My Stuff » Languages

Cool Code v Working Code

Martin English — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:57:13 +0000

Developers and Administrators under the age of thirty have no idea why old farts like me are sceptical of the productivity claims, why we roll our eyes at the hype and buzzwords that sell books and consulting engagements, about the amzing new programming language / technique / methodology du jour. Occassionally, it’s because we’ve seen it all before. IBM systems running multiple operating system instances ? Sounds like good ole MVS to me….

For example, the current state of play is that Sun’s JRuby team (Sun hired key Ruby developers Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, back in September) has just released JRuby 0.9.1 for Java, with version 1.0 is expected in due course.

Apparently, going from JRuby 0.9.1 to 0.9.0 apparently brings a 50 to 60 per cent performance improvement (just how slow was it then ?), improves support for Ruby on Rails and for including Java classes in Ruby; delivers various design refactorings; and fixes some 86 Jira bugs. According to Thomas Enebo,
JRuby is going really well.

And Microsoft has just hired Ruby guru John Lam, to help it add dynamic scripting languages to the Common Language Runtime platform. Apparently, he created RubyCLR as an alternative to Microsoft’s C#, so this suggests that Microsoft could soon deliver Ruby as a complement to it’s release of IronPython (which is Python for .Net). There’s certainly a rich choice for dynamic programming enthusiasts these days.

The problem I have is that delivering systems fast is popular, until the business finds out:

that what it gets doesn’t align with its requirements well,
that the cost of development pales into insignificance besides the cost of support,
there’s no traceability

Of course, better dynamic languages may help but they’re still not really the real issue, as far as I can see., For example, customers and employers are thinking about ITIL and IT governance).

The real issue is that there’s No Silver Bullet. It’s an important essay from way back in 1986, by Frederick P. Brooks (he of Mythical Man-Month) that has been repeatedly proven.

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve. An example of an accidental difficulty is manual memory management, e.g. “malloc” and “free,” or the singleton classes people create in Java because they don’t have top level functions. An example of something which is actually difficult is dealing with the subtle interactions between different parts of a program, for example, figuring out all the implications of a new feature that you just added.

Improvements in programming languages can eliminate accidental difficulties, but after you’ve done that, you’re left with the actual complexity of software development, so the No Silver Bullet theory basically warns us to expect diminishing returns from new technologies. I’m not really doing justice to Brooks’ argument, so if you haven’t read No Silver Bullet recently, I would highly recommend it.

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Free Language Courses » FSI Language Courses

Martin English — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:58:44 +0000

Free Language Courses » FSI Language Courses
The United States Government’s Foreign Service Institute has created a website offering eleven different language courses for free. Languages included are: Cantonese, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish.

All courses consist of audio and text lessons divided into chapters and those are divided further into courses like basic course volume 1 and volume 2. Most units and audio files seem to be really big, the test mp3 files that I listened to had a size of about 10 megabytes each and lasted for about 20 minutes.

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those cartoons

Martin English — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 03:36:42 +0000

Surah 5:2-4 from the Koran:

“And let not the hatred of some people in shutting you out of the Sacred Mosque lead you to transgression and hostility on your part. Help ye one another in righteousness and piety.”

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Fear of Writing

Martin English — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:29:08 +0000

From Coding Horror :

When I meet people that have something to say, and an interesting way of saying it, I encourage them to blog. But there’s one big hurdle many people simply never get past: the actual writing. I can respect that. Writing is hard. People spend their entire lives learning how to write effectively. It isn’t something you can fake. It isn’t something you can buy. You have to work at it.

And that’s exactly why people who are afraid they can’t write should be blogging. It’s like exercise. No matter how out of shape you are, if you exercise a few times a week, you’ll inevitably get fitter. And if you write a small blog entry a few times every week, you’re bound to become a better writer. If you’re not writing because you’re intimidated by writing, well, you’re likely to stay that way forever.

If you’re still hesitant, I highly recommend John Scalzi’s Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing, and Brian Marick’s Hints for Revising. They’re absolutely dead on with every point. Consider your writing a natural extension of your spoken conversations. If you aren’t comfortable reading it out loud, rewrite it until you are. In the words of Elmore Leonard:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Blogging isn’t for everyone. But if you think it might be for you, don’t let fear of writing keep you from doing it.

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www.techbooksforfree.com

Martin English — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 01:16:46 +0000

Good Technical books for free download, includes
* Linux
* Java
* Microsoft
* C and C++
* Perl/Python
* Science in general
* Networking
* Database
* Security
* Assembly Programming
It also has a link to the IBM redbooks site.

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Who’ll mind the mainframes?

Martin English — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 08:27:49 +0000

The Boston Globe has a running a story about the maintainers of the mainframes getting older and facing retirement. One of the problems is that many computer science programs don’t include mainframes in their curricula anymore. From the article:
“Amid concerns that America doesn’t produce enough technically trained young people, mainframe computer users and developers are especially concerned. Most computer science students concentrate on small-computer technology, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating systems, or the popular alternatives Unix and Linux. Few have been trained on zOS, the operating system that runs IBM Corp.’s massive mainframes.”
According to Forrester Research in Cambridge, the actual number of companies and organizations that use mainframes has declined.
”But the user organizations are increasingly large. The largest organizations are the ones that are most loyal to the platform.”
For an Australian perspective on the issue and how it is being dealt with, look here.

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Australia Linux trademark row

Martin English — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:29:10 +0000

Some background on why the Linux mark institute (and more specifically Linus Torvalds) are attempting to licence the Linux trademark in Australia.
If you don’t protect a trademark, it becomes useless. thats why Kimberly-Clark don’t like you using the term Kleenex if you mean any old generic paper tissue. My understanding is that the owners of specific trademarks don’ twant their specific product confused with any other; they’ve got a lot of value invested in the brand and don’t want it devalued.
PS See here for a funny story related to the “.. for dummies” series.

