Déjà vu

What does it tell you when you accidentally enter a website, due to a typo, while trying to access a website you've never visited before, and you instantly recognize it as a site you once accidentally visited some three or four years ago while trying to find something else. Too much unused brain capacity, to much time on the web, both, or nothing?

Designing WSDL

I've been designing some services this week and found Eclipse Web Tools Platform to be quite handy. Some minor sync-problems between the graphical representation and the generated WSDL but nothing serious and the bulk of the work can easily be done using drag and drop. When I've tried it some more I'll probably let our customer have a go at it.

I found a quite good article about different WSDL styles at IBM DeveloperWorks.

Biometrics on a T43 with Suse 10

Thanks to this excellent article I can now authenticate with the fingerprint reader on my ThinkPad.

Evolution + Exchange + Gmail

I've never used Evolution before although I had a look at it some years ago. Think it was around '01. Anyway, got myself together today and configured it for the company's Exchange server as well as POP against Gmail. I was actually quite suprised to learn that Evolutions Exchange plugin uses the OWA. I always thought it used something IMAP-ish and hence I assumed that I'd have to be connected to the internal network, through VPN etc. Really nice surprise that this wasn't the case. Everything works smooth.

Chili

We've just had a thirteen people chili shoot out over at Mats place, we did one "vanilla" North Texas Red and one slightly modifed. They were both really good and both kettles got more or less cleaned. This was my first chili evening and it was really good, more gonna follow.

Joey deVilla sums up the monkey knife fight

Joey deVilla has, at least so far, the best wrap up of the ongoing Monkey Knife fight, to quote him on that lovely term, started by Fowlers post on Human Interfaces over at his blog. He not only does a good job on summing up the discussion, but he has funny pictures as well! :)
Personally I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't think Human Interfaces necessarily go against YAGNI and Jon Tirsén, I think, has a good explanation why.

I do think that a 25 method class is easier to maintain than one with 78 methods.

However if we're talking about core libraries I do think that they should, as should most code, support the developer in not only achieving his goal but also help him do that in a way that makes his code clean and easy to understand. So I'd rather see if(list.isEmpty()) than if(list.size() == 0). Hence I'd rather see ... = list.getFirst() and ... = list.getLast() than ... = list.get(0) and ... = list.get(list.size() - 1), but then again, how often do you do need the first and the last list element? All the time? Now and then? Never?

And I do think there's a lot of crap in Rubys Array class. I think a core library should contain "utility" or alias methods for the most common use cases to make the clients code easier to read, understand, and maintain even though this might add a couple of what could be considered extraneous methods. But what's enough?

Stack or FIFO IM:er?

I'm a FIFO:ish instant messenger, as are most of my friends and colleagues working with computers. Some of my friends that don't spend most of their time in front of IDEs and APIs are however stack:ish based instant messangers and answers the last message before answering previous messages, if at all.