Posted Sat, 10 Feb 2007 10:57:00 GMT
I’ve got this pretty small project that I’m doing for myself and friends. It’s just a small web-site we have for fun. I don’t have that much time at the mo to work on it, so a friend suggested he’d do some of the work.
The first thing that came to mind was “right, cool, we’ll just make a CVS repository somewhere and work on it together”. That way we’re not growing out of sync, I can see what he’s doing (he’s not that experienced) and I know he’s not broken it cause I and everyone else can try to build before committing.
Except, I don’t have the time and desire to run and manage a CVS server. So, quite naturally, I thought there’d be a place on the net somewhere which offers free source control repositories. After all you can share your pictures, share your thoughts (in a blog), share your documents (google docs), share your calendar, all that for free, why shouldn’t you be able to share your code??? And, sorry, I don’t mean sourceforge - this is not an open source project and I don’t want to be bound by some licenses too long for me to read.
Well, my search has been unsuccessful so far. If anyone knows a place where you can share your code with a few other people, please write to me!
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Posted Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:07:00 GMT
Wow, it’s been a while…. Anyway, back to the point… wouldn’t it be nice if you could right-click and select “Extend this class” or “Implement this interface”. I don’t even remember where I’ve seen this, but I still mechanically reach for it whenever I want to…. well.. extend this class…. In eclipse you have to go new/class and then click a button and choose your class, whereas I reckon most of the time you want to make a subclass you are already in or near the base class.
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Posted Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:31:44 GMT
A guy said something which sounded a bit odd to me the other day. We were in this training course for something called Agitator, which is supposed to help you test better. Anyway, he said that ninety percent of the companies he’s visited as a consultant had started off using JUnit for unit testing, but then abandoned it because the tests were difficult to maintain.
Anyway, it might have just been part of the salespitch (he was quite heavy on the selling) but I think it is either untrue, aor if it is true, is totally lame.
I can’t believe people just stop testing, because it’s too difficult. Is it possible that most companies out there really are in the stone age? I know a few, but ninety percent?
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Posted Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:08:00 GMT
Having spent the last thirty minutes deleting spam comments from this website, I decided to turn the comments off. I wasn’t getting that many anyway…
It was a fairly quick decision, but not the first option. My blog had “Spam protection”. Full of hope, I clicked the link only to find an extremely simplistic page, offering me to disable a list of IP addresses. That’s not gonna stop them, is it?
The thing is, this site is maintained by myself. Not the content, the site itself. When I was making it I wanted to learn Ruby On Rails. So I bought the hosting on railsplayground (excellent), I downloaded the blogging software (Typo, also excellent at the time), I installed it, tweaked it a bit (the joys of open source), then tweaked it a bit more and here’s the web-site. While the tweaking was fun, I did not really intend to keep tweaking it all the time. I wanted is as a blog, and I also wanted to learn a bit of Ruby.
Now, not so long later, I find it stupidly out of date. While the spam protection engines in the blog hosting services are sophisticated beasts, mine still bans individual IP addresses. There’s no way I am writing a spam protection for my wiki now, and the thought of finding the latest version of software I don’t even remember the name of and upgrading is far to painful to even contemplate. I am more or less faced with the choice between being stuck with this forever (with it growing older and more out of touch), or buying a full blogging service for a marginally higher price from people who know how to do it and more importantly, have the time and will to do it.
The choice is pretty easy.
I find myself doing this more and more - Flickr for one is a great example - you pay them a bit, and they manage the storage, backups, sharing, printing, and everything-else-you-can-do-with-them of your pictures. It seems to me that trend is not extraordinary. The division of labour was a major booster for the world’s wealth hundreds of years ago, and there’s no reason why it should not continue.
Some places and sectors have tried to defy the trend. For example, people in the UK, in addition to their main job, also engage in property speculation, building and decoration, gardening and driving on a regular basis. However, mostly, the division-of-labour trend has prevailed and continues to do so.
So, I am outsourcing. Which is why I started this post here and not in my personal blog. It has something to do with software.
Which really brings me to the point. So far I have written about tasks that I am not prepared to take on on a regular basis - software maintenance, backup, organising pictures. It makes sense - division of labour is all about economies of scale and expertise in a particular area.
Now, say I was a large manufacturing organisation - I have a great business idea, which can only be enabled by a very specific software system, which I have specified. It’s a one-off and I have more expertise in the field than anybody else - that’s what makes me superior. There’s no economy of scale (since no external company will be doing this on a regular basis, or so I hope) and there’s no expertise in my area greater than mine. Why would I give it to someone else? It defies the whole point. Why should I pay somebody to learn about the specifics of my business, gather the necessary people, inefficiently communicate my requirements through complicated documents (possibly future base of litigation), and surrender my know-how to a company that will sell it to my competitors?
I might as well do it myself, retain a full control over what’s going on (this is vital for my business, remember), and save on other agency costs. Note, I would still outsource activities, where I would benefit from the division of labour - those not specific to my business and the expertise exists outside my company (general IT and telco, printing, PR, etc.) I think a foolproof method to tell one from the other, is that on the latter you can make an SLA - you have a way of judging the performance. On the former, you don’t.
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Posted Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:39:00 GMT
I have just made my first Eclipse Rich Client Platform application. It does not do much (displays a text and a couple of fields), I just wanted to get a feel for the product.
It looks like a great way to build standalone applications - it has a fairly simple API, and is quite intuitive for eclipse users, and will be especially easy for someone, who’s written plugins.
Essentially that’s what you finished product is - the eclipse core, plus a few plugins. Mine, which admittedly, did nothing, ended up being just over 10Mb, but I suppose a much larger app will still be just over 10Mb, because 99% of that is the eclipse core.
One of the best things though, is that the application can be exported to any supported operating system, and it actually looks native and is native, despite being written in java, because the eclipse runtime is for that platform. Great!
And this 10 minute intro to Eclipse RCP is very, very useful - http://www.eclipsezone.com/eps/10minute-rcp/
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