Persiflage and Piffle

I’ve not disappeared completely, just been busy. My hard disk failure caused me to re-evaluate my development O/S and (after purchasing a couple of new HDs) I’m up and running with Ubuntu. I never bothered to re-install XP; getting all my stuff up and running was a breeze. That includes things like Eclipse development tools, importing MySQL databases to get my private wiki running, Bugzilla, Subversion, et.al.

I’ve not completely binned Microsoft, I’ve got Vista running on another machine; but here’s another Microsoft bug bear. I tried to use the Vista backup utility to store data to a SAMBA share on Linux; unfortunately it doesn’t work.

There’s an article about it on the Samba mail lists here. I can write to the shares from Vista using normal (e.g. explorer, word, notepad, etc.) mechanisms. For info: I’ve not got a domain setup, just a workgroup and so the creds are not sync’d between the two machines.

If anyone’s got any bright ideas (other than re-compiling Samba) I’d be very interested to hear them.

So here´s the bummer; I got an error message on my machine yesterday warning me that a file was corrupt. ¨Excellent¨ I thought; no, not excellent that a file´s corrupt - excellent that I now know and can do something about it. Since the O/S was Windows XP, I nipped into the event log and saw lots of NTFS errors… oh-no… bad sectors. So foolishly I did what a lot of people would do - I ran chkdsk. Although not my boot partition, the drive was in use by a number of services I run and so chkdsk needed to perform a boot time check - so I foolishly let it.

So here I am, writing this blog entry from Ubuntu… why? Because chkdsk ´fixed´ my disk is such a way that Windows can no longer read it - at all!

I threw an Ubuntu installation disk into my DVD drive (burned a few weeks earlier from a downloaded ISO image) and let it start up a running Ubuntu installation. So that´s the first nice thing about Linux; a lot of the distributions let to ´try before you buy´ … well ok, ´try before you install´ actually.

It auto-mounted my external USB drive but not my other hard drives. The faulty partition is on a SATA disk, but even so, a quick ¨mount /dev/sda6 /media/ddrive¨ and my old supposedly inaccessible D: appeared. So thanks to Ubuntu I have now copied off the last few bits of information that I´d forgotten to backup (with only the occasional ¨Cannot stat: Input/output error¨ to slow me down )

If only Windows were able to read its own partition as easily!

What a nice article title…. clear as mud

So, what the article is really about relates to my playing with a postfix notation DSL; and specifically, adding IDE support within Eclipse. Since I’m going to be using Java bytecode as the underlying execution mechanism for the DSL it makes sense to try to reuse some of the Eclipse JDT functionality; but the JDT does more than I want. Specifically, any files that the JDT finds that cannot be processed by its builder are merely copied to the output directories (i.e. whilst .java files are compiled into .class files, all other files such as .xml or .postfix are merely copied).

Well, I don’t want that; I want the JDT to ignore my files. So we need to add a copy exclusion filter.
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The server side has an article about agile offshoring. It’s quite a good article highlighting some of the things you need to consider, and my experiences of working with an offshore team are quite similar. The thing I wanted to comment on isn’t so much the article as one of the comments.
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Whilst I’m not sure I’d take the argument quite as far as Jason Gorman in this blog article “Good Enough” Really Means “Almost Perfect”, I’m right with him in his sentiment.
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If you’re interested in software development, the relationship between design and construction and whether the discipline is engineering or an art, then I very much recommend spending 15 minutes reading Jack W Reeves’s What is Software Design? article. It puts an interesting slant on the term software design to help align it with other engineering disciplines.

The article is 15 years old and as with all good things relating to our industry, timeless.

Today, whilst skim reading an article for a product, I found myself head in hands, screaming “No, no, no!”. The product in question has a CSV import facility so that you can load up some important data quickly, for example:

IDENTIFIER, NAME, EMAIL
1,Nermal,123@456.com
2,Pooky,789@abc.com

Nothing wrong there, I’m happy with CSV as an import/export mechanism (see KISS principle).

Here’s what got me.
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Scott Ambler’s article on the consequences of fixed-price IT projects gives some good coverage of the high level issues with fixed price (or fixed bid, if you prefer) projects. I wholeheartedly agree with what he’s saying in principle, but what about in practice?
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As part of my investigations into the benefits of model driven techniques and DSLs I’ve been looking into some Java byte-code generation mechanisms. After I’d managed to get my masochistic hacker tendencies under control, I decided not to write a whole new class file generation framework myself and instead downloaded ASM and BCEL.

Essentially, I wanted to be able to generate Java classes on the fly from a DSL, and because I wanted to look at both ASM and BCEL, I setup the basics of my scenario to allow different class generators to be plugged in.
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In my why have all your eggs in one basket? blog post, I described how you could completely customise the structure of your Eclipse projects to be almost any thing you wanted. Perhaps though, I may have been a little misleading, and could have implied that I think that this kind of frigging around is a good thing.
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