Find the world’s most boring blog

I think we should have a competition to find the world’s boring or pointless blog. Add your suggestions below, here is one to start the ball rolling

“Thus far the LORD has helped us.” 1 Samuel 7:12

P.S. Putting my blog in the list is not allowed

I Crossed the 500 Hits/Day Threshold! Yayyy!!!!

Blog Stats

Total Views: 2,895

Best Day Ever: 517

Views today: 518

I Crossed the 200 Hits/Day Threshold! Yayyy!!!! « The Wandering Glitch 2

Today I had record stats on my blog

I read this post on Andrew’s blog with some envy a few weeks ago as I was struggling to get above 50 on most days. Now today I have suddenly jumped to 517 (so far) and it turns out that it’s mainly due to Andrew and my discussion about Agile development. Someone liked what we said and send my post to Stumble Upon

So many thanks Andrew and I think you may have got a few extra hits as well.

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Handy Hack: format the display on gworldclock clock

Updated Oct/08

• I now use Gnome Clock. Right click on the task bar and you add additional time zones.
• If you don’t have access to GMT time zone in your tool add Reykavik, it uses GMT all year around.

Gnome has a handy little application, Gworldclock, that displays the date and time in multiple time zones (I currently keep track of nine).

Adding new time zones is done through the GUI interface and should be obvious after some experimentation. It is also possible to change the format in which dates and times are displayed (File/Preferences) and there is an option to enter a custom format. However for new Linux users it is not very obvious how to create a custom format and there is no explanation (until now).

The format is specified using the conventions of the UNIX date command and you can get the that documentation by typing man date at a shell prompt. I’ve also added a summary to the end of this post but I am not sure if Gworldclock supports all the options. To start with you might want to try %R %a, however %N is probably of limited value

%a     locale's abbreviated weekday name (e.g., Sun)

%A     locale's full weekday name (e.g., Sunday)

%b     locale's abbreviated month name (e.g., Jan)

%B     locale's full month name (e.g., January)

%c     locale's date and time (e.g., Thu Mar  3 23:05:25 2005)

%C     century; like %Y, except omit last two digits (e.g., 21)

%d     day of month (e.g, 01)

%D     date; same as %m/%d/%y

%e     day of month, space padded; same as %_d

%F     full date; same as %Y-%m-%d

%g     the  last  two  digits  of the year corresponding to the %V week number

%G     the year corresponding to the %V week number

%h     same as %b

%H     hour (00..23)

%I     hour (01..12)

%j     day of year (001..366)

%k     hour ( 0..23)

%l     hour ( 1..12)

%m     month (01..12)

%M     minute (00..59)

%n     a newline

%N     nanoseconds (000000000..999999999)

%p     locale's equivalent of either AM or PM; blank if not known

%P     like %p, but lower case

%r     locale's 12-hour clock time (e.g., 11:11:04 PM)

%R     24-hour hour and minute; same as %H:%M

%s     seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC

%S     second (00..60)

%t     a tab

%T     time; same as %H:%M:%S

%u     day of week (1..7); 1 is Monday

%U     week number of year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53)

%V     week number of year with Monday as first day of week (01..53)

%w     day of week (0..6); 0 is Sunday

%W     week number of year with Monday as first day of week (00..53)

%x     locale's date representation (e.g., 12/31/99)

%X     locale's time representation (e.g., 23:13:48)

%y     last two digits of year (00..99)

%Y     year

%z     +hhmm numeric timezone (e.g., -0400)

%:z    +hh:mm numeric timezone (e.g., -04:00)

Linux for the ungodly?

Linux for Christians | Ichthux

Ichthux is an operating system aimed at Christian users

And so the though comes to mind, “What would Linux for atheists look like?”.

Answers on a post card please….

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Formal UML documentation for ALM Processes

Use Cases and Implementing Application Lifecycle Management Systems

use cases can be deployed with good effect when implementing an enterprise scale Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system.

I found this article from a pointer the CM forum at the Xing networking site. Whilst I had considered the use of use cases before for process, I had not really thought about it a this level if granularity or the use of sequence diagrams to show higher level process. I might try some of this in my next Development Process engineering project.

Once obvious area of concern is that the products from such a UML effort will be too cumbersome to be useful and to hard to re-factor into more comprehensible documentation. Remember my mantra is “Appropriately Lightweight“

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So why the hell do I use Linux?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Battle of the operating systems

in 100 words or less, why you are such a supporter of your chosen operating system and what features you love about it

The BBC is asking people to justify their choice of OS, and to be honest it’s a hard thing to do in an objective and factual way. However let’s see how I do…

Linux provides my with the most flexible and compatible platform for the type of technical software work I do. It’s cheap in license fees, secure and highly functional. The are also a complete set of business and office applications to use as well.

