Blue Sky On Mars

Rebates on computer products often suck. I waited a year to get a rebate on my Envision LCD monitor. TCA Fulfillment Services has conveniently lost not one, but two separate rebates for Computer Geeks products! TCA (who runs “wheresmyrebate.com”) has just denied a CompUSA rebate of mine, because they didn’t like the receipt I sent them. Beware, beware, beware!

On the flip side, there’s Apple. I had a far bigger rebate coming from them, and they got the check in my hands 3 weeks after I sent it in! That’s the way to process rebates.
Update 1/19/05: This posting appears to be one of my most viewed over time. For your convenience, TCA’s toll-free number is: 800-578-8883 (that way you don’t have to read through all of the comments to find that tidbit).

I bet sometime sooner than later I’m going to need a Swing calendar component.

ZVTM is a Zoomable user interface toolkit for Java. One of the example applications put forth is IsaViz, an RDF editor that represents RDF as a directed graph. I’ve always thought that the RDF XML syntax was more than a little unwieldy for normal humans, so IsaViz seems like a great tool.

I’ve been thinking about (and working on/with) Java Swing GUI frameworks quite a bit lately. The GUI-Commands project incorporates some ideas that I’ve seen in Eclipse (the notion of menus and toolbars being built up dynamically, called contributions in Eclipse). I’m somewhat surprised to not see any mention of UndoableEdits in there, because that’s a great benefit to using the command pattern with Swing… it’s fairly straightforward to do undo.

I had initially thought of having commands in my system provide UI components as they do in GUI-Commands, but had changed my mind because I found a way to make the commands themselves largely transparent to the application. We’ve got a lot of apps to write, though, and I may change my mind if I find that we need to create the same menu items all over the place.

It seems entirely likely that I may want to look this project up again sometime. It’s released (according to the java.net page) under the LGPL.

This is one of those “wow” things. Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia

An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon’s multimillion-title catalog. The entire collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is viewable.

I have a pretty good idea what’s involved in creating the archive that Amazon has created because of my work. Scanning and OCRing 120,000 books is an impressive feat.

The Hoax Photo Test is more difficult than you might expect. It’s quite a collection of photos… I scored 4/10 on level 1, and 6/10 on level 2.

An intriguing article about a technique for marketing called memory morphing. The basic idea is that you plant some notion about a product in service in someone’s mind that makes them tend to think differently about previous experiences.

She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert “remembered” meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character.

I have a feeling that had I saw that particular advertisement, I would have thought “that’s odd, Bugs Bunny doesn’t belong at Disneyland”. But different people have better memories for different things. I could see a lot of people not having the “Bugs Bunny is from Warner Bros.” factoid at the ready.

XML.com: microdom: an XML DOM Designed For HTML [Oct. 15, 2003]

This article introduces microdom, a XML DOM implementation written in Python which was designed for dealing with HTML’s legacy issues both when parsing and when generating documents.

From Hacknot comes The Skeptical Software Development Manifesto. It’s meant to be an attack on XP and the Agile Manifesto, but is really just an essay on skeptical thought. I don’t think anyone will debate this principle:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer by adopting those working practices which give us the highest chance of successful software delivery.

Absolutely. I even agree with the statement that we need to identify the degree/frequency of customer involvement.

But, the fact of the matter is that while Mr. Ed is trying to attack XP with his manifesto, he’s really attacking every software development methodology.

We recognize that controlled experimentation in the software development domain is difficult, as is achieving isolation of variables, but that is no excuse for not pursuing the most rigorous examination of claims that we can, or for excusing claimants from the burden of supporting their claims.

Sure. But, who’s going to spend the time doing this? If you want to write a PhD thesis comparing the effectiveness of XP and CMM, go for it! I’m going to write some software.

From The Deflowering of a Pair Programming Virgin:

For a pairing of mature developers, I believe the effect on code quality is vastly overstated amongst the XP community. That there is some marginal improvement in the quality of the code when first cut seems clear. That this improvement justifies the investment of effort required to produce it, or that it could not be obtained more efficiently through regular code review techniques, is not at all clear.

The use of the words “I believe” throughout the conclusion of this article clearly show that these are to be considered opinions. The opinions in this article are derived from one person’s observations of pairing with one other person for four days.

The “Deflowering” article seems typical of what is on the Hacknot site… so, finding “proven” software development techniques does not seem to be something that will come from Hacknot. Nor will that proof come from me.

When you get down to it, I’d probably be willing to sign both the Agile Manifesto and the Skeptical Software Development Manifesto. Until someone comes along with “proven” software techniques that meet the Skeptical Manifesto requirements, I will continue to do things the agile way which in my opinion provides my customer with the best software.

Ned Batchelder: Exceptions in the rainforest is a response to Joel Spolsky’s article on exceptions. He had a nice little breakdown of system code to go with his explanation of why exceptions are “better”:

In my experience, there are three layers to real code (from bottom to top, so this list might look upside-down):

* Adapting the software beneath you.
* Building pieces of your system.
* Combining it all together.

I agree with Ned’s article here. This is why exceptions are good. I think Ned is also making the argument for either using unchecked exceptions or for just transparently passing the exceptions all the way back up to the C layer.