Oh, by the way… me and Aila are now back from our paradise island, rested and full of energy. It’s play time again!
Manila Express™: “Manila Express™ makes adding links to your Manila weblog as easy as 1-2-3.” Well… Hello World! and all that. But I already dislike having new stuff inserted at the beginning of the page and not at the end… we’ll see.
Today I found out that MS had released a new version of Windows Script Host. This may not be news to a lot of people – but for scripters who didn’t know: WSH is one of the more interesting and open things Microsoft has done in a long time.
This afternoon I bought two interesting books:
- Kent Beck’s Guide to Better Smalltalk, by Kent Beck
The name doesn’t do it justice. Beck is a true ObjectWizard, and this collection of deceptively short and simple articles is fascinating stuff for any objectoriented developer. Of course, getting a taste of Smalltalk has never been easier: just download Squeak. - Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML, by Scott Rosenberg
This could be the second UML-book to read, after Martin Fowler‘s classic “UML Distilled”. It looks very minimalistic and useful. But I haven’t tried it out on a client yet (or even finished it!), so we’ll see…
Quote of the day, from Cafe con Leche:
“Having all your content removed from a database and stored physically as XML files, you’ll lose the lightning-fast query times that enterprise relational databases can give the portal. The strategy most are going for is dynamically serving “slices” of data from (sometimes fairly hairy and finely-performance-tuned) SQL queries as dynamic XML content”.
Hmmm… makes sense now. I’m not so sure that’s a smart long term move.
Yesterday, I began a very interesting consulting gig: modeling the next generation of document structures for the Swedish Parliament. The first modeling discussion was great but somewhat confused – it’s not easy finding common ground between good old-fashioned business objects (standard UML) and the document stuff (DOM, DTD, XML-Schema, whatever…).