Hopeful Hacker

If you were wondering where where I was, I have been wrestling with a monster, a real nightmare. Too big to fit completely into 1 brain. Just the static data schema took 3 months to design. On top of that, 2 complicated GUI’s (1 static data, 1 transactional), a core processing engine that takes instructions in one end and spits out files, reports and outputs to clients, internal users as well as 5 other systems with both a manual and an automated (Straight Through Processing) workflow in the middle. ...

I want to talk about one of those ‘bread and butter’ topics that a developer or system designer will encounter frequently and perhaps will not think much about. Its states, or more precisely the naming of states. If you have ever designed a table or a class to represent a transaction or any other ‘non static’ entity and plonked in a column named ‘status’ then you know what I am talking about. ...

Ok, inflammatory title for this post but I listened to a great talking about the science/religion debate and a couple of things really resonated with me. Web2.0 and Memes Firstly was the concept of . Memes is ideas in analogy to genes where:- memes have, as a fundamental property, evolution via natural selection I Immediately thought Web2.0! I wont try to Define that but one of the things that sites like and do is to catalyse the the evolution of memes, crank up the number of collisions between and tests of ideas. ...

So Papa calls last night and has a full 30 Minute spew about his new, ADSL connected computer. After sorting through the confusion, I discover the evil culprit….Auto Update. Case 1) ‘Whats Java and why do I care?’ So the Java Runtime environment was installed by default on Papa’s new pc. Fair enough, you need it to do lots of cool stuff on the internet. The problem started when the JRE decided to check the internet for an update and ask Papa if he wanted to upgrade. ...

According to a very learned and wise colleague of mine, while developers will always say that they are pro workflow, none of them really believe that it works. Personally, since being involved in a workflow project, I have always liked the idea. Its so neat and tidy, the yucky business rules that no developer really truly understands are zip-locked away in some XML document or modeling tool and we can just code neat little boxes that respond to requests from the workflow system. ...