Jonas Beckman

Some light debugging via phone - nothing serious today.

But I turned one customer on to Python - that was fun! It took us about twenty minutes have him running and modifying some of my test-scripts. Including downloading and installing Python.

In the afternoon my cable connection went dead and stayed that way for about 16 hours. I wonder what UPC were doing?

Hard swim-practice today: plenty of timed intervals. That really hits the pulse. We also practiced starts, which I haven’t done for years. And doing flipturns every lap is becoming natural.

I am sitting in bed with cushions behind my back, listening to the rain. It’s a good place to be.

Work is going well. Today I am debugging and re-configuring some web services that will go live soon. Tomorrow I’ll go over to another customer and install an upgraded Python/XML/SQL Server app.

Common errors in English. Via Dane Carlsen

Feeling Moral. Trusting your feelings sounds good - but what does it mean? Via Times Shadow

The main character in one of my favorite novels says: ‘I spend most of my time happy, sad or bored. I know I can get rid of the happiness if I try really hard - the rest I am stuck with.’
Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany

Of course, everyone else in the novel thinks the main character leads an interesting life. And sometimes he is even flattered by that.

So what about me? Well, I prefer happiness to being interesting. But I am not bored very often.

Forgot about the cleaning lady today. She knows me by now and wasn’t surprised.

So I decided to work elsewhere a few hours and walked over to Aila’s place. It’s empty right now and has the connections I need (I set them up myself once). The customer never noticed: I am working from the same machine and answer the same phone.

On the way, I bought several early-seventies thrillers from a bookstand. Sleazy covers and authors who mass-produced long series about private eyes and secret agents… the very same ones I used to buy as as a kid who had just learned to read.

Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, secret agent OSS 117, taught me to be particular about what brand of champagne I asked for. I was 8 at the time but never forgot that.

I am home again, in a very clean apartment. Night is falling. Deadline tomorrow morning, but it’s under control… a few more hours and I’ll make that one.

I woke up freezing and the skies were grey all over. Even I had a cold now. All the nice people from yesterday were momentarily forgotten - instead I worried about other people’s problems again.

But it didn’t last long. I slept it off - rested almost all day until the cold let go. Then I took a long walk through rainy streets, stopped by for some live DJ:ing & sandwiches and went back home to work.

Several hours later, after some Python hacking, I mailed off a status report to a customer.

Why Larry O’brien decided to jump to .NET
Via The Wagner blog

A Simple NUnit Set in Visual Studio.NET Via stronglytyped.com

NAnt, a free DotNet build tool

DotGNU Portable.NET is a suite of free software tools to build and execute .NET applications(GPL). Here is what they have to say about other alternative DotNet tools. They cooperate with Mono in some ways, but have their own C# class library.

Hmm… I find myself debugging Java web services clients today. Well, why not? But I should have gotten more sleep.

C# webservices, Java clients and lots of small Python scripts for my own testing - it’s a nice setup. And I can run it all from my old Thinkpad.

My fellow debugger didn’t have it so nice: he was inside corporate firewalls, up to his ears in tangled-up app servers. Don’t even tell me how fast your testing setup is! he said with mock despair.

It took me five seconds to test a live server from the outside - it took him twenty minutes. So we worked by phone. I tested things for him from outside, as he slowly got the production stuff inside sorted out.

I’m starting to get a better feel for C# and ASP.NET.

I use Google (and some good bookmarks) all the time when I design or code - it’s much more convenient than having docs on my harddisk. But after a while links I’ve already visited and things I already know won’t help me. Then it’s time to start thinking harder about my own specific problem.

I’m having fun right now. Of course, some really boring old-time stuff will probably never go away… like tweaking SQL datetime comparisons for hours because the customer’s backend sucks.

Pattern for personal websites
Useful. Makes me feel even more guilty about the state of this site, though. Link via Martin

Processing XML with Java. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s new book is available online. Worth a look even if you are not doing Java.

A Practical SQL Tutorial. Easy to read. Deep enough for a developer.

DotNet - Common Tasks. Great overview of solutions.

Pull-parsing XML for Java and C#. But for super-easy pull parsing you should of course use Python.

E-commerce course material. Lots of web architecture slides from Newcastle University. Some are simple enough.

Still working. I’ll take a break and go see some theater in a few hours. I probably won’t have time for a review until tomorrow.

