Musings about software development, random thoughts, etc.
1 if(!succeed) {
2 try();
3 }
Thompson states:
Cylons
Sauron's Eye
Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.
Leaders and managers are encouraged and exhorted to rely more on their intuition and judgment. Everyone knows that "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." Ha ha ha. But where does bad judgment come from? My answer — and the replicable answer from Nobel Prize winning research: Trusting gut instincts and feelings.
The entire field of behavioral economics has been built on the intensifying recognition that people, particularly smart ones, are suckers for cognitive illusions and heuristic biases that pretty much guarantee that "gut-trusting" will, on average, yield heart burn.
What gives this issue great urgency and good timeliness is the nascent phenomenon discussed in Gary Wolf's excellent New York Times Magazine piece on data-driven introspection. He describes his cast of anal-retentive compulsively computational cast of characters as uber-geeks. To me, they're the uber-introspects: a new cultural class that values the ability to relentlessly act upon obsessive self-knowledge....Instrumenting ourselves, our thoughts, our actions, and — yes — our networks of colleagues and acquaintances, simultaneously transforms both self-awareness and situational awareness.
So here's a simple, cheap experiment: the next few times you make a snap decision or judgment where your gut is your best friend, take 20 seconds to send yourself an email or text briefly describing what you did and why. Quit after doing it maybe 20 times. Then look at those messages from the vantage of a week later. I promise you'll be surprised. (I did a version of that exercise when I was having a nightmare time with a client. The resulting review left me biting my tongue and forbidding myself from sending substantive project emails without sleeping on them first.)
Joel and I both agree: one of the most effective coding practices you can adopt on your team is interactive, sit-down-with-your-coworker code review. 90% of the things you will learn have nothing to do with the code. I believe programming is a far more social activity than most realize. If you write code, and nobody but you ever sees that code — did you really extract all the benefit from writing that code?
This video was just shot at the Pub at Crestview Hills.
Thank you,
Mark McFadden
www.markmcfadden.tel
Here is Dilbert's take on the Lost (insert "Apple" here) 4G Phone in the Bar:
A problem with a checkbox is that the browser will only include it in the request when it is checked. If it is not checked, the HTML specification suggests that it not be sent (i.e. omitted from the request). If the value of the checkbox is being persisted, either in a session bean or in the model, a checked box can never unchecked by a HTML form — because the form can never send a signal to uncheck the box. The application must somehow ascertain that since the element was not sent that the corresponding value is unchecked.
The recommended approach for Struts applications is to use the reset method in the ActionForm? to set all properties represented by checkboxes to null or false. The checked boxes submitted by the form will then set those properties to true. The omitted properties will remain false. Another solution is to use radio buttons instead, which always submit a value.
It is important to note that the HTML specification recommends this same behavior whenever a control is not "successful". Any blank element in a HTML form is not guaranteed to submitted. It is therefor very important to set the default values for an ActionForm? correctly, and to implement the reset method when the ActionForm? might kept in session scope.
public class DynamicStringArray {
public static void main(String[] args){
String[] originalArray = {"a","b","d"};
System.out.println("----- Original String Array ----");
for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
}
//create a fixed-size ArrayList from the String array.
ArrayList oldList = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(originalArray));
//create an ArrayList to hold the inserted items.
ArrayList newList = new ArrayList();
//assume no "b" in the array
boolean hasB = false;
//check if the array has a "b"
for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
if(originalArray[i].equalsIgnoreCase("b")){
hasB = true;//we have a "b" Houston
}
}
if(hasB){//the array has a "b"
for(int i = 0; oldList.size() > i; i++){
if(oldList.get(i) == "b"){//found "b"
newList.add(i,"newB");//replace "b" with "NewB"
newList.add(i + 1,"c");//add "c"
}else{//not "b"
newList.add(oldList.get(i));
}
}
}
//create new String array
String[] newArray = new String[newList.size()];
newList.toArray(newArray);
//pass new String array to old String array
originalArray = newArray;
System.out.println("----- Updated String Array -----");
for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
}
}
}
It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.Check it out
Given the rapidly "evolving" role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), one paradigm to consider when surveying the swiftly changing CMO phenomenon is to look at natural ecosystems and how ever changing environment pressures facilitate the change or evolution of the organisms in those ecosystems. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of the "primitive" CMO, the new environmental pressures challenging the CMO, and finally the fitness factors that are involved in the survival of the fittest CMOs.Here is Survival of the Fittest CMOs.
Given the need for understanding the trends and patterns exhibited in data, utilizing the data in a way that can provide a competitive edge is vital. Three particular products or opportunities for this need are systems to store the data, systems to warehouse the data, and systems to mine the data for analysis and decision making. Data storage is a well understood concept of the use of computer systems to store customer information and transactions as well as other business related data. However, data in a data warehouse is different that the data stored by point-of-sale systems.Here is Business Intelligence from Social Media.
Using Curl, developers can implement a new class of complex, business-critical, Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with Ajax or other smart client technologies.
Curl allows organizations with legacy client-server applications to move to Web-based delivery, increasing reach, improving processes, accelerating productivity and reducing cost.
From Bill Taylor's Practically Radical Blog at HarvardBusiness.org. In lean times, there's nothing more valuable than a great new product idea. Why not invite your customers to share their creativity with your company -- and turn the best ideas into actual products! That's what legendary shoe designer John Fluevog has done, with a project he calls open-source footwear.
If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
--A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up--
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way--
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.
<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"You want to enlarge the image to a size of 450 by 450 pixels based on the action of a user. Instead of a link to a larger image, we will enlarge the image when the user passes their mouse over the image. To do this you can utilize the mx.effects.Resize class. Enter the following into your MXML file:
height="150"
width="150"
/>
<mx:Resize id="resizeBig"Then, within the Image instance, modify it with the following:
widthFrom="150" widthTo="450"
heightFrom="150" heightTo="450"
/>
<mx:Resize id="resizeSmall"
widthFrom="450" widthTo="150"
heightFrom="450" heightTo="150"
/>
<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"Finally, recompile and you will see that when the user passes their mouse over the image it enlarges without the use of links to the larger image.
height="150"
width="150"
rollOverEffect="{resizeBig}"
rollOutEffect="{resizeSmall}"
/>
