Average Everyday

Jedi mind tricks for Java

2007-07-31T12:31:00.001+01:00

The Walton brothers have released Jedi - get your head round it, it's a fantastic java tool.

Litle Bro gets Married

2006-08-23T12:23:00.000+01:00

My little brothers wedding was on 12th aug 2006 to the lovely Sophie.
I was best man and it was excellent :-)

Again, making sure I had a post about that too :-)

My Beautiful Wife goes 30

2006-08-23T12:20:00.000+01:00

On 11 Aug 2006. So this post is a bit late. But I've been neglecting the site recently coz I've been happy and learning lots at work and had very little to b1tch about :-)

One of the things I bought her was Logans Run, the old classic 70's movie.
I'd forgotten that the "ascending" (euthanasia) age in it was 30 ;-)

..just wanted to make sure I'd posted about this :-)

Amnesty accuses US on rendition

2006-04-05T09:21:00.000+01:00

From the BBC;

Three Yemeni men allegedly abducted and mistreated by the US were probably held in eastern Europe, human rights group Amnesty International has said.

The report, based on interviews with former detainees, also links the US practice of "rendition" to the torture or ill-treatment of terror suspects.

Washington has insisted it would never send detainees to places where they would be at risk of torture.

Shiny New Job

2006-04-04T11:38:00.000+01:00

Well, here I am posting on my new job before Simon does. Humph.

I'm at BNPP (Banco National de Paris - Paribas), doing shiny new Agile Java stuff with JMock, FIT, Hibernate..... totally shiny.

..but having to use Lotus Notes for my email. Eugggh.

Our House

2006-03-23T14:53:00.000Z

Guilty of the worst website abuse [of our World Of Warcraft guild website], you can now see the piccies I have of our house, and a few details, at

http://www.symbad.co.uk/elf/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=2282#2282

...I tried to add the pictures into this Blog but the damn thing just wont work and won't tell me where the damn pictures uploaded to or what they are called :-(

Dark Star?

2006-03-10T11:13:00.000Z

Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer

No not the movie, but an idea I quite like - that dark matter and energy could exists as dark stars - that look to us like black holes - and even, that this is what black holes really are; the classical description of a quantum dark star.

...have a look here, see what you think.

Firefly-Serenity Chinese Pinyinary

2006-03-02T09:59:00.000Z

Gorram Shiny

...well, that's not chinese, but lots of the speach in Firefly and Serenity is, and my mate Steve has pointed me at this excellent site of translations. 99% Mandarin, FYI.

Recycle old computers

2006-02-28T13:51:00.000Z

Via this article By Drew Cullen on The Register, here's a link for Computer Aid International, a good way to recycle old PCs and have them put to good use.

London Java Meetup - 7 Mar 2006

2006-02-27T11:31:00.000Z

Jez has just posted the next meetup, and it's here at Smiths of Smithfield - next tuesday.

Free nerdy books

2006-02-23T16:39:00.000Z

From Digg.com on this very subject, Free Computer Books, Tutorials & Lecture Notes (about games etc)

Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers

2006-02-23T11:02:00.000Z

Again from My Beautiful Wife, a great post I very much liked...

Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers

London 2.0rc3

2006-02-22T12:22:00.000Z

From Simon - organised by Sam - for Monday 13th March.
When the location gets confirmed I'll update.

Serenity makes more money from DVD than from box office

2006-02-21T10:11:00.000Z

Via Digg.com - like slashdot and the register.

http://digg.com/movies/Serenity_makes_more_money_from_DVD_than_from_box_office

...well I always thought that would happen, just like the series did.
...lets keep it going huh? Must order a copy myself, of what leg do I have to stand on?

Guantanamo Film Stars Detained in Luton

2006-02-20T18:06:00.000Z

Again M.B.W puts me onto the staggering behavior of the government here -

Guantanamo Film Stars Detained in Luton

...One step more worried about democracy every day....

This much I now know

2006-02-20T14:00:00.000Z

Thanks to My Beautiful Wife , I know understand a bit more about the mechanics of what is happening under UK law at the moment - the gradual erosion and decline, slowly, of civil liberties, as one side fails to play by the rules (how British of us to have it so).

