Jonas Beckman

Release every Monday - how is that for an XP slogan? Anyway, we currently do and so far it works.

Tim Bray: Why XML doesn’t suck

Kendall Clark: XML isn’t too hard

Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration

Martin Fowler: The new methodology

Too much free software?

Tim Bray: XML is too hard for programmers

A Novices Tutorial on Subversion
Subversion is a very interesting replacement for CVS - I’ve been tracking it for a while and will probably switch in a few months. There is even a clone of my favorite CVS add-on TortoiseCVS

Inetmedia fokus: Kriget i Irak

Michael Moore: Starting a ruccus was the right thing to do

Don’t try this at home - do it in the pool!
From BBC Sport academy, swimming section.

Beyond the blog: …many of us will be reading 10,000 weblogs.

Some comments from SWSW on the future of weblogging, by Anil Dash, Ben&Mena Trott, Justin Hall and others.
Via mymarkup.net

I see RSS aggregators (like my current favorite Syndirella) as complementing, not replacing web-browsers.

In a typical research session, I scan perhaps 200 news sources, browse headlines and a few paragraphs here and there - then open up maybe 10-15 pages that I actually want to read. I open all pages on separate tabs (which Opera and many others have), then keep them around until I’ve read them.

So far, actually reading individual weblogs is too much fun to give up - effiency isn’t everything. But if smarter tools can refine that pleasure I’m all for it.

In some way, I belive this is like weblogger dinners: not all webloggers can be dinner companions - but it would be sad if none of them were.

Swedish weblogger Förvetet recently coined the expression Bloggbreddning. This is difficult to translate well. But the idea (which I agree with), is that webloggers become interesting when they have an unususal combination of context and perspective - not just because they have a narrow focus on some favourite subject.

Which reminds me of a discussion I had with Det perfekta tomrummet, På kornet, Mulli.nu! and Klipspringer at the recent weblogger dinner.

Very long day yesterday: swim training in the morning, then worked until late in the evening.

Today I did my laundry early in the morning, then had my usual Friday massage before work. Now it’s past nine in the evening and I’m at the office, wrapping up next week’s software release.

Here is an Asian Times article about the Project for a New American Century. This organization has formulated much of what is now known as the Bush doctrine - the idea that it is in USA’s best interest to make unilateral and preemptive military attacks.

Here is another nice little essay that talks about the same American realpolitik.

The first Swedish weblogger dinner took place this evening: Real bloggers eat sushi.

Erik (mymarkup.net) and Klipspringer

Gustaf Holmberg (Det perfekta tomrummet)

Fredrik Appelberg (Mulli.nu!) and Henrik Torstensson

Not long afterwards, updates began to show up on blogs.unmade.com. Klocklös i tiden kept track of the blogger dinner links and Emmanuel posted another dinner picture.

Python legend Fredrik Lundh couldn’t make it, but noticed that others were having fun.

Woke up too early, went back to sleep… then went swimming.

Got a new phone today: Nokia 7250. Very good at the basic stuff and a nice little toy, too. When my new SIM-card arrives I’ll try some moblogging. Why not?

While I was at it I switched my mobile connection from Telia (which I distrust in most things) to Vodafone.

Our company had a deal with Telia that became very expensive - and their sales manager insisted everyone had to sign up for something more long term if we wanted a better deal. Not a very smart way to treat customers - leaving Telia was the only option left, so that’s what I did.

I woke up early, as usual. Plenty of time to have breakfast, read the news, do some stretching. My body feels like swimming, but I’ll wait.

It was spring yesterday: a long walk in the woods, a quick dip in the lake after sauna and excellent home-made food. Good company, too.

Today we’re installing the very first version of a new system at a customer’s site. Then we’ll keep the versions rolling.

We did another well-received demo, cleaned up the data model, edited some use cases, then taught the local admins how to install the SQL Server database, testdata and the client apps.

Everything just worked and we were home in time for lunch. I was very surprised - but it has to happen sometime, I guess.

Yesterday I went for a marvellous four hour walk with my friend Joen and my favorite dog Tintin. Tintin found a new home with Joen a few months ago, with a little help from me.

Early morning, the sun is shining today.

But I’m still inside, pondering Test-Driven Development in .NET. I agree with these unit testing thoughts: most interesting frameworks (for DotNet or anything else) aren’t very easy to test yet.

In my current project, we have a persistence framework and a GUI generator that automatically builds screens with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for any object and links between them. I wrote the GUI generator in a few days - but testing both persistence and GUI is difficult.

Can mock objects really be the simplest thing that work? I hope not. On the other hand, I’ll give Abstract ADO.NET a try pretty soon.

I recently started using the NUnit Addin for Visual Studio (here is a screen shot and a download. Working this way has a fresh feel to it. Sometimes I still miss my Smalltalk workspaces from the late Eighties - but life goes on.

I’ll take a break and watch the sun. I know just where to go for a long walk in the woods and some sauna. It takes a while to get there, but it’s worth it.

I just haven’t had it in me to go bonkers posting war links…

War kills people… news channels have no room for this one truth. And to me that makes the whole medium feel like a lie.

Journalist Scott Rosenberg about the denial of death.

I am making software again and like it that way. Monday we make the first release to our current customer. We actually feel pretty relaxed about it: just another thing done one small step at a time.

Our tools are VS Studio 2003 Final Beta, TortoiseCVS for version control and NUnit for unit testing.

C# Refactory is a nice refactoring add-in for VS Studio. I bought it and like it a lot - but unfortunately it doesn’t work with VS Studio 2003 yet.

C# may not be Smalltalk - I have shipped real projects in both Smalltalk and Python and hate type casts and stupid compile time stuff as much as anyone. But for what we do right now it works out. Reflection is our twisted friend.

As usual I began Friday with two hours of Lomi-Lomi massage. I do this on a regular basis - it’s fun, helps me stay sane and feels really good.

Massage is a language you learn by listening and by doing. Right now, I do intense listening. Eventually I’ll speak it myself - I began training shiatsu a few years ago and plan to be licensed some day.

Well, I’ll definitely write more later… but now I’m off to do my swimming, before the pool gets crowded.

Ben Hammersley has collected background info on the Kurds in Iraq. My personal expectation is for USA to sell the Kurds short in a clumsy and bloody fashion - but I do hope to be wrong.

War news is converging again. After a few hours everything is recycled in every available media: the expected invasion of Southern Iraq from Kuwait is underway, it’s hard to say if Saddam is alive or not, a helicopter crashed etc, etc.

There were some reports of explosions in Northern Iraq from AFP and Al Jazeera.

How To Read Al Jazeera In English. And an interview with the company translating Arabic news to English.

Here is the the Arabic-to-English translation site. Besides Al Jazeera, there are several other Arabic news sites you can translate: Asharq Al-Awsat from Saudi Arabia, Al Hayat from the United Kingdom and Al-Ahram from Egypt. Some of these sites also have abridged English editions.

It’s hard to beat good old BBC for background news, though.