The downside the is the extra time it takes to get hardware and gadgets to work. and everyone else’s’ assumption that I can run Windows software or that MS Office is my native file format.

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We need more hard computer science, not less

There was a debate arising out of an incident at OSDC 2006 which prompted this comment in the blogsphere. Note that this post is about the teaching of computer courses, not the original incident, which already seems to have generated enough heat and noise.

Why there’s few women in IT

The computer science programs are padded with so many inconsequential classes to make up a full degree. Who really needs assembly language now? And we have a class in Pascal one day, and databases the next — without any rhyme or reason how these interface into the real world.

Let me start off by saying that more women in the computer profession would be a good thing, I don’t why there are so few and I don’t think I have any particularly good ideas about how to get more.

However I do have strong views that we should be more rigorous in teaching computer subjects and that there should be a bias towards teaching core fundamental technologies as a basis for future learning. So I would expect to see some basic electronics, assembler programming, compiler writing, OS theory (and with access to OSS operating systems students can actually to practical lab work), data structures, algorithm analysis and so on.

The value of such knowledge is threefold:

1. Students have a mental model into which more advanced ideas and technology understanding may added
2. In future life solving real problems is much easier when you have a wider understanding of the technologies under which your system is running.
3. It become easier to assimilate the many new ideas that sweep over the industry every few years e.g. the move to OO from Structured programming.

I see too many undergraduates with no core computer skills. All they are fit for is project management (with apologies to the many few excellent project managers I know)

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Yet more on the Agile debate

Andrew very rapidly replied to my last post about Agile and as usual had much to say that was worth reading. However there was one issue I wanted to pick up on.

More on the Agile Debate « The Wandering Glitch 2

Everything changes around us because those who ought to have given more thought to the requirements have postponed thinking (indefinitely?).

Perhaps the easiest way is to illustrate a counterpoint is with a true story from my own chequered past!

Agile is not a panacea, neither is it all wrong

Andrew said last December

Another Anti-Agile Gripe « The Wandering Glitch 2

the ‘agile’ ethos promotes a mentality that actively avoids solving problems ahead of time. That leads to short-termism that ultimately bakes bugs into the code!

I really wanted to say something about this as the time but real life overtook me so here and now is my contribution to the never ending discussion of ‘Agile’ vs. ‘Waterfall’. First some obvious things:

A dark thought for the middle of the night

As I was drifting of to sleep last I suddenly realised that next year it will be 30 years since I wrote my first computer program, a small mainframe BASIC application that printed out the multiplication tables to twelve — no proper loops, just if and goto because that’s as far as I had got in the book. I did this in sixth form at Maidstone Grammar School just as I was starting A level computer science with a new school teacher, Tim Baker, who as you can see has moved onto other things. I owe them, and many other people, a huge debt.

Handy Hack: How to configure gvim for svn and svk commit messages

If you use svn or svk and would like to use the GUI version of Vim to edit your commit messages then add the following in your .profile, SVN_EDITOR="$EDITOR --nofork"; export SVN_EDITOR. This of course assumes that you already have have $EDITOR set to some value such as /usr/bin/gvim.

If you use a csh style shell then modify to suite.

Handy Hack: How to make sudo credentials ‘reset’

Jonh Wendell mentions how to get the sudo program to insult you. If you want to test his hack, then after making the change issue sudo -k which will reset your timestamp to epoch and force password entry the next time you use sudo.

Test Driven Development and EAT’ing are well worth it

Back in November I mentioned that Cogent Consulting were running easy access training (EAT) courses. The first was yesterday and was an exceptional workshop on Test Driven Development (TDD). There will hopefully be further courses so I suggest you keep your eyes on the Cogent EAT web site. There are some more pictures on Steve’s blog.

So what did I learn about TDD and programming in general?

1. TDD requires rigorous application of the write-a-test-see-it-fail-write-the-feature-see-it-pass-re-factor-and-see-it-pass coding cycle
2. Keep a notepad handy to note down any re-factoring you see that will distract in the middle of the cycle
3. I got some exposure to pair programming (I was paired with some more experienced folks which was a huge help because of my lack of Java/Eclipse/Agile programming skills) and found it a revelation — made me wish I did not work on my own the whole time — many thanks to the patient students who worked with me
4. I understood what dependency injection is and more importantly why we want to do it
5. I was reminded of the importance of naming things
6. The difference between State testing and Interaction testing (using mock objects)

Most importantly I was invigorated to be exposed to new ideas and techniques and I’m looking forward to trying TDD for some of my current Perl work. Many thanks to Steve and the other attendees who helped make the day so worthwhile for me.

Is OSS a receipe for chaos?

