I want to read “Peopleware” again

Bruce Eckel recommends Peopleware — Productive Projects and Teams (by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) in his recent weblog entry The Mythical 5%. When I ordered a bunch of book recently I was thinking of including both The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks and Peopleware, but I didn’t. It is probably a good idea to… Continue reading I want to read “Peopleware” again

Enterprise ready

I would have ordered an Enterprise ready T-shirt on the spot if they had my size in stock.

Holiday project!

The day before yesterday I registered a domain name for a new project and yesterday (while recovering from a really upset stomach) I wrote three A5 pages with a database model, sketchy requirements and possible features. All from very basic ones (“It shall be possible to register a new user account”) to some that are… Continue reading Holiday project!

Ant “replace” task does not preserve Unix file permissions

This is probably a well-known fact for everyone who has used Ant on Unix for a while, but an annoying discovery for me who have been hiding under a C++ rock. The five year old bug report File Permissions not preserved in replace task pretty much says it all: Java couldn’t stat files, and it… Continue reading Ant “replace” task does not preserve Unix file permissions

Beautiful Code

I’ve been reading Beautiful Code from time to time during the autumn. It’s mixed bag and I actually skipped some chapter that was too deep into maths for my taste. Chapter 22: A Spoonful of Sewage was an instant favorite; it is a a fascinating head-first dive into a bug hunt in Sun Solaris’ synchronization… Continue reading Beautiful Code

Apache Ant is regrettably (?) using XML

I’ve done some Apache Ant build file hacking today and that made me recall that the original author of Ant, James Duncan Davidson, actually regretted using XML as the file format. Mysteriously missing from today’s world wide web, but fortunately captured by the Wayback Machine, the blog entry Ant and XML is worth reading. The… Continue reading Apache Ant is regrettably (?) using XML

Most ThinkPad T60p original battery for the money

The old battery for my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60p went from bad to useless this autumn but it wasn’t until yesterday that I ordered a new 9-cell battery (7.8 Ah) directly from IBM Sweden where the 9-cell battery actually was cheaper than a 6-cell battery (5.2Ah) . I first looked at well-stocked reseller Dustin but after… Continue reading Most ThinkPad T60p original battery for the money