To claw back some of my own polemic, we haven't lost our civil liberties yet - but as a bastion of Democracy, supposedly, every loss is a vital one and the slippery slope we are on has already gone on too long and must be both stopped and reversed.

Lets hope so eh?

Even less free speech

2006-02-15T18:20:00.000Z

MPs back ban on glorifying terror.

Not that we had any free speech, but there is goes, up in a puff of smoke even more. etc etc.

There is one key test for any legislation: the Nelson Mandela Test.
I didn't come up with this, someone on radio 4 one morning did. It runs like this:

Any law that would have prevented us calling Nelson Mandela a Freedom Fighter is a bad law.
He is, but the state he was in at the time branded him a Terrorist.
Under these laws in this country, I could be locked up for saying so, were that regime still in power.
These laws suck - we are already in a police state, and it is getting worse and worse.

Fantastic

2006-02-14T15:35:00.000Z

we'll be dancin in the streets...

Well My Beautiful Wife has finally left her stressful job.... now begins a three month countdown to freedom and much less stress and more happiness.
On a day like today, having that happen yesterday is just totally fantastically brilliant.

4 Things Blog Tag

2006-02-09T16:11:00.000Z

Simon has tagged me for this, so I'll have a go...

And damn but he's tagged some of the people I would, so I'll do my favourite Buddhist blog, lotusinthemud, and Steve over at neveratoss.

Four jobs I've had

Paper Boy.
Shelf Stacker (during my year off).
Technical trainer.
Developer/Programmer/Whatever you call it these days.

Four films I can watch over and over again

Contact.
Shaun of the Dead.
Buffy, the musical episode. Counts in my world.
Alien.

Four places I've lived

Lee Green (London).
Keele (Stoke On Trent).
Streatham Hill (London).
Winchmore Hill (London).

Four TV programmes I love

Firefly.
Stargate.
Scrubs.
Life On Mars.

Four places I've been on holiday

Indonesia & Bali.
Australia (East Coast).
Pisa, Italy.
At home, just chilling out.

Four of my favourite dishes

A good satay stir-fry.
Lasagne. With chips.
Fajhitas.
Marmite on toast.

Four websites I visit daily

E.L.F. (World Of Warcraft guild website).
Life and The World.
Small Values Of Cool.
GMail.

Four places I'd rather be right now

In bed with my babe and no book.
Kicking ass with my guild homies, inc my babe.
Out with my mates, at their houses or a pub, inc. my babe.
In the new house my babe and I are trying to buy, with my babe and a good book/episode of the programmes above.

Homework Project

2006-02-09T09:37:00.000Z

I've done a homework project recently - the best way I've found to revise/learn toolsets and APIs is to have a project to put them into.

So I've done a simple Noughts-and-Crosses game (tic-tac-toe.... War Game anyone?), and Simon has kindly agreed to host my zip file for me here.

This version uses Swing GUI components to make both an Application and an Applet to run the main game frame. Theres a stab at using MVC patterns in it, and JUnit for everything. It was coded in Eclipse IDE and there's javadocs and, of course, and Ant build file for everything.

To NoUnit or Emma?

2006-02-08T19:58:00.000Z

An opensource code coverage tool, NoUnit, that I just came across. Not sure how it stacks up against Emma.

More on Hibernate

2006-02-08T19:28:00.000Z

...hmmm... maybe I should be using del.ic.ios...

The Hibernate Core descriptions.
The Eclipse and Ant tools - invaluable - the page on setting these up is here.

A handy "beginners roadmap" page.

The downloads page, for all of the above.

More on JMock...

2006-02-08T19:10:00.000Z

The online JavaDocs .
The getting started page, with the basic code outline.
Further tutorials, including Constraints and Expectations.

The geeks will inherit the world....

2006-02-08T17:41:00.000Z

Transformers...robots in disguise

From my mate Glen at work, a video of a boffin project to make a real ransformer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dut6jxCiakg

Java Toys

2006-02-07T10:00:00.000Z

Shiny...