My father David, a retired engineer, recently asked me the following question:

OSS seems to invite it’s devotes to do their own thing and often that is a recipe for disaster

At first blush this would seem to be a potentially huge problem, however in practice this is not the case. The potential for such splintering comes from two possible sources

1. Members of the development project. In the first instance they can fork the whole project and take it in a completely different direction. In the second instance they can make changes and distribute them outside of project release mechanism. Karl Fogel discusses project forking in his excellent book Producing Open Source Software and shows how it’s a moderating power for good because it forces a consensual style of management. Similarly there is usually little motivation for developers to release patches from outside the project as it much harder to get users to accept them or receive the recognition for the contribution from the user and developer community (the release of experimental patches is a recognised exception to this of course and it widely used in the Linux kernel). Developers who which to work outside the project mechanism for obvious reasons of vanity and ego are usually felt to have little to offer anyway and so get ignored.
2. Customers using OSS products can make modifications and customisations as they see fit. This of course is one of OSS’ major selling points — you can make whatever changes you need to and are mistress of your own destiny. However any organisation that offers OSS support contracts will have caveats about not supporting unknown customisations. Is is not usually in customers interests anyway to stray too far from the core project as it makes taking new features and fixes from the original team much harder.

So basically it works because it is in everyone’s self-interest and the trouble makers get ignored. Does that answer your question Dad?

Mason and YUI

I will be contributing some new work at soon at Unisolve which will revolve around HTML::Mason and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). I am really looking forward to digging further into these tools.

Mason is a templating engine for Perl programmers. That means that you can mix Perl code with your data (often HTML) so that additional content can be generated in the fly before the information is presented. For instance you can extract records from a database. There are a plethora of these tools, however Mason is one of the more established.

YUI is a AJAX library designed to allow web applications to present a rich user interface using Javascript (and other stuff) on the browser. This can make web applications provide features and functions that have only be possible previously with “thick” client software that have enough programmed intelligence to support the user interaction experience.

Handy Hacks: How to create an ISO file image in GNOME

On my Ubuntu 6.10 system the easy way to create an ISO image file is as follows:

1. Insert the CD (or DVD) into the drive. A CD icon should appear on the desktop after it auto mounts
2. Right click on the desktop icon and from the pop up menu select “Copy Disc…”
3. On the small dialogue that appears the “Copy disc to:” field probably displays the CD/DVD writer drive. Change it to “File Image”.
   1. To make a direct CD/DVD media copy on a blank disk leave the field set to the writer drive.
4. Select the “Write” button
5. On the next screen modify the file name (keep the ISO file suffix) and directory name as required.
6. Select “OK”

The copy starts.

Eclipse 3.2, Junit4 and Debian based Linux

I have just discovered that if you use the deb based distribution of Eclipse for Ubuntu Linux (6.10 in my case) then Junit4 is disabled. This also seems to apply to other Debian based distributions I think.

The fix is to download Eclipse from the Eclipse web site and unpack. Then run Eclipse from the unpacked location. You need to have previously installed JDK 1.5 of better.

A new free Australian web site for property owners

A colleague from Melbourne Perl Mongers has started a new web site called Free House, providing free property listing services for the Australia market. I have no idea how he’s going to make money as I can’t see any adverts! However I wish him the best of luck.

If you’re looking to sell or rent then why not try it? It costs nothing.

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Organisation Wide Processes

Over on the LinkedIn network Juhani Anttila asks

We have here in Finland a networked group of participants from different business and public organizations in the country. We are working with questions of the development of business processes in our organizations.What is your opinion and experience HOW SHOULD ONE START WITH THE ORGANIZATION-WIDE DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESSES IN ONES ORGANIZATION? Reference (unfortunately only in Finnish language):

Whilst business processes are not my area of expertise I thought I would hazard a reply.

Perl inside-out objects

According to Perl Best Practices, a.k.a PBP, the “One True Way” to implement Objects is using a technique called inside-out. Unfortunately reading Daminan’s explanation, although as usual excellent in many ways, did my head in because I could not imagine how the storage was logically laid out (I’m kinda old fashioned in how I understand things you see).

Luckily a quick FWSEy and I was able to find Perl Australia’s cool explanation that lays out the way the attribute hashes store values in inside-out objects. I suggest you print out a copy, fold it up and place inside PBP (What do you mean, you don’t have a copy? I hope you’re not a Perl programmer). The content is Open so you can do that, Hurrah for Open Content I say.

There are still a number of questions in my mind about how this works but perhaps I can find someone at next Perl Mongers meetings, in a brewery this month, to fill in the gaps. I’m afraid the website is wrong about the meeting BTW — it’s on Friday 12/Jan.

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