The other day I was browsing already read articles in Google Reader, and found the article in Google Reader!

As I like the article very much and still would like to recommend it to others, I have decided to host it myself: The Book Of JOSH. Enjoy!

As painful as it is, we have deemed it necessary to cancel this years conference.

the meeting point for Agile Software Development in Scandinavia

I expect great talks and workshops. For example, Johanna Rothman will be speaking!

By the way, Lean Magazine #5 is available for download!

It’s actually just a page showing a screen shot and the name of the file that is currently playing, together with some commands to remote control XBMC.

Available commands are pause/resume, stop, play another file, and shutdown.

I also implemented support for showing notifications on the XBMC screen, which gave me an idea:

The Google Calendar can e-mail reminders for appointments. If XBMC is running, the reminder could be shown as a notification on the XBMC monitor.

I was just about to start implementing this calendar-reminder-in-XBMC when I reminded myself that there are many other small and big projects that would be more valuable for me. But instead of throwing this idea right down the trashcan I decided to blog about it first. Done!

Now I’ll spend some valuable time with my son!

• I’m not productive enough in C++ and I feel too limited by Java
• A large chunk of Java frameworks seem to serve no other purpose than to workaround limitations in Java
• I believe (and hope!) that Java will cease to be the default language in the non-Microsoft world, and that other JVM-based languages such as Scala, Groovy and JRuby will become more important
• How can I convince a client to allow Scala, Groovy or JRuby in a project?
• I should really get some C# experience!
• It seems like I almost always resolve to PHP when I need to get something done quickly… which reminds me of an upcoming blog post about a recent fight with SoapServer and SimpleXML to implement WSSE UsernameToken authentication.

Most date formatting comes from the DATE FORMATS section in include/config.php but even after changing these date formats I still don’t get all dates displayed as I would like.

For example, the text box for the date when editing an item is using the TZN_DATE_FRM constant defined in include/classes/tzn_generic.php. There’s a pretty naïve comment in the source code, saying that there is a “US format” for dates and a “rest of the world” format. Fortunately (for the US), the rest of the world is not united in opposition.

To get the date format I wanted I changed the constant definition like this:

define("TZN_DATE_FRM","%Y-%m-%d");

What I liked most about the job ad was the last part:

We’re hiring you for your mind. Please showcase it by answering some of the following questions in your cover letter:

• What is a recent programming insight you discovered and what was intriguing about it?
• Why do you want to work with us? (be specific!)
• What Open Source communities/projects are you a part of and why do you like them?
• Tell us about a time you brought initiative to your team and made a positive change.
• What modern programmer do you admire and why?
• How do you learn and keep up with the field of computing?

These questions really appeal to me!

[...] good programming practices are directly opposed to good communication practices.

In bullet form:

1. D.R.Y. Does Not Apply.
2. Humans don’t mean what they say.
3. Compilers don’t need to see an example.
4. Programs love definitions; Humans get flummoxed.

From now on I will try to repeat myself more often, act on what people mean and not what they say, give more examples and avoid definitions. Except when programming!

function permute($array)
{
  $results = array();

  if (count($array) == 1)
  {
    $results[] = $array;
  }
  else
  {
    for ($i = 0; $i < count($array); $i++)
    {
      $first = array_shift($array);
      $subresults = permute($array);
      array_push($array, $first);
      foreach ($subresults as $subresult)
      {
        $results[] = array_merge(array($first), $subresult);
      }
    }
  }
  return $results;
}

assert(permute(array()) == array());
assert(permute(array(1)) == array(array(1)));
assert(permute(array(1,2)) == array(array(1,2),array(2,1)) ||
       permute(array(1,2)) == array(array(2,1),array(1,2)));
assert(count(permute(array(1,2,3)) == 6));
assert(count(permute(array(1,2,3,4)) == 24));

Recently some of our developers ran into the accusation that with a dynamic language like ruby you use so many dynamic type checks that you end up effectively writing your own type system. So they thought, since we’ve written a lot of real ruby code – how often do we make dynamic type checks?

…

We define a dynamic type check as the use of the methods is_a?, kind_of?, and instance_of?.

This made me think about the use of instanceof in Java. A pretty non-scientific investigation of an Open Source Java application (Vuze) showed:

Lines of code: 740257 (find . -name '*.java' | xargs cat |wc -l)

Number of instanceof: 1926 (find . -name '*.java' | xargs cat| grep -c ' instanceof ')

LOC/Number of instanceof: 384

So, there is actually more instanceof in this Java project than there are dynamic type checks in the anonymous Ruby projects used for the statistics presented by Martin Fowler. I certainly hope it wasn’t a Java developer that accused dynamic languages to use lots of dynamic type checks!