vesterberg.se

So you are a developer and create programs. Believe it or not, someone will come after you and work on your code. We should write our code for those that come after us. Documentation is often neglected in projects or is too far from the code, so that when the code changes, documentation does not.

A step in the right direction is that we let the code tell the story. As you write, you choose names that speak. Your coding of algoritms and solutions should be obvious. Educate yourself in the conventions, best practises and patterns of the language you use. Don’t use smart coding if you are not forced to do it for performance reasons. If you make design decisions, add why you did as you did. Reveal your thinking in the code. Add the purpose of your methods as comments. Always write comments and code together and at the same time. I can guarantee that what you plan to add afterwards, is never done.

If you have done smart-coding, someone will spend a lot of hours trying to understand how it works. Imagine how much time, effort and money that is wasted this way. The time you save when you take a short cut is lost three times when someone after you will continue to work on your application.

See your code as a living thing. It will continue to live after you have left it. Our attitude and perception of the works of our hands is what will rule and govern our habits.

I have been using the floating thumb technique (see earlier post for an explanation) for a while now and I like it.

One additional advantage besides what I mentioned earlier is that you have better control over D- and G-string and can get a fatter tone if you like. I always felt that the sound of the G-string was to small, at least on my main axe, Warwik Streamer LX. Now I can “dig in” more with the fingers. More flesh equals fatter tone.

I appreciate being able to mute more than two strings with the thumb. It is important to practise slowly at first, so that the thumb rests relaxed on the strings. The fingers that are not used at the moment should have as little tension in them as possible.

I am reading the book Wicket Pro by Karthik Gurumurthy from Apress and working my way through the examples in the book. Wicket caught my attention as I was was looking for an alternative to JSF for a web application. I have worked with Struts, Tapestry and a few other frameworks. Wicket seems to have an interesting and novel approach to Web “GUI” building. Pages are built up like Swing forms and panels, with components added programmatically. EJB3 is moving away from descriptors. Wicket does not use XML-descriptors. It’s goal is to be simple with a paradigm more like desktop apps than web apps. It has built in handlers for AJAX. I will continue to report how it turns out.

So, at last, I have some blogging software up and running. The choice fell on the well known and proven Wordpress. I just didn’t feel like tweakin’ at all. Installation was a breeze, but I had severe problems with my server though. Did you know that many motherboards manufactured 5 years ago have bad capacitors that begin to leak and malfunction by now? The result is instability, spontaneous reboots and all kinds of evil things. You can spot he leakage on the top of the capacitors as some kind of grease coming out of them. If you have miniature hands and a brave heart you can replace the capacitors. In my case I reused some older computers I had laying around.