Archive for September, 2004
Wednesday, September 29th, 2004
Since I was asked... Most projects I've worked on have used something
like the following scheme to identify releases. A version number like "6.2.3.1407" means:
major version 6
minor version 2
patch 3
build 1407
The major version number is only incremented when significant changes
are made. In practice, "significant" means "changes that make this
version's ...
Posted in Student Projects | No Comments »
Sunday, September 26th, 2004
At 13:26 this afternoon, more than a day and a half after the
deadline I set my students, I finally got the Tapestry/Hibernate
warmup exercise working to my satisfaction. The final bug took
several hours to track down; when I found out what it was, I almost
decided to throw Tapestry away and ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 20th, 2004
In an earlier posting, I listed the programming tools I use. As part of setting up at the Blueprint Organization (who have kindly given me desk space for the next few months), I've realized that a complete working environment needs more than just software.
Peace and quiet.
Study after study has ...
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Thursday, September 16th, 2004
According to one of my students, I tell the same jokes, the same way, every time I lecture. I apparently make them sound fresh each time, though, so I guess that's OK.
I give the same introductory lectures to each new group of students as well. In contrast with ...
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Thursday, September 16th, 2004
With time, and a little luck, almost anyone can do something once. The only way to know whether you actually understand how to do it, though, is to see whether it takes you less time to do it a second time.
For example, as of 10:30 this morning, I finally ...
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Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
In the summer of Hippo, we managed to completely drain half a dozen whiteboard markers. Meetings alone wouldn't have accomplished this: it was the combined use through both meetings and random silly drawings that used them up. Now that the summer is over, I wish that it was ...
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Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
A quarter of a century ago, in The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks pointed out the difference between intrinsic complexity and accidental complexity. Intrinsic complexity is how hard a problem really is; accidental complexity is how much harder we make it by creating inconsistent APIs, fragile configuration files, or ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Monday, September 13th, 2004
I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchet. How can you not be a fan of someone who dedicates a book to "the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol... Whatever the name, their purpose...is identical: to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »
Monday, September 13th, 2004
After I leave HP, I'll be doing development on at least four different machines: my lightweight Windows XP laptop, the desktop XP machine at my girlfriend's, Pyre (a single-processor Linux box), and the CS department's CDF lab machines. I've been keeping a log of the tools I've installed; here ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 13th, 2004
I sat down yesterday morning to work through the first half of the warmup exercise we've given the Hippo students. My goal was to have Hibernate persisting my book loan records by the end of the day.
Didn't get there. Instead, at some point I used Subversion's "move" command ...
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