12 Best Practices for Spring Configuration Files

Jason Zhicheng Li has a blog post where he lays out 12 best practices for Spring configuration files. I have only used Spring on 1 project, but I can definitely see the basis for several of them. These are worth keeping in mind as you develop your next project based on the Spring Framework.

LispWorks 4.4.6 Introduction Movie

Rainer Joswig has made a short introductory movie demonstrating the features of LispWorks Personal Edition 4.4.6. The movie just shows off the environment and doesn't give any introductory Common Lisp information. For that, check out:

• ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel
• Successful Lisp by David Lamkins

Also, be sure to subscribe to the Planet Lisp feed to get the latest and greatest information from the Lisp world in one, aggregated place.

Handbook of Software Architecture

Did you know that Grady Booch is working on a new book called "Handbook of Software Architecture"? I just found out today. He's developing the book online. There's also a blog that has information about the book progress and other tasty tidbits.

I really look forward to reading this book. We need more high-quality books on systems architecture. It's one of the hardest things to learn well because our knowledge of it is scattered in so many places. I'm excited because I'm sure if anyone can pull a good overview of the subject together, it's Grady Booch.

LispWorks Personal 4.4.6 Release

LispWorks has released the LispWorks Personal 4.4.6. There are some bug fixes, but perhaps the biggest news is that it now supports a larger image size. Dave Fox of LispWorks explained:

"We often receive requests for a free Edition of LispWorks that can
run larger programs, so here it is. LispWorks Personal Edition can now
grow by more than twice as much as previous versions and so is
suitable for a wide range of academic research and other
non-commercial uses."

Sweet. LispWorks is a fantastic environment. If you've been wanting to see what a professional Common Lisp environment is like, why wait any longer?

Made With Secret Alien Technology

I absolutely love the new Lisp logos that Conrad Barski has developed for use with Lisp projects. It cracks me up.

If you haven't checked out Conrad's "Casting SPELs in Lisp", you really should. It's an intro to Lisp that leads you to build an adventure game. Really good idea.

R&D Making a Comeback - With New Rules

Computerworld reports on an R&D Revival. The article says that R&D is making a come back, but the rules have changed. Companies are now making sure that R&D efforts are more targeted and the potential outcomes mesh with the company's business. The focus is still on rapid innovation because that remains a market differentiator for many companies.

I'm glad that R&D is still valued. It seems like over the past couple of years all we've heard about is R&D cuts, facilities being shut down, and research going overseas. (I guess the last point may still be true as more companies become multinational). It's refreshing to hear something positive about the R&D community.

Hybrid Open Source Business Models

TheServerSide has a reference to Zach Urlocker's blog article on Hybrid Open Source Business Models. Zach points out how a hybrid business model is becoming more popular where companies have some portion of their offering that is Open Source Software. It's an interesting model, and I would imagine that it's hard to pull off in practice. Well, maybe pull it off right.

del.icio.us code?

From Chris Double's Radio Weblog, Snippets is a site where you can post snippets of code and categorize them by tagging them with keywords. You can then share your code snippets. It's very del.icio.us, but even more tasty because it's chocked full of code goodness.

Back To Firefox Again for the Second Time

Well, I've gone back to Firefox from Opera. I gave Opera a solid week. I like the browser and especially the M2 mail and news client. However, the feature set didn't compel me like it used to. Also, I found myself missing the compatibility (that's right, I said compatibility) of Firefox. Go figure.

Interestingly enough, I didn't miss my extensions too much. Hmmm... Maybe I should clean out my extensions in Firefox and only add back the ones I really care about...

Mighty Mouse and Firefox

I have been having a "problem" with my Apple Mighty Mouse in Firefox on my Mac. Instead of scrolling horizontally, moving the ball left and right made Firefox go forward and backward through history. I hated this action, and it's really been a nuisance to me.

Tonight I decided to do something about it. I found this article on macosxhints. The second entry seemed to work for me. I now don't have the forward and back scrolling problem and all is well.

Junction Rocks

I just found a tool that rocks so hard it’ll make your grandma freak.  I’ve wanted a tool to create symlinks on Windows for years; nay, perhaps a decade now.  Fortunately, my friend Jeff turned me on to Junction.  It’s small, it’s simple, it has no requirements.  I like that.

Now, I’m off to restructure my hard drive the way I want it with superfluous links.  Love it.

Blogger for Word

I’m not a big fan of Word, but the Blogger for Word add-on works extremely well.  I’ve published all of today’s posts using it.  It integrates into Word as a toolbar.  You just create a new document containing your post and use the toolbar to publish.  Simple and it works.

I really need to invest some time and get Emacs set up to publish to Blogger.  I just haven’t felt like investing the time yet.

Treo 600: SD Card Not Recognized

Here’s a tip for you Treo 600 owners…  If you’re Treo suddenly tells you that “The handheld cannot recognize this card.” when you are using an SD card, try putting the card in the slot and doing a soft reset.  Once the device is reset, there’s a chance that the card will magically be recognized.  Why?  I don’t know why.

