I _Really_ Don't Know

I've been watching Teqlo for a little while (since before the renamed from Abgenial Systems) and they look very interesting. They've been pretty coy about what they're doing other than letting us know they're broadly about letting you combine web services into applications without doing any programming. Anyways, they finally got a video out showing precisely... nothing. Although the UI looks like it'll be quite pretty...

I've signed up for the preview, so I hope dissing the video doesn't stop them sending me a login...

Goranka Bjedov - Using Open Source Tools for Performance Testing, Google TechTalk, 8 September 2006.

Goranka provides a great overview of how Google are doing performance testing

Xansa. I haven't bothered to blog at all about my time there as I only lasted 6 months, and it was two years ago. The account I worked on had a particular culture to it that I found I couldn't work with. I'm not going to expand on that here for the same reason I haven't blogged about it before - there are some great folks there trying really, really, hard to do some great stuff, but there's a lot of difficulties that make it difficult for them to.

So, why am I posting this now? Well, this strange thing keeps happening; every few months or so I get a clump of searches for Xansa and variants of it showing up in the logs - from inside Xansa's network.

This book is a great book. I started reading Douglas Coupland when a friend handed me Girlfriend in A Coma and I couldn't put it down. That was several years ago and, building software for a living, I had to read Microserfs. I guess I'll get around to reading JPods soon enough.

But this book get a strong eight-out-of-ten. It's different; in the way that Pulp Fiction was different and Isaac Asimmov's The Culture series is different. It doesn't feel like anything else I've read. Ever.

Over at Outgoing, Thom's been looking at Marc a bit. Not a surprise really, as OCLC use it quite a bit.

When I first joined Talis, almost two years ago, I wrote about The promises (and arrogance) of youth, a comment about how most, if not all, of what we try to do has been done before and often better.

Thom Hickey over at Outgoing posted a snippet about the old addage Worse is better - or "Crap is the new black" as I prefer.

Thom says:

So, it's ages since I last blogged anything and even then a lot of was BlogPaper... So what's up with that?

Well, I try to blog things that genuinely contribute to the world. Things like Poo and What is professionalism really about? Writing things like that contribute gives me a sense of meaning, of being able to help others.

There are a number of things that I look for in assessing if code has been written in an object-oriented way or in a procedural way - I've got a document somewhere that I wrote at a previous job, but this brief piece about "getters" by Martin Fowler is well worth reading.

Fowler assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge in his writing. For example, for this piece to make sense you need to know that "getters" is a term used for methods on Java classes that simply expose a field on the object.

I've been accepted to speak at Waterfall2006 with the following session:

If It Was Good Enough for Shakespeare: A Fresh Look at the Need for Talent in Software Engineering

In order to learn about how the world works we need two things, the ability to notice that stuff is the way it is and the ability to find or develop an explanation for the way things are. These are things we try to assess when looking for talent to hire.

I was so proud last night becuase my (eldest) boy, aged 5 (and a half) asked what in my mind is a seminal question.