candescence.org

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

photo credit: OctopusHat

I’ve recently been sucked back into the world of Java to work on a fairly agile-friendly project. We’ve got 2-day iterations going on and quite a lot of communication. Despite a severe lack of testing – which i’m working on – all seems well. But i’ve noticed a habit that bugs me a little. We’re meant to be passing this code off to some other teams and as such are trying our best to keep it clean and well javadoc’d for those that follow us. The problem i have with this is a simple little tag that Eclipse likes to throw in whenever you start a javadoc comment for a class; that tag is @author. I can’t stand the little bastard. We’re a team – we’ve all ripped at the guts of this code and if we’re anywhere near as agile as we aim to be then ownership of code shouldn’t matter. I’m aware this this auto-generated tag doesn’t really mean much but its mere existence irks me.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about the Tacate truck it is actually related. As the old coding parable says: “how many developers could be hit by the beer truck and the project still survive?”. Figured it’d be fitting since i was ranting about the topic of code ownership.

Having recently fought of a rather nasty spam bot attack on a forum i run i must say i’ve had little tolerance for spam of any kind as of late but i have to say the most recent comment caught by Akismet has me amused. It was in Chinese with no links what so ever (so i’m not sure how Akismet did in fact catch it unless it just hates Chinese). The comment in its native tongue is as follows:

男人网从多个角度诠释男人时尚生活方式,从男士的健康到着装,到男士忠爱的奢侈品;从男士的烧钱的玩物到男士的性健康,做个有魅力的成功男士.

And being the curious person i am i had to send it through babel fish to see what i got and it was indeed worth the effort:

The man net annotates the man fashion life style from many angles, from gentleman’s health to clothing, to gentleman loyal love luxury goods; From gentleman’s fever money’s toys to gentleman’s natural health, make to have the charm successful gentleman.

My best guess is that they’re trying to sell clothing, maybe, or gentleman fevers? Oh i give up. Maybe a more apt title for this post would’ve been The Confusing Side of Spam. I’m still wondering what exactly a “man net” is…

We switched to Git from Subversion on one of my projects at work because of some rather untimely downtime on our gforge server (for the record i hate that beast of an app and it’s pathetic attempts at UI design). I’d struggled with the transition to Git as i’d largely heard the “it’s distributed and solves world hunger!” arguments for the switch but when i looked around i saw everyone hosting on GitHub (which i love) as a centralized server much like you would with SVN and thus retreated into grumpy old man territory in which i shouted at this new-fangled version control system to get off my lawn.

It wasn’t until i read Josh Susser article on Agile git and the story branch pattern that some of the other advantages of Git really began to sink in. It’s truly a great little intro to the concept of story branches which clicked quite well with me. I’m now a happy Git convert and enjoying the freedom of slapping code at branches not having to worry about the inevitable pain of merging.

Was just poking around last.fm today and noticed that an Epson ad on the page was asking me to enter my last.fm user name to “see [my] music tastes in color.” Being a visualization nerd i went ahead and entered my name and found myself presented with a little animation of the graph printing from an Epson printer. The ad then linked to a full-sized and branded, of course, graph over at aeracode.org who’ve been doing last.fm visualizations for a while now. Just found the use of social sites’ data visualization an interesting concept in advertising. The full graph is below: