License 2 Code

Ha. We had a contest to restart blogging. I won.

The Spawn of the Broken Build… Born from a thousand inexcusable broken builds and the anguished curses of developers calling wrath down upon those willing to roll the dice with a renegade check-in. She came, she kicked some developer ass, and she was vanquished to the circular file by a chanting mob. Rescued, pressed again into service by a band of hearty, toothless rogue developers, and dealt a final mortal blow by the silver pike of management.

Oh great spawn, where art thee? The legends are strong.

(Actually, she’s in a bag in my office awaiting another rogue band. If you know of pirates of such a need, in possession of hearty constitutions and ample sense of humor, I just might be able to conjure up a similar build spawn trophy for you. Leave me a comment with ample curses about your broken build problem, or hearty chanting for a token idol, and if you’re serious we might be able to assemble one for you in our spy works.)

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Wired magazine, you are so friggin deep

So Steve Dowling, one of our PR guys, just brought me my stack of pre-read magazines with stickies attached to the articles I should check out[…]

April edition of Wired - “You missed the biggest unanswered question: Why is there anything at all? Or to put it another way, Why isn’t there nothing — no matter, no energy, no universe, no space, no dimensions, no branes — no anything? We will have little fundamental understanding of our universe until we can begin to answer this question with anything other than superstition.”

Steve says this letter just blew him away with its profundity and I have to agree with him. This is deep stuff. […] As Steve puts it, “Here’s a magazine that’s basically about gadgets, but dressed up with all sorts of pseudo-intellectual stuff about man’s search for meaning. Isn’t that just like us? Perfect fit.”

I was recently introduced to this blog and absolutely love it. Such charm, such charisma, such wit! I wonder if this is another of Black Spy’s anonymous publications. I’ll know for sure when I see “Steve” blog about nerd cache.

In another sign that the end of the world is nigh - Linked List has been patented. I must admit part of me was jealous — talk about nerd-cache! “Oh, you wrote Rails… and you got an award for Tapestry… and the whole world is turned on to your Spring framework… well I’m the guy that patented Linked List.”

Put THAT in your slide rule and calculate it!

Interesting short little ditty on the creator and creation of the MP3 file format. Good for a short read, but what really caught my eye was the end:

“Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user’s tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist.”

Because as I read, I was listening to my Chemical Brothers station on Pandora. Well, perhaps you are only allotted one extremely cool music-tech invention in a lifetime (I don’t think Brandenburg is involved in Pandora or the Music Genome Project).

First VB compiler actually written in VB! This post title says it all.

The fine editorial board of SOAFacts has once again reviewed a set of solid submissions and commissioned a SOAFacts.com update. My favorite:

“It has been said that an infinite number of monkeys pressing their buttocks against keyboards for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. 100 monkeys typing for 10 hours will eventually produce a SOA project plan.”

Black spy is back! Secret mission executing projects in far-flung foreign regimes complete. Kudos to white spy for single-handedly keeping our fledgling enterprise alive.

Comments again.

I read this in the comments section of the Object Mentor Blog. Tim Ottinger says, “…my favorite definition of “expert”? The guy who knows what all the errors look like.”

Too good!

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon more and shouts, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” The man below says “Yes, your in a balloon that’s hovering over thirty feet above this field.”

“You must work in information technology.” says the balloonist. “I do,” replies the man, how did you know?” “Well,” says the balloonist “everything you have told me is technically correct, but it’s of no practical use to anyone.” The man below says “You must be a corporate manager.” “I am,” replies the balloonist, “how did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, but you expect me to be able to help. You have the same problem you had before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

HA Ha, ha… (sigh)

From the Pretty Good Joke Book.

After slaving away for hours over submissions of all quality, the editorial board has updated SOAFacts with a number of independently verified nuggets.

Let’s hope…

Bookpool in in the midst of their 50% off O’Reilly book sale. Kind of buries O’Reilly’s own ‘hey java is now open source so we’ll give you 40% off our ten crappiest java titles’ sale. (Link only provided so you can see the list of ten).

Buy hey, at least O’Reilly pocket refs are 50% off in PDF format here. Good deal.

Ahhh, finally a SOA book for the C-level execs everywhere. I’m reminded of SOAFacts number three: ‘SOA is not complex. You are just dumb.’

From Wikipedia - the infinite monkey theorem  states that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

Donald Smith’s excellent Open Source Licensing for Developers presentation stated copyright as a form of protection existing for original, minimally creative, tangible works of authorship.

Hmmm. This led me to posit the infinite server theorum, which states that “an infinite amount of servers generating random english word combinations will almost sure create all possible future written copyright-able works.” Post THAT on an infinite number of tangible web servers and I say cha-ching!

Amazon EC2 here I come.

The best thing I got out of the Q and A was SOA Facts.

Just got the November 2006 issue of Dr. Dobbs. The new Dr. Dobbs, not the classic programmer’s journal… From our bugged executive meeting room tapes* of CMP media ‘Let’s take two industry-standard, consistently good (for free) software monthlies, and merge them into one crappy excuse to fill the inboxes of tech cogs across America! [burrp] and pass the Cristal…’. Gone are the gnarly programming exercises on the Dr. Dobb’s side, columns by industry heavyweights like Robert Martin on the SD side. Ah what free-as-in-beer gets you these days… Lots of ads…

*pretend. All pretend.

Thoughtworks is hiring a Ruby guru for their rapidly growing Ruby and Rails practice. Good sign for Ruby. An even better sign would be DHH filling the spot. Now that would be interesting. Our intelligience reports don’t indicate that outcome, but on the off- chance it came true, you can count on us to say ‘you heard it here first.’

Wired proclaims programmer blogs have jumped the shark. Over a month ago… But hey, we just started this… Doh!

Now I know why those pragmatic programmers are so productive. I ordered the PDF version of Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Ed, and was told this:

“Your request to reship the PDF for Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Ed has been entered into our fulfillment system. Teams of PDF-aware gerbils are this very moment limbering up to deliver your content.”

Its not Ruby, nor capital-Agile. Its the gerbils. One more thing - the note ended:

“Given the current backlog, we estimate that the time to create PDFs is about 11 hours.”

But the PDF was available in more like 11 seconds. So - those gerbils are smart enough to have implemented with Amazon’s EC2 service?