Blog

Flex/AIR Jam Right Before the Roundup The next Flex/AIR workshop with James Ward and myself will be February 25-27, 2009, Crested Butte, Colorado, This is right before the JavaPosse Roundup, so you can get the most out of your airline ticket.
Java Posse Roundup 2009 Registration Open Because of a conflict with the SD conference, we moved the Roundup to March 3-6.
Google Adwords: Stick with "Adwords Basic" They goad you into "Standard Edition" but once you change, you can't go back. No matter how bad it is. Change at your peril.
Will Open-Sourcing Java Remove Competetive Corporate-Think? Publicly-held corporations ostensibly serve the people they sell products to, but are required by law to actually serve their shareholders. Privately-held companies only serve the customer.
New Book: First Steps in Flex Now Available James Ward (Adobe evangelist for Flex) and I have coauthored a book to rapidly bring programmers into the world of Flex. Our primary intent was to make the book small (only 140 pages), with short, pithy chapters, to lower the hurdles to learning this powerful GUI system.
Speaking at a Castle in Denmark I will be giving two presentations at the annual conference of Javagruppen, the Danish Java user group, January 9-10 at the Hindsgavl Castle.
Video Interview on InfoWorld I was visiting my friend Zack Urlocker and he did this 6-minute video interview for his column at InfoWorld.
Version Control is Undo Perhaps we only commit big chunks at a time as an artifact of older version control systems. What if we treated it as a full-fledged undo facility?
Things I Learned at QCon Floyd Marinescu asked me to organize an open-spaces session at the QCon Conference in San Francisco. I learned interesting things at both open spaces and regular sessions.
BitBucket/Hg vs. Launchpad/Bzr We recently moved "Python 3 Patterns & Idioms" from Launchpad to BitBucket. Here's why.
Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering A useful collection of observations about our profession.
JavaPosse Roundup 2009 Dates Set Mark March 2-6 on your calendar.
Python Decorators III: A Decorator-Based Build System Most build systems start out with dependencies, then realize they need language features and eventually discover they should have started with language design.
The Demise of the Headhunter Headhunters are like travel agents, except that it's taking the web longer to make them go away.
Python Decorators II: Decorator Arguments The decorator mechanism behaves quite differently when you pass arguments to the decorator.

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Quotes

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
-- Benjamin Franklin

If somebody comes up to you and says something like, "How do I make this pony fly to the moon?", the question you need to ask is, "What problem are you trying to solve?" You'll find out that they really need to collect gray rocks. Why they thought they had to fly to the moon, and use a pony to do it, only they know. People do get confused like this.
-- Max Kanat-Alexander

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
-- Henry Ford

I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
-- Vidiu Platon

I'm beginning to wonder if the sum total pain caused by the box-and-arrow crowd has outweighed the occasional usefulness of UML.
-- Carson Gross

You do not have to spend a lot of time and effort on those who strongly resist change. You only have to help and protect those who want to change, so that they are able to succeed. Put another way, your job is not to plant the entire forest, row by row -- it is to plant clumps of seedlings in hospitable places and to nurture them. As they mature, these trees will spread their seeds, and the forest will eventually cover the fertile land. The rocks, will, of course, remain barren regardless. ... once you have figured out who cannot be converted, you should not waste more time trying to persuade them.
-- David Hutton, The Change Agents' Handbook

... no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are one of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.
-- Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

A nation ... consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation ... Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is? ... If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law ... He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.
-- William Gibson, Spook Country