Skip to content

Category Archives: technical

Technical topics.

Why Steve Jobs mattered | Bob Lewis

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Why Steve Jobs mattered | Bob Lewis: “Nothing about the iPod, iTunes store, iPhone, or iPad was safe. Jobs focused on upside potential, not downside risk. Like the great generals in history he preferred offense to defense. As for excellence, he insisted on it in the technical as well as general meaning of the word. [...]

Also filed in business, professional practice | Tagged | Comments Off

Requirement: futuristic

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

So a friend said to me one of his client’s requirements was the system be “futuristic”. Here’s what we built:

Also filed in business | Tagged , | Comments Off

Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen | Bob Lewis

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen | Bob Lewis: “When IT is a business, selling to its internal customers, its principal product is software that “meets requirements.” This all but ensures a less-than-optimal solution, lack of business ownership, and poor acceptance of the results.” (Via Bob Lewis [...]

Also filed in business, professional practice | | Comments Off

On upgrading to Mac OSX 10.7 “Lion”

Sunday, October 16, 2011

So, I finally got around to upgrading to 10.7 from 10.6. I had deliberately held off for a while, to see if there were any major hassles before committing myself to it. Apart from the reverse-scrolling thing, which a lot of people didn’t like, but which you can quickly get used to, I hadn’t heard [...]

Also filed in apps | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

blog link: world–

Friday, October 14, 2011

world– by Robert Merkel at Larvatus Prodeo. Published October 14, 2011 at 09:02AM The technology world has just lost another giant, though one without the towering public persona of Steve Jobs. If you’re not actually a programmer, you’ve probably never heard of Dennis Ritchie. But the vast majority of software you use was built using [...]

Also filed in business, infrastructure and frameworks, programming | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Friday, October 14, 2011

“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.” via Dennis Ritchie: The [...]

Also filed in infrastructure and frameworks, programming | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Spring, JPA/JTA, and multiple persistence units, with view transactions

Thursday, October 13, 2011

I have grappled with this topic before. Tonight, after 13 hours of struggle, I finally got my web app perfected in this regard. It all started when I needed to start the Transaction out in the view, i.e. as soon as the resource is opened on the HTTP side (rather than when the database service [...]

Also filed in architecture, infrastructure and frameworks, programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

UNIX timezone database shut down

Friday, October 7, 2011

The UNIX time zone database has been shut down because of copyright complaints! Overthrow the DCMA! http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html

Also filed in business, infrastructure and frameworks, rants | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

if this then that

Thursday, September 22, 2011

I have recently been using “if this then that” to integrate my Google Reader with this blog and other places, like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and tumblr (I have a Classics-related tumblr). It’s a great way to do simple integration between these services but one annoyance is that it lacks any way to discriminate actions. For [...]

Also filed in apps, rants | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

blog link: Who Owns the Risk?

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Who Owns the Risk? by Mike Cottmeyer at LeadingAgile. Published September 20, 2011 at 08:30PM Back in my late 20′s I was a project manager in a pretty good sized IT shop. I worked under a great VP that put me in situations that were really beyond my abilities.  He fundamentally believed that I’d do [...]

Also filed in | | Comments Off