Here's some useful stuff I was reminded of / introduced to in a conversation about Agile java practices recently;

JMock, overlapping with MockObjects; the general mock objects Wiki is here; Here is the MockObjects download page.

WebWork, in the same tool-space as Spring

And Eclipse RCP - the layer on which the Eclipse IDE is really just a set of plug-ins, which you can build all sorts of interesting applications out of.

From My Beautiful Wife

2006-01-31T12:24:00.000Z

She says;

I see your "detained for protesting", and raise you the exclusion zone:
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2006/01/the_limits_of_t.asp
and
http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2006/01/two_events_to_l.asp (read the comments)

...I'm disgusted with myself that I ever voted for these people, which (not in the last election but in previous ones), I did. I take it back. Sorry.

Police State anyone?

2006-01-31T10:11:00.000Z

WARNING: this is not democracy and we have already lost all our civil liberties.

Man arrested for protesting against ID cards - using the draconian terrorism laws he'll have a permanent file about it.

I expect I'll be carted away soon for mentioning it - I guess that makes me one of the "Anti-Government forces" Charles Clarke was talking about on Radio 4 the other morning. I like listening to that in the mornings (the Today Program of course), but quite franlky, what I hear mostly scares the cr@p out of me a lot.

Lets not forget these jems of democracy;
28 January 2006: ID cards 'will track where people go'
29 September 2005: Heckler, 82, who dared called Straw a liar is held under terrorist law

New features in 1.5, JTable (Swing) and JavaDoc

2006-01-29T12:53:00.000Z

"..now downloading eclipse 3.1.2..." that's what I needed my Eclipse updater to say, not "...2.1.3..."...maybe now I can use Generics and Enums...

Eclipse 3.1.X help pages - nuff said.

Sun's JTable examples - nice and useful- as is this page on layout management, which let's face it, is a pig.
As well as the online JavaDoc reference - handy.

For new Java 1.5 features we have Enhancements in JDK 5, including Enums,

Oh and getting the extra images to display in firefox - that was a amatter of turning off the "Tools/ Options/ Content/ Load Images/ For The Originating web site only" option.

Firefly Season Two

2006-01-26T12:40:00.000Z

Shiny. For a given value of Shiny.

Also, you have to wonder who the production company is that's put up that site, as it says it's not affiliated to Fox or Universal, and does not say it is affiliated with Joss Whedon.

Hmm.... that bit above is supposed to be a picture, and wouldn't you know it, it works in IE but not Firefox. Damn. Must be something up... will try to fix that soon...
Double hmm... as my Make Povery History banner isn't working - I wonder if that's coz I've upgraded to Firefox 1.5 from 1.0.x?

Every OS Sucks

2006-01-06T13:52:00.000Z

And now, a word from Nathan Fillion...

From Ned Batchelder, a link to Three Dead Trolls, (check out the homepage for a plug by Nathan Fillion), and their new video/tune, Every OS Sucks...

Officially an Uber-Geek :-)

2006-01-06T11:25:00.000Z

It's a geek, Jim, but not as we know it...

My Beautiful Wife got me Tim Collins book Are You A Geek? for xmas.
We spent some quite amusing time going though it filling it in;

The results are in - I just popped into "ubergeek" status, with 1011 points (you need 1001 - 1500 for this category).
I was/am (geekily) quite pleased about this.
"Thankfully", I got high on the nerdy stuff and low on the Sex life stuff (I.e I'm married and happy and stuff) - so I'm a nerd with a life, apparently.

Groovy, or at least, I think so :-)

Say it aint so...

2005-12-22T09:01:00.000Z

Simon just put me onto this article on Slashdot... let us all give a prayer to hope it isn't so, if not today, then in the long run...

Stevan knows about buying undies....

2005-12-14T09:46:00.000Z

"...well for me really but my wife will be wearing it..."

I met Steve through Simon... good bloke... and he has "man buying underwear for his wife" rather succinctly accurate I'd say...

Bluehorses

2005-12-12T12:47:00.000Z

Bluehorses are probably the only folk-rock-celtic-heavy-metal-goth band around. www.bbc.co.uk

My mate Steve put me on to these guys;

Bluehorses - The UK's top Celtic rock band featuring Welsh/Irish gothess Liz Prendergast on vocals, electric violin and electric Celtic harp.

