep on using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means…)

"The Grinder, a Java Load Testing Framework"

• Since I’m on an alternative-JVM language kick, why not consider The Grinder, which uses Jython?

"Making Agile Reviews Effective"

• I know, I know… But since I’ve been on such a pro-Code Review kick lately, I thought I’d share an article that identifies some Code Review anti-patterns.

"Get Your Database Under Version Control"

• This was the original article, from whence I found all the others in this post.

This 5-part series outlines some great suggestions:

1. – "Three rules for database work"
2. – "The Baseline"
3. – "Change Scripts"
4. – "Views, Stored Procedures and the Like"
5. – "Branching and Merging"

" SSW Rules to Better SQL Server Databases"

• These hints have some SQLServer specifics, but many of thm can be looked at with DB-agnostic lenses.

"I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users"

• This reminds me of the saying "Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can barely hear what you are saying."

CheaperTalentHypothesis

• Martin Fowler asks "Are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?"

The Years of Experience Myth

• Everyone’s heard of the posting asking for 5-8 years of Java experience when Java was only 3 years old, right?

The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development

• Ignoring these laws always comes back to bite ya…!

Pure CSS 3D Boxes

• My designer coworkers loved this…
• They dissected the code to figure out the diagonal lines. It turns out the ‘secret sauce’ is a 20-pixel border with a different colors on horizontal versus the vertical. It seems the border bevels itself when given these parameters.

10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

• Ooooooh, #10! Even web designers are getting on the "testing bandwagon". YAY!

The Most Favoritest Icon

• To me, this story represents an allegory about the importance of good monitoring of incoming URLs.
• This reminds me of a story in "Release It!" (Chapter 7) where a newly deployed site was brought down by all the ‘bots’ in the open web that were hitting old (and deprecated) URLs. The session load brought by handling all those requests killed their servers.