Published at January 30, 2008
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File this one under the “you’ve got to be kidding me” category. Amazon patent number 7,325,045 abstract says:
A client component runs on a user computer in conjunction with a web browser and detects errors, such as but not limited to “404: page not found” errors, in which a requested web page or other object cannot be displayed. In response to detecting the error, the client component notifies an error processing server, which uses the URL of the failed request to identify an alternate object to display. The alternate object may, for example, be (a) an object retrieved from replacement URL, or from a URL that is otherwise related to the requested object, (b) a cached version of the requested object, (c) an object retrieved from a closely matching URL found in the user’s clickstream history, or (d) a dynamically generated page that includes links to one or more of the foregoing types of alternate objects. Also disclosed are methods for identifying alternate objects for a given URL.
So in a nutshell they are saying they are patenting any means of processing an error. Whether that is showing you an alternate page from some means of lookup. In other words, if you do any kind of logical error processing for your site you would be infringing on their patent. How nice.
The patent can be seen here.
Published at January 29, 2008
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After a few weeks of moving back to a Mac, I can honestly say that I am far more productive that I ever was on a PC. The really ironic thing? I’m not using an IDE. While I have Eclipse installed, I didn’t go beyond that and I haven’t honestly opened Eclipse in over two weeks.
The Secret?
Well, the company I work for had an extra license for TextMate and I grabbed it. I’ve never used it before but I have always heard such good things about it and decided to give it a whirl. In the past I’ve been a diehard JEdit fan. JEdit has the best code folding hands down, and a wonderful array of plugins.
However, I have to admit that TextMate has pretty much won me over. Dare I say that I enjoy writing code now? I never thought an editor would make writing code actually enjoyable in and of itself, but this is about as close as I have come to finding such a thing. Combined with the tabbed terminal in OS X 10.5, I have almost everything I need to write my code quickly and run my tests.
Say It Isn’t So!
The key to being productive? Very little mouse usage. While I have yet to master all TextMate’s key combos, I know enough to be fairly quick at it. Yes, yes, IntelliJ and Eclipse both have a wide array of keyboard assignments, but for some reason it just isn’t the same. Maybe it’s mental, who knows.
The single biggest feature that I use is the CMD-T, which brings up the open file dialog that allows you to search for a file just by typing in it’s name. This saves tons of time as you aren’t hunting around a traditional file open dialog. IntelliJ has a similar feature but it has two different key combos depending on the file type. Yuck. I believe Eclipse has something similar as well. Neither one is as seemless or quick as TextMate’s though.
The One Big Drawback
If there is one thing that I miss the most about a full IDE is code completion. With a language as API heavy as Java is, code completion is almost a must. So far I’ve been getting by pretty good, but I do miss it from time to time.
Published at January 24, 2008
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Raymond Lewallen has a post on CodeBetter.com about how there is too much money to be made in software development and the general mediocrity of software developers these days.
For the most part I have to agree with him. Even though I am in a different community than him (be being in Java and he in the Microsoft camp), the same sentiment about mediocre and poor developers being the norm rather than the exception holds true. It is utterly amazing how many bad developers there are out there with very little to no problem solving abilities or outright horrible coding practices, and they get paid well.
Of course the real fault here lies in bad interviewing and hiring practices. The right pre-hire process could solve a lot of these problems. It won’t weed out everyone, but it would weed out the vast majority. The company I now work for has almost half the dev group interviewing a candidate at any given time. You don’t come in for a one or two hour interview. You come in all day long. The result? More than one set of eyes and ears listening to what they have to say over a wide variety of subjects. As a result of this the skill level is quite high.
What about salary?
Good developers should get paid well. Companies can rarely get by without good software these days and a handfull of good developers far outweighs a ton of poor developers. The problem is in judging how to pay these people. I remember some time ago reading on Joel on Software about how they structured their pay scale. Open and basically fixed. Everyone knew what everyone else made by their “ranking” or title.
Do I feel fairly compensated. I would have to say yes for the most part. Sure I would like more money, but who wouldn’t?
Do you feel like you make enough?
Published at January 16, 2008
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It looks like BEA has finally been bought, by Oracle. BEA was always a leader in implementing JEE specs and almost always ahead of everybody else.
Now that Oracle has them, I’m sure they will succumb to monstrosity that is the Oracle machine. Assimilated, folded into the mass, it will slowly fade away. For BEA’s investors and shareholders it is probably a good thing, as it is hard to compete in the application server market place these days, with the open source offering being so well rounded and the smart companies finally realizing that they just don’t need a full JEE stack app server.
The sad thing is the weblogic was the only real commercial competitor to IBM’s websphere. Anybody who has had the displeasure of running websphere will know what a POS that software is. Hopefully Oracle won’t mangle it too much.
Published at January 15, 2008
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It seems like Twitter is getting yet another black eye, as Duncan Riley reports from TechCrunch.
Twitter has been both a success story and a pain in the ass for the Ruby on Rails community as Twitter is built on RoR. It seems they continue to have scalability issues. If this keeps up people will eventually fade away from the service, and that would be a big smack against the Rails community.
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