Just downloaded everything I could, and it's great.
So he was right :-)

I don't know much about them, but to me there were elements of other stuff I like - Levellers, early Hart (circa 1972 - 76), misc 60's and 70's rock, the eclectic list goes on.
Fun stuff, I'll be after some more :-)

Nerd Tattoos

2005-12-12T12:43:00.000Z

Your tattoo is weird old man...

My mate glen at work just put me onto this posting on Revenge of the Tattooed Nerds... crikey, that's dedication for you :-)

Brunning's 1st Law of System Hassle

2005-12-08T16:11:00.000Z

Our Simons 1st Law of System Hassle... maybe it's some weird karma for The Duff Fairy and it's more accurate Revision?

More XP Resources

2005-12-08T14:28:00.000Z

That's 'andy 'ary... bung it over 'ere...

A few more sites I just came across reading up on some of the threads in extremeprogramming@yahoogroups.com and scrumdevelopment@yahoogroups.com

http://www.xp123.com/
and
http://www.xpdeveloper.com/
and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/XPlorations/?yguid=245047439
which is the announcement group for the above xp123.com, and which includes a link to the handy article Scrum Development on a Page by William C. Wake.

Geek Toys

2005-12-08T09:23:00.000Z

Faster than a speeding bullet...

Crikey. I ordered one of these from Dabs yesterday, in the afternoon, and it had arrived by the time I got to work this morning. Very impressive - Dabs come up trumps again, so I'll give them a plug.

Of course, I only got it for this, (or this or this (or even this)), which is sad but true, but that's me, so what can I say.

Make Poverty History -

2005-12-07T14:04:00.000Z

I have a dream...

To add a Make Poverty History "White-band" to your site like Simon has, go to this page and copy some of their sample html into your page.

I'm not as involved in all this as we should be, but it's a start.

Pong Clock

2005-12-06T14:57:00.000Z

The Pong Clock - a work of beautiful geek simplicity.

London 2.0rc1

2005-12-06T09:46:00.000Z

Rhetorical Q: How many geeks does it take to have a separate party in the front room, back room and kitchen?

Don't miss - well I won't - the Dec London Java Meetup organised, as ever by Jez (Java) and Sam (Ruby, Rails, etc) and Simon (Python et al)

The title is a link to Simon's comment on it - like he says, there will be many different geek groups there - I wonder how many factions we can split into?

{Edit - A few mods coz of my tough-crowd audience ;-) }

XP Day comments by Steve Tooke

2005-12-05T11:23:00.000Z

Steve, who I worked with during Sam's Lego game, has some good comments on what he took away from the day, and what other people were saying about their efforts to implement Agile/XP practices...

Simon still hasn't found my site

2005-12-01T17:25:00.000Z

hehe :-)

New RSS feed in Squishdot site

2005-12-01T17:20:00.000Z

This is the DTML (Zope markup language) we use at our place to exend
the RSS feed;
<rss version="2.0" dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<channel>
<title><dtml-var></title>
<link><dtml-var></link>
<description><dtml-var></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<dtml-if>
<image>
<title><dtml-var></title>
<url><dtml-var>/<dtml-var></url>
<link><dtml-var></link>
</image>
</dtml-if>
<dtml-in sort="date" size="100">
<dtml-with>
<item>
<title>
<dtml-var>
</title>
<link>
<dtml-var><dtml-var>/<dtml-var>
</link>
<description>
<dtml-if meta_type ="="">
(New Reply)
<dtml-else>
(New Topic)<br>
</dtml-if meta_type>
<dtml-if meta_type ="="">
<dtml-var><br>
<dtml-else>
<dtml-var><br>
</dtml-if meta_type>
</description>
<dc:creator><dtml-var></dc:creator>
<dc:date><dtml-var></dc:date>
</item>
</dtml-with>
</dtml-in>
</channel>
</rss>

Internal Web Sites (Squishdot, ZWikki and Zope)

2005-12-01T16:50:00.000Z

At the XP day, a couple of the guys there asked me about the Intranet stuff we have set up, as we use this to keep ourselves up to date on all sorts of things in the company.

