Client Java

One of the biggest gripes about java is the Swing support. Unfortunately, swing does not provide training wheels. Its easier to create a bad swing application than a good one. A good example is IntelliJ IDEA. The problem is typically a lack of understanding of various advanced swing topics by new developers. A few issues lacking in previous JDKs have made developers experiences difficult and has tarnished the view of swing development but once you understand the various concepts it becomes enjoyable.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was that I rediscovered the Client Java blog. In my opinion, it is a significant resource to keep up to date with Swing advancements. It is a community blog focused on various technology and concept advances in java for clients.

V02 max

An interesting site on VO2max.

Well... I went to Body IQ in an attempt to increase my vitality status.

My results are:

Body Weight: 86kg
Height: 177cm (5'9")
Body Fat: 15%
BP Systolic: 110
BP Diastoic: 70
Cholesterol: 4.87
VO2 max: 47.0
Sit & Reach: 55cm
Situps (per min): 50
Pushups (per min): 43

The particular examination was - (a) a questionair, (b) a cholesterol test, (c) blood pressure, (d) some odd belt gets strapped around your waist and a watch gets placed on your wrist to monitor heart rate, (e) a step test, 4 sequences of stepping to a particular taped beat that increases in frequency every sequence with a minute or two rest between each sequence and a final rest of 3 minutes, (f) max situps in 1 minute, (g) max pushups in 1 minute.

In total I get about 16000 points from that little exercise which should push me into silver status.

Well... My car got stolen on sunday and was recovered by the police on tuesday. Its now in a vehicle pound awaiting the insurance agency picking it up for assessment.

Its quite amazing, I had to go very close to some super dodgy areas in JHB to fetch my car. I used Google Earth to view the area where I would be going allowing me the peace of mind to head there without any worries. Google Earth rocks, I've used it practically - for security reasons. When the chap was explaining how I get there and how some signs/small roads were difficult to read (you might miss it), I could see exactly what he ment and could never go wrong after using Google Earth.

The exact coordinates of my car when I left were 26`16'06.57" S 27`56'46.91" E.


They took,
1. Maccadamia nuts (R20)
2. Car radio (+-R300)
3. 2x Speekers (+-R800)
4. Cassette tapes (gift)
5. Night stick (??)
6. Sun blocker (R40)
7. Parking disc (??)
8. Money (+-R15)
9. Some shopping (+-R550)
10. Can of deodorant (R15)
11. Lipice (R5)

Total = R1695

They messed up,
1. Stuff around the ignition
2. Passenger seat
3. Boot area
4. I suspect something was taken from the engine
5. I suspect that the engine is dodgey

They left
1. Gift vouchers (R400)
2. Some bank receipts

Anyway... I was planning on changing my car so I was not suprised or unprepared for the financial impact (should they not recover my car).

-Tim

Well... A few thoughts... 811

1. Starteam 2005 is Awesome. Its leaps better than Source Vault, which is huge strides better than Source Safe.

2. I quite like Weblogic 8 and EAR deployment (especially when you've got some massive projects). I've come to realise how much is missing from Tomcat. I still dont like the custom deployment descriptors that all J2EE servers require. The fact that you have to pack and unpack jars to configure descriptors is just plain unhappay.

3. IntelliJ IDEA 5 is great. I like the Favorites view, the javascript support and the html support but I will wait for more features before I shell out more cash for IDEA IntelliJ as 4.5 still keeps me highly productive.

4. Error handling and logging... If I get furious about one thing, its error handling. There is no excuse for poor error handling and use of logging. None at all. One of the worst things I was once told was that "Logging isnt required because its not a requirement. Oh, and who is going to look at the logs anyway". (That just makes me angry). Anyway, thats in the past, right now I'm dealing with a decent system that could be one third its current size.

5. Toplink ORM - Seems nice, I still prefer Hibernate as an ORM. I'm still to work with Hibernate 3 but from what I've read it's come along way. The only additional feature that I would like is for it to calculate and apply additional indexes (as specified) by SchemaGenerator.

6. We got a new Nescafe coffe machine. #811 is the number for hot chocolate. Its enabled me to cut coffee out of my diet. All i've got to do is spend a bit more time in the Gym and a wont see the effects at all. If only I could cut out beer + redbull + jagameister I'd have slightly more healthy weekends.