Well… almost six in the morning and still hacking. Time to wrap things up, I think. The basic functionality is right.

C# is OK and ASP.NET feels pretty good, too. But writing my test-clients in Python still makes a lot of sense - when the testing becomes complex I need compact and readable code .

Slept a few hours, then back to business. Some phone calls, some more loose ends… basically everything seems OK. Time to switch hats - I’ll get into performance, load testing and trying to break things now.

Swim training in Skärholmen. The coach says my freestyle kick needs work. So that’s what I do most of the time. We did some arms-only with weight between the legs, though - that was much easier.

Early morning, in bed at the hotel. I’m surfing on my banged-up old Thinkpad. No scheduled tutorials today, so I’ll try to get some work done. I have two deadlines for different customers next week: a new web service built in C#/ASP.Net, and an update to a Python application.

There will be an Eclipse bird-of-feathers this evening. I won’t miss that one.

My view from 16th floor is great: the waterfront is flanked by even taller buildings and the mountains on the far side of the lake are cloudy. Watching the ferries slowly make their way across the water I relax and think about myself and some people I know.

Work is going well today. I took a break and walked down to the Pike Place market. Eventually I got hungry and had late lunch with myself at the Athenian Inn.

Old Smalltalkers never die… they just re-implement all their stuff somewhere else. Great Eclipse BOF!

Kent Beck and Erich Gamma did a nice stand-up routine selling the fun of developing plug-ins for Eclipse.

John Duimovich descibed using Eclipse as a Smalltalk environment. Many of the oldtimers seemed secretly to agree that the only second-rate thing about Eclipse was Java itself. And having spent the last part of the Eighties hacking Smalltalk myself, I kind of see their point.

Several other cool things, including: Stellation and the Eclipse plug-in for AspectJ.

Good luck, Garret!

Greg, did you get my mail? I may have problems with outbound mail but incoming works just fine.

Googlism useless but fun! This happened when I typed in my name:

• jonas beckman is back on the blog and got a nice birthday gift for himself last month
• jonas beckman is really into the wider software world of delphi and python
• jonas beckman is necessary – to calm oneself down

Found via Mark Pilgrim

I’m organizing an XP workshop at my company. I’m aiming for something very hands-on: do things first, discuss later. Also, we’re trying to find a teacher with experience from real projects - tomorrow, we’ll interview someone promising. Naturally, we’ll use Python.

Martin Fowler asks: Is design dead?

No, says Fowler. But he argues that continuous integration and testing makes refactoring possible. Which means changing your design late in the project isn’t always a catastrophe.

Continuous Integration with Visual C++ and COM talks about making this work with MS tools. And Joel Spolsky (with his strong MS background) is also a friend of daily builds.

Building from inside an IDE (like Visual Studio or Delphi) is fast for the single developer. But how does an entire team get fast releases and built-in testing? Unit-tests are great, but unless they are extremely easy to run they won’t be used.

Running builds from external tools like CruiseControl or Finalbuilder is possible and not very difficult. Also, both VS and Delphi has commandline compilers and can integrate external tools with the IDE.
Thank you Kyle Cordes, for telling me about Finalbuilder.

But will developers think it’s worth it? What we are looking for is The Simplest Thing That Might Possibly work. Like someone said on the WikiWikiWeb: Don’t build a lot of amazing superstructure, don’t do anything fancy, just put it in.

Tomorrow I’ll learn more firsthand. We will spend the whole day discussing tools and workflow for a project where the existing codebase is in Delphi.

Something I personally find invaluable for refactoring is visualizing existing code. Not necessarily full-roundtrip-model-driven wonder tools - I just want to step back and SEE the whole picture sometimes. For Delphi users, Modelmaker is an excellent modeling tool.

Here is a new Bruce Eckel interview. Obviously a very creative person, it was interesting to learn a little about how he got started.

Eckel on testing:

Hope is not a strategy. That is, you need to have some kind of testing and automation built into your project so that at any time you can do a build; if it gets all the way through, you know that everything is okay, but if it doesn’t, you are pointed right at the problem.

Link via DailyPython. Naturally, Eckel is a great Python fan. He says it expanded how he thinks about programming.

Greg does even better dinking and dunking today.

Some women I know shouldn’t read this. And others already have.

Plenty of heartless bitches around. And I like that… maybe I am a pervert?