Using Python, there is a web server called Zope.
Under Zope (download page here) we set up a Squishdot site (downloaded from here; you need the TinyTable zope product as well), which is inspired by Slashdot, and we also installed a Wikki using the built-in ZWikki application.
We then customised some of the Squishdot installation to include Anonymous browsing and Logins for posting - this info can be found in the Squishdot site, as above.

I ended up so involved with Squishdot that I help moderate the site from time to time - I'm glad to help with any queries. I guess it's one of the few ways I've contributed back for all the help the open-source community has given me over the years.

We changed the RSS feed on the Squishdot site to be more complex, so that we can have our feed demons/etc picking up all the latest posts and information, as a way of broadcasting it round the whole company.

XP Day {Day 2, Tuesday} (London 2005)

2005-11-30T12:52:00.000Z

"fight the good fight" or "we have a dream..."

Another great day was had.

First I went to Scrum 59 Minutes by Rachel Davies and Giovanni Asproni - a great introduction. Between this and the Lego game yesterday I can see how Simon and Tulna and El Presidente have chosen some great, practical bits to put together; it really made me feel that the stuff I'd been reading up on and talking about were I work was all valid again, instead of feeling like the resistance was insurmountable.

After that it was Storytelling With FIT in the after noon by Steve Freeman and Mike Hill. They did a great lesson, from an overview, not-so-techie level, of what FIT is and how it can be excellent for acceptance testing. Unfortunately here, there is a strong division between not only all the Dev teams but QA and Support as well, so that will be a hard sell. Thankfully after some round-the-kettle discussion this morning the QA guys I know were saying "my god, it sounds like a proper process", so I think we have some buy-in :-)

I was lucky, I think, in choosing some of the best presented and informative presentations there were.

Great stuff, feeling invigorated about it all, and for a while the fight to get it here won't feel so bad knowing many other people are fighting the same good fight, and having a tougher time, if not worse...

XP Day {Day 1, Monday} (London 2005)

2005-11-28T22:28:00.000Z

"One man's terrorist is another mans freedom fighter...."

Today and tomorrow I booked the annnual leave off work and paid for myself to go to the London XP Day 2005, organised by The eXtreme Tuesday Club, amongst others.

When I told work about this, they considered stumping up the cash and even time, which was a massive and pleasant surprise.

I went to the morning sessions on Moving To Agile - What Worked Well And What Didn't,
by Gavin Hope and Lindsay McEwan, and Case Study - Bootstrapping Agile by Daniel Poon.
Myself and many others were lifted by others tales of woe and hardship for fighting the good fight. Buy it can be done and we must have hope and faith and drink lots of coffee. Daniel, above, has been a pioneer for this for 5 years where he is and they're just making bits of progress - better and better all the time. Kinda puts the rest of our struggles in perspective.

The highlight of the day was Sam's The XP Lego Game. A brilliant and insightful introduction to many of the key concepts, and a wonderful refresher to those of us who made a bad move, for our sins, and are desperate to stay in the loop. I think Simon will be especially chuffed that the use of Bananas as the measure of project velocity got a mention from the man himself ;-)

Of course I had to miss all the other threads running at the conference, but the evenings work continued in what, where I work, we call "meeting room 3".... the pub.

More on that tomorrow, after going to a gig in the evening as well.... full day again....

Cruise Control, Ant and VBUnit.

2005-11-17T21:47:00.000Z

"It aint pretty, but we gone and done it anyway..."

We've just got a continuous integration server set up where I work, and we have many big legacy VB6 applications that just won't go away. Your mission should you choose to accept it... is to drag this stuff into the 20th century. And I know it's now the 21st, but one step at a time huh?

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/

Cruise Control - the industry standard, I think because it 's about the only one, for Continuous Integration.

For non-java and non-.net projects, I think most of all you want to be looking at some of the original essays by the first few folks at ThoughtWorks who put it togther;

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

As, of great use to us mortals who have to live in a partial non-java world, they tell you how to do it in com;

http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/ciWithCom.html

...which was the basis we (well, me, on my own one night) used to make VB6 (I know, I know, for our sins, legacy, etc etc) build from an Ant file.
Then we added in VBUnit3, and suddenly we felt a little closer to the real world.
After that worked the first time, I had to go have a lie down. Then danced round the office and made everyone come and watch... "..throw the switch egor... it's alive..."