7. Whats with lists anyway? I'm just jotting down a whole lot of thoughts.

8. I thought I'd have had withdrawl symptoms when moving from Java 5. Alas, a whole lot of libraries need to start using annotations effectively (reduce total code by 10%).

9. J2EE Client Application Modules... First time I've heard of those. A J2EE client container sounds intresting but I wonder what horrors are involved in getting that to work.

10. After work... ? Probably newscafe, its in walking distance now that I'm @ Discovery. Too convenient. Even better is the company bar - R5 a hansa.

11. What have I been up to lately? I went to a charity ball last weekend... theme... larger than life. I bought a large cowboy hat, othewise, very memorable. 5 weeks ago I went to another charity ball - Christmas in July. Very red, lots of elves. Then the polo @ Inanda polo Club. Its been a while since i've been in the sun the entire day.

12. Otherwise, time to go look at a problem ... :(

The Guide to the Southern African Financial Services Industry - SA Financial Sector Forum

An intresting website that regularly updates financial indicators and links to papers about the South African financial industry.

I was just looking for the prime (overdraft) intrest rate and stumbled across this site.

One of the biggest myths about AMD and Intel is that an AMD chip runs hotter than Intel chip. This was valid of the K6 (and early K7s when you compare how far the K7 got pushed).

Roles have been swapped - AMD is far superior at controlling their heat and power consumption.

Power Consumption Chart
Power Consumption (Dual Core)



I recently got my mother a new computer. At first we tried purchasing it through a private dealer who tried to include a R4000 video card and secondly an intel box that was unnecessarily expensive (something like R11,000). What an utter rippoff. After a bit of a conversation with the chap, his defense was based on experiences about 4 to 5 years ago.

I cannot blame him for his experiences but I can blame him for not keeping up to date, his ignorance hurts customers and unnecessarily overcharges them.

Well, when you're at terminal velocity... and you're smiling... your front teeth tend to get slightly cold and you get sensitive teeth. Well thats how I felt after I went skydiving for the first time.

Mike, Astrid and I did Tandem jumps at the JSC (about an hour out of JHB). We got it filmed and on DVD (although we still have to edit it and join the 3 videos together).

An amazing rush but once you're parachute opens everything's different. Beautifull would be one way to describe it.

Heard a funny story about tandem jumps the other day... Two people do a tandem jump and pull their chute immedately. They carry a six pack of beer with them and drink it on the way down.

-Tim

Last night I watched the ending of Jason vs Freddy before CSI and 24. The last nights episode of 24 was amazing stuff. Exactly what I expected from Jack Bauer. I've watched season 1 and 3 of 24 and its well worth the 24 hours you sit watching the season. I'm now 3 hours into season 4 and 4 hours into season 2 (i'm getting season 2 from the video store and watching season 4 on mnet).

They should have a Jason vs Predetor. Or even better, Jason vs Predetor vs Alien vs Freddy vs Chuck Norris vs Steven Seagal.

Alot has happened since my last post...

I left my previous company (miss them quite a bit, unique company and good products); had drinks with the entire company for the 2nd time ever (might be the first); watched the battlestar galactica remake; had a 15 year family reunion; went to Hluhlue game reserve; went on a battle tour of Rorkes Drift and Isandhlwana; started at a new company; started waking up early (first concerted effort to get up early since... grade 6 at primary school); got ill; got well; went on systems induction; a few friends birthdays; went on core induction; beerfest; got ill (not related to the beerfest... some kinda food poisoning... terrible); went to see Avril Lavigne in concernt (awesome concert); got well; learnt spring framework fundermentals (1.2 is nice, i wonder when IntelliJ will have IDE support for Spring).

I'm not going to go into detail since i've been so busy since my last post but:

1. I highly recommend the battle tours and Hluhlue.

2. Core and System induction are the companies plan on introducing you to the companies products and the companies backend system. This arms you with information you need to know where to start (massive systems).

3. Spring gives me a happy feeling (just like Java 5.0 and Hibernate). I fear the beans.xml file might explode in size for large applications and become opaque to the inner mind.

4. Really miss seeing the rest of the family and my new nephew. It all started off with a spectacular dinner at the Oyster Box watching a gold moon rise on the ocean, slighly obscured by a lighthouse with a pool. (had to be there). Hluhlu was great, got to see the most massive elephant but no cats. It all ended when hyenas rocked up at a braai (it was the last day/night, we left the next morning).

