Symphonious

Someone complained that this blog didn’t look right in IE on windows so I thought I may as well redesign it. The fact that that certain someone is good looking might have helped… So might have the fact that it didn’t look right in Safari either… and the fact that it caused IE 5.2 on OS X to crash… Mostly because she was good looking….

Anyway, there’s been a bit of a redesign, hopefully it should work in all browsers this time. The slight change to the color scheme is quite nice as well. If you do see any problems, give me a yell.

This year I plan to write and produce a musical stage production. I’ve already got an excellent choreographer and an award winning composer so things are starting to fall into place. I’d really love to find a talented director and they are so central to tying everything together and it’s really not my field.

Soul Purpose will probably form the basis for the band, but we’ll most likely acquire a few extra players to fill out the sound a bit and particularly to provide some more orchestral instruments to produce that great theatre sound - not to mention making things easier for the vocalists.

In terms of a story, I’ve got a few ideas floating around my head at the moment, and have just gone out and bought a little notepad I plan to carry everywhere to note down any ideas that pop into my head. Lately there seems to be a lot of ideas running through my head which is good to have back. About 10 years ago I used to constantly have ideas for computer programs to write running through my head but that died out and I’ve been idealess for quite some time. Now the ideas are back but this time targeted towards performing arts which is a little surprising since it’s typically been my sisters that have been the writers of the family.

I seem to be doing okay at it myself though - the Mafia murder mystery dinner I wrote a few months back went really well and that involved writing about 30 000 words of character descriptions for the 50 people that showed up (a sell out btw).

Anyway, things are in the early planning stages at the moment but it looks like we may do a small production, possibly a cabaret style thing, late April or early June and then swing into a full musical production in the second half of the year (by then the script should be finished). So if you’re in or around Brisbane Australia and want to get involved with any phase of a musical production, from writing the script, to building sets, directing, producing, cast, crew and right through to marketing drop me a line. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about these developments a fair bit as the year progresses.

chromatic talks about the overuse of patterns and design in software development. This highlights a problem the software industry seems to have - it just doesn’t understand moderation.

It’s not only design that suffers from excessiveness, it’s processes too. Some people get so caught up in explicitly defining and then following a process that they spend more time on the process than actually getting things done. Worse still are the people who get so caught up in the process that they forget to check that it actually achieves the right thing.

Of course, none of that should be taken to mean that all processes are bad, but in needs to be taken in moderation. This attitude that extreme programming takes of “if doing a bit of this is good, lets turn the dial all the way up to 11″ is really crazy. Too much of anything is bad for you. You need unit tests and they need to cover your code well, but you don’t need 100% test coverage or you’ll just spend way too much time writing tests (not that extreme programming actually advocates 100% test coverage).

Pair programming is another great idea that can be taken too far. There is a lot of code where it really helps to bounce ideas off of other people for, but there’s a lot of fairly mundane code that you should be able to write without help and still get it right first time. In those cases it’s a waste to have two people doing mundane work, you should just split up and work individually until you hit a problem that benefits from pair programming. Again, moderation.

Anyway, with a thunderstorm coming I think I’ll blog in moderation and sign off now.

I really have to mention for the benefit of my non-apache friends, Planet Apache. It’s an aggregation of blogs by Apache committers and contains a lot of really interesting stuff both from the world of Apache and from outside it.

It’s open to all apache committers but is still ramping up with new people adding their blogs so we’ll see how well the noise to signal ratio survives, but at the moment, the signal is really very good.

This is a fantastic suggestion from Warren Ellis. Friend of a friend systems should be integrated with instant messaging to become the central hub of your internet community experience.

It needs to go a step further than that though - it should integrate with iSync, Outlook, your PDA etc, so that it really becomes the central hub of all your communications devices. It should include the functionality that Address Book now has (on OS X) with it’s bluetooth phone integration.

I’d also put the focus on business networking and customer relations more than dating as well. A system that integrates with all your communications mediums, tracks the communication with customers or business partners and allows you to easily view and search that information. That’s a pretty nice tech support/help desk setup. Ignoring some of it’s tracking capabilities scales it back to be a nice business contact tool, and with the friend of a friend thing coming through it still serves as a dating tool for those who really want that.

Mostly though, I think I just want another cool toy to play with - the bluetooth phone I recently acquired is just so much fun to play with.