Points mean prizes...

2005-11-17T21:43:00.000Z

...if anyone can, or ever does, work out what the Average Everyday in all this references, and comments it here.
Mind you, someone would have to read this first.

More Scrumming

2005-11-17T21:08:00.000Z

More resources for some great articles and info;

Methods and Tools - a newsletter/agile site that publishes free articles as PDFs.
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.html

Scrum @ ControlChaos
http://www.controlchaos.com

Scrum Alliance
http://www.scrumalliance.com/

Agile Alliance
http://www.agilealliance.com/

Scrum Education
http://www.scrumeducation.com/scrumedu

Groups

2005-11-17T21:03:00.000Z

Here's some groups I recommend getiing in on - I'm just reading as much of the discussions as I can at the moment, doing the whole silent partner thing, but they are excellent and there is much to think about.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/

Scrum development

2005-11-17T21:00:00.000Z

Right, it's about time to throw something useful in here when I've done nothing for ages.

Having been doing some Java revision to get back up to scratch, I could hardly pass up reading about this now could I?

Yes, I know this is a cold start, but after much delay, it's beter that the "none" I'd been doing before.

So here's the homepage;

http://www.controlchaos.com/

And as for this page which sums it up, or this one with the pdfs on it, the diagram on the former is perhaps the most useful thing I've seen in ages.

Micheal Moore

2004-12-10T18:18:00.000Z

I like what this guy has to say.
Some people criticise him for being polemic, but I think he's very tame compared to his counterparts on the American right.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

Via his site and through there or directly here http://www.pcavote.com/voting/film/f01.shtml you can vote on the US 31st Annual Peoples Choice Awards, for which Farenheight 911 is nominated in the "Favorite Movie" category.
Now, I know that given it's just one in this list:
>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
>Fahrenheit 9/11
>The Incredibles
>Shrek 2
>Spiderman 2
the choices are hard... but I say let's rock the boat as much as we can :-)

...

Average Everyday

2004-12-10T18:08:00.000Z

....Insert typical first-post gumph here....

This blog is supposed to include things that have struck me as interesting, important or funny. I hope you like it. I hope I will.

A.E.

Is it True?

2004-12-10T11:16:00.000Z

Find out about all those urban myths and truths at Snopes.

Average Everyday

Jedi mind tricks for Java

Litle Bro gets Married

My Beautiful Wife goes 30

Amnesty accuses US on rendition

Shiny New Job

Our House

Dark Star?

Firefly-Serenity Chinese Pinyinary

Recycle old computers

London Java Meetup - 7 Mar 2006

Free nerdy books

Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers

London 2.0rc3

Serenity makes more money from DVD than from box office

Guantanamo Film Stars Detained in Luton

This much I now know

Even less free speech

Fantastic

4 Things Blog Tag

Homework Project

More Ant and Hibernate tutorials

To NoUnit or Emma?

More on Hibernate

More on JMock...

The geeks will inherit the world....

Java Toys

From My Beautiful Wife

Police State anyone?

New features in 1.5, JTable (Swing) and JavaDoc

More handy java links

Firefly Season Two

Every OS Sucks

Officially an Uber-Geek :-)

Say it aint so...

Stevan knows about buying undies....

Bluehorses

Nerd Tattoos

Brunning's 1st Law of System Hassle

More XP Resources

Geek Toys

Make Poverty History -

Pong Clock

London 2.0rc1

XP Day comments by Steve Tooke

Simon still hasn't found my site

New RSS feed in Squishdot site

Internal Web Sites (Squishdot, ZWikki and Zope)

XP Day {Day 2, Tuesday} (London 2005)

XP Day {Day 1, Monday} (London 2005)

Cruise Control, Ant and VBUnit.

Points mean prizes...

More Scrumming

Groups

Scrum development

Micheal Moore

Average Everyday

Is it True?