Happy to be writing again. Dont think i have time for the next 2 weeks but after that everything should be good. I'm working late right now. Lots to understand and do. Its nice to be able to work late (shoot me now).

-Tim

When designing systems or preparing presenations its important to understand your documents.

Vague documents occur when trying to put too much information into a single document that does not directly aid the purpose of the document. That information may confuse the reader as the document drifts from one topic to another. Such information should be put in a different document. When presenting some point of view and producing some presentation, its important to back your results with strong sources.

Its better to build up many sets of correct and consise documents that are easy to update when information changes or becomes available. Furthermore, different types of documents may depend on (and source) information from numerous documents without confusing the scope and purpose of the document.

Consider what happens when putting together an technical integration manual. The manual should source information from various internal technical notes and apis. Any new information should be updated and corrected in the technical notes, not the technical manual. It is typical to have technical writer compose the manual from specifications and notes. The techical writer is not typically the authority to create the source material. When the manual contains original material, the documentation style is either (a) the manual is the specification, or (b) the manual is dependant on source material, source material should be updated or source material is unique to the manual, or (c) there is no source material.

A problem with many source documents is being able to find the documents and having someone review changes to the document. Google Desktop Search is an example of an effective way to find what you're looking for while MS Sharepoint Portal Server provides both reasonable search functionallity and document process control (i forget the correct terminology). Unfortunately MS SPS is cost prohibitive for smaller businesses.

Either way, documentation is costly to create so its important to be effective in its creation and use.

---

Reliable + Cheap = Lots of preparation and documentation (not fast)
Cheap + Fast = Little preparation and documentation (lets go live)
Fast + Reliable = Someone else did the documentation and are charging for it.

---

The scope of this is again possibly too large and vague in itself. Am i trying to jot down my thoughts... or am I trying to put together a javaworld.com article.

Pick Two

(a) Reliable
(b) Cheap
(c) Fast

An XML namespace is not a URL, its a URI. If it looks like a URL (http://mycompany.com/food/thought), it should resolve to an RDDL instead of 404 not found. If it is not a URL it should be a URN (urn:mycompany.com:food/thought).

O'Reily on RDDL has a good document to get you into the headspace.

www.rddl.org has the RDDL specification.

Since a URL is tied to a companies web deployment, i'd structure the URIs such that they dont collide with web content. The webserver should map the final part of the namespace to an RDDL file.

http://<site>/uri/<unique-part>/<version>

namespace URL: http://frogs.com/uri/food/flying-things/1.0

site: frogs.com
unique-part: food/flying-things
version: 1.0



One thing... security. I dont want to let the rest of the world know my internal protocols and schemas. This could be enforced by a secure site (internal.site.com) or protected areas on the site.

I keep on reading about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and how its some sort of silver bullet. I then read as many critics about how (1) SOA is actually just stateless RPC (2) over Web Services; (3) its no silver bullet - cannot do X, Y, Z; (4) it already exists in many companies using different protocols; etc, etc, etc.

I fear that many miss the point and get confused between the architects point of view and the sales-man's/advocate point of view.

The sales man wants to sell an idea because he's either wants to make a profit by providing a consulting service; or is some sort of idealistic fanatic.

The architect/researcher's point of view is that the SOA concept has been identified as a real and worthwhile enterprise pattern. The discussion and research around SOA is focused on increasing the total understanding around how to apply the concept to the enterprise, what the implications and limitations are and how to cleanly implement the pattern across a large enterprise. Two points to consider - (a) It is better to have a well understood enterprise architecture whose implications and limitations are well researched than having an architecture arise without control and without understanding its limitations, (b) SOA is mostly applicable to a subset of problems.

Now sometimes ...

the advocate/fanatics miss point (b) - so they advocate SOA everywhere.
the critics dont understand (b) - so they dont see the value of the pattern.
the architects dont understand (b) - so they try to apply the pattern to every problem.

...

My house got hit by lightening last night... Happiness and burnt wires. For some reason it was only the circuit with the house lights... and the house alarm. (I have a house alarm?)