Thanks to this PDA Street Forum post – it worked for me!

WOD of Issues

The Fishbowl has a great post about The Wall of Death.  The idea is that you create a wall where you put issues, enhancements, etc. for the current release for a software product on a big wall.  Developers take issues off the wall, work on them, then record the time it took on the paper.  When they are done, they deposit the pieces of paper in a “done” pile.  This leaves a very nice paper trail and shows your progress.

I love this idea.  I can think of at least a half dozen projects where I would have loved a Wall Of Death.  (You could even casually call it the WOD which feels satisfying.)  The WOD would have been much more satisfying to work with than a spreadsheet or online issue tracking system.  

The only draw back is that I’m a consultant.  Most of the time I have to work in conditions that would not be friendly for a WOD.  Now, if you could have a virtual WOD, that would be cool.  Wait a minute, isn’t that what systems like Altassian’s should strive for?  Maybe they should incorporate the WOD idea into the next version of their products.  (

Singing Opera

Last month, Opera celebrated its 10th anniversary by giving away free licenses of their browser. I took advantage of it because I was an Opera lover before Mozilla went 1.0. I installed the latest version of Opera and licensed my copy. I played for a bit, and then put it away.

For several months now, I've noticed that my Firefox is leaking memory like crazy. I don't know what's going on - is it an extension? Is it the core? I guess I could uninstall everything or use a different (new) profile to see if I have still the problem. I also suspect Gmail's web interface. Seems like if you leave that up for a couple of hours, the next thing you know Firefox is topping 80 - 100 MB of memory usage.

Instead of playing around, I decided to give Opera another whirl and I've been enjoying it immensely. I set up M2 (Opera's mail client) to do my Gmail via POP. It's a very slick mail client. I am not sure if it allows me to send HTML mail messages, but I'm not sure that I care either. I love its speed and simplicity. I also love the way it indexes mail and integrates so nicely with the browser.

I've also started loving the Opera interface all over again. The mouse gestures are awesome for when you don't want to take your hand off the mouse. The keyboard shortcuts are equally awesome for when you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard.

So, what's annoying? Lack of sites that support it. Gmail mostly works. The dialog box where you type in someone's name to send them a message doesn't work from time to time. But, M2 is working like a champ for that.

Some sites just don't recognize the Opera browser, and they let you know it. However, you can hit F12 and change Opera to emulate Firefox or IE. The problem is that the emulation isn't complete (or completely broken in the case of IE). However, it does let you fake out some of the sites some of the time. Also, when I use Safari on my Mac, I have similar issues.

All in all I'm having a great time with Opera. I think I'm going to continue to use it as my preferred browser for another week or two and give it a fair shake. It's certainly stable and doesn't seem to leak memory that badly. And those two things are worth alot to me.

FT.com / Technology / Digital Business - How open source gave power to the people

FT.com / Technology / Digital Business - How open source gave power to the people is a nice piece on how Open Source Software (OSS) is empowering people in new ways that weren't previously possible. There's also reference to how OSS is starting to change how corporations offer their products and services.

More about declining interest in high tech education

The Globe and Mail: Where jobs are and students aren't reports about how young people are not pursuing technical careers. They site the technical bust as the reason.

Whatever the reason, I'm afraid there is a growing possibility of real technical brain drain problem in the U.S. Not only are we losing research funding to other countries, but we're also having trouble finding people to even pursue a technical career.

Argh.

Linux Empowers Supervillians

This cracked me up even though it completely lets our secret out...

Design-first vs. code-first

The Server Side has a hot thread on Design is not coding, coding is not design. As you might imagine, it has all the trappings of a Holy War. There are some interesting posts, though.

I think there's a misconception in the software world that there is some kind of silver bullet to making great software. Sometimes languages are held up as a silver bullet. Sometimes it's tools. In this case it seems to be methodology, specifically design-first vs. code-first type of methodology.

What do I think? Well, I think it takes a team of dedicated, talented people to make great software. It takes good ideas, good design, good project management, good code, and good customer support. Without dedication, talent, direction, and sound practices it doesn't seem to me that any of the things you must be "good" at is possible.

So, design-first vs. code-first? Yes. As long as it fits in the context of a good practice that allows your firm to make good software.

I would like to create a methodology called "Holistic Software Development". It's mission statement would be something like "get good, hard working people to focus their talent and energy on turning great ideas into great software that empowers customers through excellent practices". It would be a methodology framework that other methodologies could plug into - something like the Spring application framework. But, it would tie them together in a way that supported it's mission statement.

But, what do I know?

What Firefox and Mozilla users should know about the IDN buffer overflow security issue

Mozilla has released a security advisory about a buffer overflow problem in Firefox. You can read about how to work around the issue here. The problem has to do with how Firefox handles local characters in an IDN domain name. CNET has a write up here.