Posts Archive

Dan North: How simple is too simple?: “Kent Beck advises us to do ‘the simplest thing that could possibly work’, but this is often mistaken for ‘the first thing I could possibly think of’ or even ‘the only thing I know’”

Well put.

(Via Planet TW.)

I read an article the other day about a surgeon who said that in order to stay a good surgeon, he had to perform operations on a regular basis. Which sounds quite reasonable right?

Ponder that the normal thing for experienced surgeons was to not take part in the actual operation. Instead, they analyze the patient and decide what should be done in great detail, creating diagrams explaining the situation.

As I’ve received a few requests for it, I’ve been given permission by my employer Valtech to republish an english version of my article on REST vs. SOAP here at my blog.

I am seeing signs in the sky that Sun is making a comeback.

• Textdrive is switching from FreeBSD to Solaris
• Rumors that ZFS might be ported to Mac OS X
• Tim Brays presence and statements on the RoR podcast from Canada on Rails
• Sun makes smart moves like supporting PostgreSQL

And not one of them is related to Java.

I will be speaking on the Rails Recipes Meetup here in Stockholm tomorrow. My topic will be on recipe 28 in Chads excellent book, how you can use with_scope to DRY your code.

Whilst I have looked quite deeply into the subject - it is quite small actually - there is one thing I have yet to find out. Chad mentions that you can use wrap your actions with scoping using a before_filter.

Thomas Looy: How Long is a Piece of String?: “- Use working software as the only measure of the progress on a project (no more 90% completed tasks);

• Measure using smaller sized tasks. Smaller tasks give you better measures than larger ones and will also give you a larger sampling of measures that can be used for meaningful statistical evaluations. Smaller tasks are also completed sooner and therefore give you measurements sooner that you can begin to use to extrapolate to a meaningful project complete date.”

(Via Planet TW.)

On behalf of my employer Valtech, I’ve written a piece on why I dislike SOAP, and favor REST. I originally wrote it in english, but the published version is in swedish.

For some REST preaching in hum-humpty-dum-dee-dum’ish go to

http://valtech.se/templates/JobSubPage.aspx?id=2582.

Update: As suggested by people more intelligent than myself, anchor tags really should have text inside them to be useful :).

Bitten by IE once again: “Side note: I talk a lot about the importance of Feedback, that tools should clearly identify problems and guide you to solutions. On a grading scale of A - F, IE would receive the grade take out back and put down like a rabid dog on this issue. And many others.”

(Via Tapestry and HiveMind.)

It seems that Sun is using James Gosling to spread FUD regarding any technology that competes with Java. He created Java, and he is a techie and techies have high standards and are always honest - right?

He came out slinging against Harmony a year ago, and now he is at it again with Ruby and PHP:

PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems, but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.

By accident I stumbled upon the alt-command-O keyboard combination which allows you to move the current window to a given Desktop Manager virtual desktop - or to place it on all of them. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough, but I have not seen this mentioned in any documentation.

This was the only thing I thought was missing in Desktop Manager. I find it really useful for Adium and Skype.