It became apparent that there was a house alarm when it started going off at 4am in the morning. This poses 3 questions... Where is it, Why is it going off, and How do I turn it off. After a short amount of time it became apparent that the pin-code was not known so it was not possible to electronically disable the sirens/speakers. These were physically disabled. Next up... the buzzers in each circuit board hidden in cupboards and other wonderful places. Removing those circuit boards solved that problem.

Great stuff. 6 hours sleep and a headache. Now to hope that the next door neighbour doesnt try to evict us.

A summary of an enterprise SOA architecture - The Rings of the Enterprise [link]

Ring Zero: WS/RMI/.NET Remoting, Java/C#, business logic + processes, databases, no security
Ring One: Messaging middleware, business system, application security, secure sockets
Ring Two: B2B collaboration, security is a big issue, firewalls, encrypted comms
Ring Three: The world, unsafe


Since Ring Zero has no security, I would expect a business process to be implemented to ensure that staff are unable to interfere with the live system / ring zero. In the simpest of applications, this would imply that a developer doesnot imbed some sort of backdoor or "feature". The security process would be code review. In a larger enterprise system it would be complete network isolation of ring zero allowing only ring zero and ring one to communicate. A deployment process that ensures only certain individuals have access to the live system and a QA review and testing process independant of the developers.

When using IEEE Software Engineering Process, you will find yourself overwhelmed with how many different templates and processes are defined. Realise that a single person is not supposed to create all the different IEEE documents and you will not typically find someone who is an expert in all the related fields. The IEEE is not suited for companies where architect == deverloper == tester == etc.

The roles of architect, developer, tester, etc will typically author their various documents and when those roles are correctly performed, an individual will typically never have to compose all of those documents. The author of the various documents should try to stick as close as possible to what is needed by document (as defined by the particular IEEE standard). When all documents are not authored, you will find a need to place some 'important' information inside a document because it has no appropropriate place.

Stick to the process and put that information in the correct document, as opposed to forcing it into some inappropriate document - otherwise your documents will become vague. The documentation may also require particular diagrams as an aid in the discussion. Dont try to put additional diagrams that will be (or are) duplicated by another part of the documentation process.

The whole IEEE Software Engineering Process might seem heavy until you stop duplicating information that has been documented or will be documented. In addition, the correct stakeholders should drive the correct parts of the process so that roles do not overlap.

The problem with investing great amounts of time in UML, before you need to discuss a particular topic, is that there are many different views of the same system. Unless you're talking to another coder, a class diagram will not aid in discussing business logic. There are typically quite a few representations of the same system and based upon your discussion only one of those is of any use. Composing these diagrams can be highly time consuming for small projects at the risk of not completing the small project at all. For larger projects its probably impossible to diagram every aspect unless you employ the use of design recovery companies.

While excessive time to compose a correct and complete model of design does not constitute a failure of UML (dont ask me to develop and formalise such a large diagram), I do think that UML is necessary. If you cannot communicate correctly, on at least a small scale, then you're at a disadvantage. There are many diagramming methodologies of which a professional should understand and use at least one modelling system correctly. That is: the ability to use the correct diagram to quickly sketch the interactions being discussed instead of using the incorrect diagram and forcing information into the diagram.

A UML Tutorial [Link]

Isnt it amazing how some of the decisions that take 1 second can be the hardest to make. Those decisions either preserve the status quo, or allow you to move forward. You can try to avoid situations that require you to choose but at some point you are plainly confronted. Certain questions must be answered. Its amazing how many reasons you can come up with to either avoid or delay. Being comfortable is a nice feeling.

Ying Yang

Cellphone radiation level charts
Old SAR Chart

I'm always concerned about this one. I remember my face getting quite hot when I used my 3210, something I'm always wary of (would prefer to use my cell as little as possible). According to the above links, my old 3210 [1.14] was lower than my T610 [1.21]. This worries me slighly because I dont seem to notice the T610 until after a lenghty conversation (5-10 minutes). Is it being deflected? or have I been conditioned/climatised.

Worrying.



On a side note, the Apple Center in the Nelson Mandela Square stocks the Mini Mac. I am impressed. I just need to wait until they get those internal bluetooth modules... and then it's mine!

I've got to go back and spend some more time there. I dont know how well it supports sending and receiving faxes. I'm keen to move my mom over to a Mini Mac but i'm worried about a whole lot of adjustment issues and lack of support. Anyone have any experience with this? What is the MTBF for MacOSX?