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State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs

Martin English — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:55:03 +0000

Ajax hasn’t even been big a year yet and already open source development tools by the dozen are pouring out. Not to mention big names like TIBCO and Microsoft already have previews on the way of full-fledged IDEs for developing Ajax applications. Ajax may be the biggest software development story of 2005.
Dion Hinchcliffe has a detailed article about how Ajax has evolved over the last six months and assesses the current state of tools, libraries, and mindshare.
Something I’m picking up from watching stories about intranet AJAX developments is that since it requires high performance back-end XML services, it may inadvertently up being a driving force for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for many organizations.
Bear in mind, though, that the point of providing SOA services is to be able to combine them and use them in a manner that is consistent and abstracted from the source application(s). SOA operates at the integration level… between apps. To assume that services should be tied together at the browser assumes that architecturally significant web services are so fine-grained that they would be useful for driving a user interface. That is nonsense.
Another issue, vaguely related, is the movement from “local” to “remote” data storage. In fact, it was going on before AJAX – since people went from fat client software towards more streamlined C/S replacements, due mostly to convenience and easier features, server updates etc. Examples include web mail (i.e. outlook v hotmail).

Ajax (programming)
Ajaz gotchas
Ajax matters

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Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails

Martin English — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Learning to develop web applications with Ruby on Rails has gained a huge amount of interest lately, but for people wanting to learn Rails there are no books on the subject. That’s changed now with the pre-release of Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails , the latest book from Dave Thomas and the author of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson. It’s really 3 books in one: a full Rails tutorial, an in depth guide to the components that make up Rails, and an introduction to developing applications using the Agile development model. There’s even a quick introduction to Ruby, the language Rails is built with.

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/04/on_conferences.html

“Ruby on Rails is astounding. Using it is like watching a kung-fu movie, where a dozen bad-ass frameworks prepare to beat up the little newcomer only to be handed their asses in a variety of imaginative ways. I’ve got David Heinemeier Hanson giving a session, tutorial, and keynote. That’s how much I love “convention over configuration” and the other philosophies behind Rails. Rails shows us a very interesting future for web applications, and is a great example of innovation from within the open source community.”

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PHP date — Format a local time/date

Martin English — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

string date ( string format [, int timestamp] )
$hh = date(“H”);
if ($hh > “11″) { after_midday() };

Fmt Description DAY =========================================================== d Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros D A textual representation of a day, three letters j Day of the month without leading zeros l A full textual representation of the day of the week S English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters w Numeric representation of the day of the week z The day of the year (starting from 0)


WEEK ==========================================================
W    ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0)
MONTH =========================================================
F    A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March
m    Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros
M    A short textual representation of a month, three letters
n    Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros
t    Number of days in the given month
YEAR ==========================================================
L    Whether it's a leap year
Y    A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits
y    A two digit representation of a year
TIME ==========================================================
a    Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem
A    Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem
B    Swatch Internet time
g    12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros
G    24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros
h    12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros
H    24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros
i    Minutes with leading zeros
s    Seconds, with leading zeros
TIMEZONE ======================================================
I    Whether or not the date is in daylights savings time
O    Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours
T    Timezone setting of this machine
Z    Timezone offset in seconds. Zones west of UTC are negative, east are positive.

FULL DATETIME ================================================= c ISO 8601 date (added in PHP 5) r RFC 2822 formatted date U Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT)

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ajax: a new approach to web applications

Martin English — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Historicaly, there’s a big gap between the richness and responsiveness of Desktop applications and that of Web technologies. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences it provides compared to the experiences users can get from a desktop application.
That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.
Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:
* standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
* dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
* data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
* asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
* and JavaScript binding everything together.
read more at adaptive path � ajax: a new approach to web applications.

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Old PC Operating Systems

Martin English — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Software doesn’t wear out

The Washington Post has an article on how aging operating systems are still widely used. The article states that “The research firm IDC estimates that of the roughly 514 million paid-for copies of Windows on desktops and laptops worldwide at the end of 2004, almost 21 percent were the aging Win 95, 98 and Millennium Edition releases.”
Cars wear out. Clothes wear out. My computer hardware will eventually wear out. But my software and the OS that works best to run it on, wont wear out. Why is everyone so hung up on the latest version of stuff _if_ the old version is doing the job? For a home user, Office2003 (or whatever the latest version is) doesn’t provide any extra functionality over, say, Office97.
This sounds like a message for the users, but maybe it is a wakeup for the OS manufacturers. So many people that still see their OS as viable and are willing to use it… The OS companies have to provide a real and justifiable reason to sell a new release. Especially when the changes that make a new feature possible often times bring instability, data corruption, or regressive preformance issues.
In fact, your kid will do wonderfully on their schoolwork with Office 97. It’ll look great when printed on that old Laserjet 4. You run almost zero virus risk if you have a cheap hardware firewall on your cable connection and limit where your kids can surf. Just to make sure you’re not exceeding the limits of the hardware. As secondary or tertiary boxes, there is no problem whatsoever with old versions of Windows.
Btw, most of the users referred to in the arcticle are not candidates for a Linux system… The default footprint of a modern Linux distributions is too bloated for the sort of hardware that can get away with win98 or or earlier.
Links:
UNOFFICIAL Windows98 SE SP1 1.6.2
98 Lite
XP Lite and 2000 Lite
Live Windows CD
Win98 USB details
NT 4 USB Fix

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