Almost on a weekly basis I get frustrated at other technical people because they do not see value in the things I see value in, or the miss the point. I am quick to judge them and point my finger at them for the blame. Through my recreational reading I have come to believe it is none other than my own doing.
Mark Cuban points out that you do not deserve his time if you are quick to respond with “you just don’t get it”. As he explains it, you are the one at fault if find yourself using this phrase. You must completely understand a subject in order to explain it to other people, then if still feel yourself falling back to the aforementioned phrase that is a tell-tale sign you do not completely grasped the subject you are explaining.
Reginald Braithwaite says the single most important thing to improve your programming career is to give presentations. This is something just recently I have truly enjoyed attending (within the last year). I completely agree with this and feel most presentations I have seen, the presenter either does not completely understand the problem at hand nor do they feel motivated by the topic. My understanding and appreciation of these individuals and what they go through has had a major turn around. I have had the fortunate opportunity of knowing on a personal level a few people who have presented items at my local JUG.
I would like to encourage others to present topics as well. So many people feel as though they do not fully understand a topic as well as others; and this is true. There are few, if any, topics I know better than anybody else, however; this is about improving yourself as a developer and I know first hand your local SIG (special interest group) would be excited to have more people provide presentations.
This seems to do a pretty good job at comparing, as far as a feature matrix, three of the top repository managers for Maven.
I know for sure developers from Nexus and Archiva have made sure this is up-to-date.
The following link is a video I genuinely enjoyed watching and I felt I would share it as well. It is pertaining to the C# 4.0 Design Team, and I try to watch most of Anders Hejlsberg videos if I am able.
They do not get into an in depth/technical discussion concerning C# 4.0, they touch more on architectural items. They mention a few languages but happen to leave Java out of it. Another thing I thought was interesting is how they have met many times to discuss a feature. This might drag on for multiple meetings (they mention 10 hours), but they end up not implementing it. I felt as thought this was really neat how they put forth a lot of time and thinking into aspects of the language and are not afraid to say no.
I just wanted to make a quick post relating to Maven profiles. I was trying some new things about with Maven the other day and decided to put these into a profile as to not disturb the normal build process. Upon performing some trial and error tests, I was getting some strange results. I wasted to much time on figuring out what the problem was, but for Maven it expects multiple profiles to be specified such as the following:
I made the mistake of specifying them as multiple -P arguments. Such as the following … this is the wrong way:
mvn -Pprofile1 -Pprofile2
Maven 2.0.8 (I haven’t check on 2.0.9) does not give any indication of an error or warning from what I can tell.
Do not make the same mistake :)
Update – It looks as though Maven 2.0.10 will correct this issue.
I have upgraded to WordPress 2.6 which was recently released. Looks like there are quite a few new bells and whistles to check out.
See the following video from the WordPress team:
The latest versions of Firefox, IE, and Opera support EV SSL, but still there is no sign of Safari … and this has been pointed out for quite some time. What in the world is Apple up to?
I have googled twice to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, currently I cannot find anything pointing to an Apple article stating it is being developed or status.
I have mentioned this to other people who seem to care less. My only point is that I enjoy having the choice of four browsers instead of one or two. I am hoping that with the introduction of more stable and safe browsers that friendly competition will ensue, and we the users will win out.
I always find it extremely difficult to come up with things to blog about. I have the privilege of working with some very intelligent people whom I genuinely enjoy talking with. A lot of times I point out how they should make a post about particular conversation. I have been told on more than one occasion that they are more of a verbal person than a writer. My nature is usually the same but I see that as a weakness of myself and I will be trying to rectify it as there is tremendous value in being able to communicate effectively in the written format as well. I will be using posts made by people I hold in high regard and give my own thoughts and spin on it.
The other thing I plan on doing, and have done in the past, is to blog about a particular tool and how I find it useful. As you may very well tell, I enjoy using vim and from time to time I blog about a certain command. I do know the help files document these items well and that there are probably countless other tutorials on the web, but this is mainly for myself and honing my skills as a blogger.
In doing so, I hope to encourage the few people who read my blog to do the same.
Jeff Atwood has a really good post titled Don’t Go Dark. I myself sometimes get caught up in things like this. With the exception of code reviews (which I really do enjoy), I have a tendency to clam up when posting my code out for public viewing for things such as open source projects.
Just last night I happened to post a python class I had been working on, it was (and is) nowhere close to being complete. But I did feel as though it had value in it and could be used by other people. I had hopes others would pick it up and improve upon it as well. I reflected on why I believe people would behave this way, and my only insight was to how I felt. My biggest hesitation was not being able to clarify any misunderstandings or to justify why I had written it the way I did and my name would be attached to the code as it stood.
I thought back to a blog post I read over a year ago, I can’t for the life of me remember who posted it. But one of the reason why was to give you a chance to defend yourself on how lousy the code might have been. It might be because of a bug or some user requirement, but since the code will always be there, it is best to document it with explanations on why you did things a certain way (or do not do things).
Performing code reviews, I feel, are extremely important in a developers life. If developers are using the agile principle of pair programming then code reviews are taken place on a daily basis. But all too often developers do not implement pair programming. I have witnessed teams, which even though they profess to use agile principles, are quick to cut out pair programming from their software development.
Maybe this should be a code kata, in that a developer should write up a snippet of code and send out for review amongst their peers.
As I was about to ‘publish’ this post, another similar fear hit me. As I put out my thoughts and opinions on this blog, I am sure that I will get something wrong. But I will always have a way to correct it and publish it out again … hey, that sounds awfully familiar to writing code doesn’t it?
Many times I have needed to relocate a Subversion repository. This is relatively easy in Subversion, there is a ‘svn relocate’ command. A stipulation of this command is the new locations repository must match identical to the old repository.
I recently needed to change (relocate) the server name of a CVS repository at a clients site. I found a small example which used a Perl script. I do not really have a problem with this … if I had Perl. The build box is a Linux environment, but my development environment is Windows XP.
I had installed cygwin previously, but choose not to install Perl (shockingly none of the items I installed had Perl has a dependency either). So I used the following in cygwin:
find -path '*/CVS/Root' -exec sed -i 's/oldcvs.example.com/newcvs.example.com/' '{}' \;I’m sure somebody has a better/faster way, and I would love to see it. But this worked for me quite well.
I am four days behind, but WordPress 2.5 has been released. I have upgraded my own WordPress installation, now I just need to complete my daughters.
