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.

As Iain points out, MS have a new toolbar, and it’s not particularly original. I’m not so concerned about it being similar though, it has the same function so it makes sense that it would have the same kind of look. What really concerns me is the fact that a browser vendor has to release a toolbar plugin for their own browser to add new features instead of just adding it to the browser directly. Guess it provides another prominent link to various MS websites…

“jbob” comments about how Java and Linux are a good fit for each other, and that better access to the internals of linux would make it even better. I definitely agree that Java and Linux are a good fit, but they are a good fit only because Java provides a platform independant abstraction. Providing access to the internals of linux from Java would remove the biggest advantage Java has over C/C++ because the code would no longer be portable. Ways to make Java programs look and act like either GNOME or KDE apps would be great (particularly if it’s done through the Swing L&F mechanism so it looks right on which ever desktop system you choose), but getting into the internals of Linux – just write it in C and get access to anything you want. One last thing:

Over at O’Reilly Chuck Toporek complains that iSync didn’t support the bluetooth phone he purchased. I think he’s pointing the blame in the wrong place. iSync supports the standard syncing protocol SyncML so it will work with any phone or device that also supports that standard which apparently Chuck’s phone doesn’t. So while I sympathize with Chuck for having bought what is for him a dud phone, I think it’s a bit much to expect Apple to do all the leg work to support every device under the Sun. Afterall, isn’t that exactly what open standards are meant to be for?

I really don’t like perl at this point in time. If anyone can explain why attempting to use the Google search webservice from within MT would return an error saying the file protocol is not understood, I’d love to hear about it. All the required modules for MT are properly installed as per their instructions and it’s still a no-go, despite the fact that it’s up and running fine on my internal server. Sigh, hopefully using CPAN to reinstall the modules in the default locations might help instead of having to install them in MT’s extlib directory by hand.

In the beginning there was chaos…. Nothing changes really. I’ve finally gotten around to putting a blog online, I’m not sure how long it will last but hopefully I’ll be doing enough interesting stuff this year that there’ll be something to blog about. I guess in the worst case I can just pester Iain from here instead of in his comments.