Comments for Andy Hedges' Tech Blog

Comment on Adam Smith vs. Fred Brooks by Paul Beckford

Paul Beckford — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:21:56 +0000

I’m not sure that the two are talking about the same thing. The difference I think is that software development is a process of creation, not manufacture. It is inherently creative and akin to new product development not product manufacture.

Divison of labour and specialisation can occur in a manufacturing environment (to some degree) since the desired outcome (replicating a pre-designed product) is known at the outset. When you are creating something new, you do not know what the end product will be, and the creative process requires a great deal of trial and error.

For software, manufacture is the replication of CD’s or more commonly today, the replication of bytes downloaded over the internet. These are mechanical processes that do not require people. The part of the process conducted by people is the creative design phase. A computer program is a design and programmers create new designs and new products.

Normaly design studios contain a few very highly skilled individuals who are suported by a number of assistants. I think it is this that Fred Brooks is eluding to in his idea of a Surgical team.

Comment on Some Hibernate Optimization Rules of Thumb by John Bäckstrand

John Bäckstrand — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:03:58 +0000

LEFT JOIN FETCH also has the ability to simply draw in huge amount of data, which will always be slow.

Anyway, how do you do pagination if you also are using join fetch? This totally disrupts the way rows are counted, and makes the setMaxResults/setFirstResult methods fairly useless. I have no idea how many rows each individual “top level” entity will have.

Comment on 5 Epiphanies in Software Development by Julian Morrison

Julian Morrison — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:08:49 +0000

Here’s one of mine (not originally mine, of course): you need a language that lets you add syntax. So far I know of Ruby, Lisp, Forth, Scala - there are probably others.

If your language does not support this you will end up replicating it, badly, via dirty tricks, because you need it to make the core of your algorithm readable.

Comment on IE7 website by Mel Sorensen

Mel Sorensen — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:02:09 +0000

I have a new laptop running vista and I can’t seem to get the links toolbar to work on ie7 like it did on my old laptop. The browser shows links in the list of toolbars and there is a check by it but all of my links are clear to the right of the toolbar in a list. How can I get the links across the top of the browser like I had on my previous computer?

Comment on Google Maps measure of Credibility by Steve

Steve — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 12:14:15 +0000

Surely you aren’t saying that people are just trying to use pretty pictures to hide the inadequacies of their product?

Its Hollywood

Comment on Java Shared Mime Info by Matt

Matt — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:07:55 +0000

First - Nice library!

Second - I have users that create Excel files and then later down the road save them with a .csv extension. I know…I know…why they do this is beyond this question. When I use version 0.0.6 on this type of file it reports it as a text/csv. Opening the file in a text editor clearly shows that this is not a csv file. Can you give a reason why it is returning “text/csv” instead of “application/vnd.ms-excel”?

Thanks!

Matt

Comment on iTunes Puts Me Off Buying a Mac by Claire K

Claire K — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:18:23 +0000

Solution: buy a Creative Zen - far more lovely than any iPod!

Comment on Java Shared Mime Info by arimus

arimus — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:53:08 +0000

Sorry, been afk due to some job switching Yeah, if you provide me with any patches you guys have arimus AT users.sourceforge.net, I can merge in the changes for folks. I only ask that you give me the okay to dual-license any contributions…I may switch to another license (Apache perhaps) at some point here.

As for licensing, I am currently licensing under the LGPL, which is not a viral license and does not require you to release your code at all. It only requires modifications to jmimemagic itself be opened up to those you distribute to.

jMimeMagic can handle both files and byte[]. Currently streams are not supported, but that wouldn’t be too hard to add.

Comment on Adam Smith vs. Fred Brooks by Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:29:57 +0000

I’ve been thinking about Economics and Software Engineering too - Seemed to me when I read Keynes’ “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” that his re evaluation of classical economics and questioning of accepted wisdom (which by his day basically distilled and over simplified Smith) could also apply to S/W Eng and “Big Design Up Front” adherents:

“But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable.” The Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp.61-62

Watch out for an essay on Agile Architecture using this quote and many more when I get a spare second to write it…

Oh, and BTW, did I mention my great great grandfather was from Kirkaldy?

Comment on Java Shared Mime Info by andy

andy — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:18:49 +0000

Renzo,

It shouldn’t be hard to make the change to the code necessary. If you could send me the changes that would be great! I’ll probably be adding this feature soon but can’t guarantee timescale

As for the license issues you should consult with your legal people.