Random Thinking

Every week at JavaRanch we have a book promotion where an author visits us, answers questions, and at the end of the week we give away four copies of the author’s book. The book promotions are very popular as they provide two great opportunities:

1. You get to ask an author a lot of questions
2. You might win a free book

The books are provided to us by the publishers so since I run the book promotions I get to work with the promoters from many of the publishers. They work hard to promote the technical books that their companies publish. In spite of the enourmous pressure they must be under during these tough times for IT books they are universally very nice people and are an absolute pleasure to work with. I deal with Kerry Guiliano at Addison-Wesley the most so I want to give her a special thanks but all of the people on this list make my job at JavaRanch easy and I want to thank all of them. I apologize to anyone I may have left off.

A very special thanks to:

• Kerry Guiliano – Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Heather Fox – Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Heather Mullane – Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Ann Sellers – Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall
• Bettina Faltermeier – McGraw-Hill
• Helen Trimes – Manning
• Eric Holmgren – Wiley/Wrox
• Judy Taylor – Murach
• Ruth Boyer – O’Reilly
• Hollie Fischer – APress
• Doris Wong – APress

And even though she isn’t a publicist, I would also like to thank Merrikay Lee, the president of MC Press for being a strong supporter of our book promotions.

My daughter is at that pre-teen age that marketers love and they have been working overtime on my little girl. Beth has done her share to make millionaires out of various female recording stars over the last few years including The Spice Girls, Brittany Spears, Avril Lavigne, and now Hilary Duff.

Hilary has been popular in our household long before she released her album, of course. She was a star of a hit Disney program as well as starring in a couple of films. But now Hilary has released her new album and my daughter insists on listening to it 24×7.

But I guess this isn’t too bad since I prefer her listening to the relatively harmless Ms. Duff instead of the brainless Ms. Spears who has decided that being a tramp worked for Madonna so maybe it will work for her. Of course, no one ever accused Madonna of being brainless. The pre-teen set thinks that Ms. Spears is, to quote a song by Ms. Duff, So Yesterday. It is amusing to see the reviews of Ms. Duff’s album on amazon. You can tell who the Lizzy McGuire fans are!

So my world is now made up of watching Kim Possible with soundtrack by Hilary Duff. Thank goodness I get to spend at least eight hours a day at work!

Every year, Software Development Magazine holds their annual Jolt Awards for product excellence. The 14th annual awards were held last night and
JavaRanch won the Productivity Award for Websites and Developer Networks.

Here were the list of finalists:

• Agile Modeling Home Page (Scott Ambler)
• IBM developerWorks (IBM)
• Java.net
• JavaRanch (JavaRanch.com)
• O’Reilly Network (O’Reilly)
• Tigris.org (Tigris.org)
• www.asp.net (Microsoft)

The Excellence winner was IBM developerWorks and was a well deserved win. The Productivity Awards went to: O’Reilly Network, JavaRanch, and Tigris.

I think it is amazing that a little web site built by volunteers without any corporate sponsor can compete with the big multi-billion dollar giants. Look at the sites that were even’t nominated including MSDN and Oracle to name just two. Beats me how we do it.

We have been working on developing new forum software for
JavaRanch. We are currently using UBB for The Big Moose Saloon but for several reasons we have been looking at replacing this Perl based software with a Servlet/JSP based solution. Not the least of these reasons is having to deal with questions as to why a Java site is using a Perl based forum!

We are working with a version of
MVNForum that we have split off. We split for several reasons but mostly because our immedaite goals are different than the goals of the development team working on MVNForum and we wanted to be masters of our own destiny in this case. But the forum we are developing will be open source and free for anyone who wants to use it. MVNSaloon, which is the development name we have given it, is a SourceForge project.

As part of the development cycle we needed a way to track bugs and enhancement requests. We had been using things like discussion groups and our own version of a wiki called Friki developed by Frank Carver. These are helpful for discussing issues but not for tracking them. The people at Atlassian were generous enough to give us a free copy of JIRA 2.6. They have a licensing scheme that grants a free copy of JIRA to open source projects that are using OSI approved license. For the last few weeks we have been using this as our bug/issue/enhancement tracking software.

What a pleasure it is to use this product. Beyond the fact that it is easy to use and mostly inutitve is that the product actually does what it is supposed to, that is, track bugs.

• You can set it up to keep you informed when new issues are added or comments are added to an existing issue.
• You can track issues to versions.
• You can tie an issue to an external link such as a discussion or wiki. This has been very useful to us since practically all our enhancement requests start as a discussion.

