dbradby.net

The Age's Bold Prediction

Just after our Lleyton Hewitt won his Wimbledon quarter final match The Age web site comes out with a bold prediction that it would be a Henman vs. Federer final. Thus both our boys left in the comp would have to loose. I took a screenshot of the headline as you can see below as it obviously meant Hewitt and not Henman. I thought I'd take a copy before they fixed their mistake :)

Ducks in the rain

Pulling out of the driveway for my third attempt at playing cricket in Boston and it started raining ... again. Luckily this time we actually got a bit of play in, 35 overs each. We (MIT) started out in the field hoping the wet ground would slow the scoring. Well at the end of the 35 overs, the other team were 199 and we were wet and tired from chasing the ball around. I fielded mainly in the covers and did ok knocking down the stumps a few times.

Some people say white men can't jump (or play basketball). After being the only white guy at the ground that day, I hope I haven't shown that white men can't play cricket either (I was the only white guy at the ground that day). After a good start from our opening pairs, I was in at number 6. I walked out there and faced the first ball that was quite full and I pushed it gently too mid wicket. The next ball pitched quite short, about half way down the pitch and aiming around my off stump. What do I do? I step back and slightly across to caress the ball along the ground through backward point. Crash! The ball didn't get much higher than my ankles and hits the stumps.

At this stage it might be useful to describe the ground and pitch conditions. We play in the middle of two baseball fields facing each other. The boundry cuts through both baseball areas so we don't have a complete ground of grass. In the center is a strip of wet sandy gravel. Placed on top of this is some canvas that is pegged tight. When the rain came we even had someone run out with a piece of plastic to protect the wicket.

This may seem like I'm working up to a big excuse for my woeful duck. But I like to think of it more as a learning experience of the playing conditions. As my Indian and Pakistani team mates happily pointed out. I'm not in Australia now. You can't play back like you can at home. Right so I've learnt something.

Next time I hope to actually make some runs and take some better photos of the action. For now this is all I have.

Code Reviews

I started writing this as a comment to this piece from Keith Pitty I got carried away.

An even lighter weight approach that I like is having people subscribe to a mailing list of all the CVS commits that take place along with a diff of the changes. You can quickly see if an important file has been changed from the subject line, then you can inspect the changes in the email, and if you need more context you can go and view the whole file in CVS. If you find any problems you can reply to the author and even the whole list if you find something that needs attention.

So now a review has taken place and feedback given sometimes minutes after the code has been written. A middle ground between meeting based code reviews and pair programming maybe?

If meeting based reviews are required then I much prefer a presentation based review where the author/s walk through their code using their development environment and a projector. It is then much easier to browse the code and it's flow while also providing the opportunity to demonstrate it's actual purpose by running it! Crazy I know! Step away from the paper based reviews.

Focus on reviewing how the code satifies the requirements, how it fits within the overall design and try to identify any opportunities to refactor the code based on your knowledge of existing code.

Do NOT review code structure. Leave this up to products such as Checkstyle that will do a much better job. This may seem obvious but I have been in reviews where brace position and white space have been debated. That must have been the closest I have been to storming out of a meeting. Instead I stayed and was terribily hostile and unproductive. Some of you might have been in there with me. Lest we forget :)

Busy night to be an Aussie in Boston

Tonight there are two Aussie events going on in Boston. Firstly the Boston AFL club, the Boston Demons, are having the season Jumper presentation.

http://www.bostondemons.com/social/

The other event is the monthly ANZACC drinks. We'll be at this one if any other Aussie's in Boston are reading this.

http://www.anzacc.org/events.htm

The is apparently no cricket on this weekend and next weekend we plan to go to New York. I wonder if I'll ever get to play?!

"Open source is not just a way of getting free code"

"Open source is not just a way of getting free code"

This comment I found while reading a great article by Jordan Hubbard, BSD and OSX guru.

Jordan makes a great case for contributing back code into an OS project from a commercial effort trying to use the OS product. Below are some gems that I want to highlight.

• Establishing trust


• Establishing a certain amount of "credit" in the barter economy


• Make future merges with the external open source software code base easier (and less expensive)


• Help advertise your presence to many opinion leaders in the same community likely to influence purchasing decisions of your product

I'm seeing more and more companies keeping internal source repositories of OS projects that they use to maintain their own modifications and fixes. Contribute back! Why take on the burden yourselves when the community already exists for free?!

And this final quote is fantastic, but sadly not followed. In fact one of the only companies that is doing anything close to this is JBoss. A company that is ironically being attacked by the same community that should be supporting such efforts.

"Finally, the open source software community can be an invaluable resource when it comes to recruiting skilled, motivated engineers who come with a ready-built understanding of at least some aspect of your product. This is one reason why developing and sustaining relations with the open source software community at the outset is so critical, and it should also be understood that open source software engineers recruited from this community will have a residual loyalty to this community. One nice way of maintaining your relationship with the community is to allow these engineers to continue doing some amount of (now-subsidized) work on the open source software public code base. They get better code, you get better code, and both sides win.

Lake Winni

Just put some photos up of our Memorial Long Weekend trip to Lake Winni

These are a Topo and Sat pic of some drives we did around this massive lake (over 250 mile coastline)

More pics of the whole camping weekend here and I'm sure Jen will write something up today about it (along with an apology regarding french onion dip).