But the best part for me is that the appearance is completely customizable. I don’t have to rely on what information someone else thinks I need to see when I go to my project. I can set it up so that all the information I need is right on the front page. For example, I have my front page configured so that I see all open issues and all issues that have been updated in the last 24 hours. Instead of having to search for these things, the information I need is right there on the front page!

After having used JIRA, I am going to see about purchasing a license for use at my company. I think this will go a long way to improving our current bug tracking system which is basically pieces of paper on my desk.

This really ended up sounding like a commercial which wasn’t my intent but I really do like this software.

For Map, here is a screenshot of my JIRA home page. You can see more screenshots on the JIRA web site.

My son is over his bout of illness from the weekend. Mikey was supposed to have his eyes checked yesterday but it had to be cancelled because they won’t do a procedure under anesthesia since he had been running a fever.

My wife, of course, caught what Mikey had and was really sick yesterday. She had to go for an MRI for something else today and they screwed up the injection so now her arm is swollen and purple. She went off to the ER a little while ago and left me with the kids.

My stupid car has been giving me trouble on a regular basis (note to self: never buy a Sebring again). I was supposed to bring it in to see why the check engine light is staying lit but it snowed here so I ended up cancelling the appointment.

Tomorrow is another day.

I have usually used Eclipse for my development (when I’m not using a basic editor – UltraEdit). But I got hold of a copy of IDEA 4.0 to check it out. I actually like it a lot. The usage features are nice as are the refactorings. I have an article on my desk that tells me how to integrate IDEA with an application server for debugging but I haven’t gotten around to setting it up yet.

There is one thing that absolutely drives me crazy. Every Windows application in the world uses Ctrl+Y for redo. But IDEA uses Ctrl+Y to delete the current line. I can’t tell you how many times I have hit Ctrl+Y a bunch of times thinking I was undoing something and then look up to see my code mangled. Arghhh! Why can’t we just follow the standard?

I just wrote a review for Amazon of The Golden Ratio : The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio. I’m usually a fairly easy marker but this book bored me to tears. The guy writes a book on math and tries to keep as much math out the book as possible. Instead he talks about why the builders of the pyramids really didn’t use phi. And then anyone who has even a marginal association with phi gets long, pointless biographies.

I think Livio completely missed his audience. People who are going to be interested in reading this book are not going to be afraid of a little math.

You can read the full review here: My Amazon Reviews

My article on Velocity was recently published in the JavaRanch Journal. I am slightly paranoid about my writing as I think everything I write sucks. Perhaps it says something that I continue to write articles anyway.

I’ve written an article for next month’s Journal already. Usually I wait until the last possible moment but for some reason I felt inspired and the article came pouring out of me in just a few hours. It took longer to test all the code and make sure it worked perfectly than it did to write the article.

Anyway, I decided I like Velocity a lot. Back in the Dark Ages before JSP was invented, we were all struggling to find ways to make servlets less than horrible. My staff and I were working on a project called the Cendant Global Referral Network (CGRN) and we needed a way to get the HTML out of our servlets. We developed a methodology very similar to Velocity. Our goals were pretty simple:

• get the HTML out of the servlets

• make the HTML editable in a cool HTML editor
• have the HTML work in a browser without having to go through Java
• make it so simple that you could explain it to a web designer with no Java experience in less than 1 hour

Velocity does all these things and with an extremely limited language there is little temptation to break MVC and put your code in scriptlets.

I just finished writing a review of this book. This is one of the worst edited books I have ever read. The code is full of errors (both compile and logic) and the grammar is terrible. I know a lot of times these projects are rushed and the authors may not be native English speakers but this is really bad. It is especially ironic because the book praises TDD and yet the authors produce non-compiling code that doesn’t work even when you get it to compile. I think a good dose of test cases would have helped.

Still, I gave the book six horseshoes (3 stars on Amazon) because it does have a good deal of value. I just wish they had put more effort into doing it right.

Symbol Technologies, the company I work for, has been working on focusing what the company is all about. The previous management lacked a clear vision of what Symbol is but our new management is very visionary. Our new slogan is “Symbol: The Enterprise Mobility Company ™”. We see ourselves as providing true mobility solutions (not just portable solutions) at the enterprise level.

Our President and CEO, Bill Nuti, had this to say:
“We have focused on delivering solutions that enable a simple core concept – the ability to capture, move and manage information, in real time, to and from the point of business activity. This concept sets Symbol apart from any competitor. It is what delivers unparalleled value to
our customers. It is core to our vision and business strategy.”

It has been a long time since I have been excited about a business strategy at any of the companies I have worked for, but I think the executives at Symbol have a deep understanding of the market and where Symbol fits in that market.