Purposive without Foresight

Yesterday Google IO 2012 opened. This is an event I keep an eye on and am very keen to attend myself someday. Today I tried out Android SDK API level 16. Really like the enhancements Google has made in such short release cycles! This entry is my tribute to Google’s engineers. Last year a friend [...]

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In September, the market capital value of IBM has exceeded Microsoft. It became the most valuable company in the IT service sector once again. This week, IBM is the 1st best-performing stock year-to-date among the Dow 30. In its 100 years of history, IBM has survived various crisis and thrived in every major IT revolution. [...]

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In the evening I was reading this discussion: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=61352 Did not read all the comments. Among the comments I have read, this one appeared sympathetic to me. In (my) IT maturity cycle, I don’t think you could get to highly productive Enterprise app development tool without a strong, mature, low-level language and platform to build [...]

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Truly Aligning Software Design to the Essence of Business Business people have been poor. When they use their equipment, their accountants speak like this: “debit depreciation expense account should be updated and credit accumulated depreciation is increased. Deferred tax asset is reduced.” When they want a software for running business, IT consultants speak like this: [...]

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I’m reading the book “Writing that Works” by Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson on my commuting train recently. Here is an excerpt from this book: It is believed that with the parameters that have been imposed by your management, a viable program may be hard to evolve. Net net: If our program is to impact [...]

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For me the current stable version of Android is almost perfect, actually I do not need any more features or stronger hardware performance than my I9000. But the deal breaker is that: The Vital Source bookshelf does not offer any Android client. I have to use Vital Source ebooks ( Why the CFA institute tie [...]

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Dirk has programmed a game “Nine Men’s Morris” during his September vacation. He exerted every effort on the AI algorithm, GTK UI programming and the Debian/Windows package building ( If anyone sponsors him a Mac box, he will also release an installer for Mac. ). We have compared his program to many existing Morris games [...]

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Operating systems: Debian Linux at home and Windows XP at work. Web browsers: Ice Weasel / Firefox Blogging tool: WordPress Media player: MPlayer Generic code / text editor: Eclipse Really good-looking, text-heavy documents such as thesis or technical documentation are just too difficult to be handled with Word or OpenOffice Writer. I use TexLive packages [...]

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Impressed by some work of mine, a friend asked me to build a website for her business. Last weekend, I traveled to her headquarter and we discussed about the concept. She and her husband have an already well established business, they’ve got impressive estates and a load of well trained staff. As energetic and ambitious [...]

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need a hug now….

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Today I arrived at this page when I was checking out information about the MySql Falcon engine: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Falcon Below is the part I found amusing: Falcon is NOT … Jim (Starkey) ‘s been at this for a long time, there have been some changes since he wrote his first database at DEC: Uni-processors to multi-core [...]

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Download the pdf keymap: eclipse-ganymede-keymap.pdf In office I work with IDEA and Microsoft Visual Studio C++ on Windows. At home I use Eclipse on Debian Lenny/Sid (Desktops managed by Compiz-fusion B-) ). These programs have very different key bindings, I want cheatsheets for quick look-ups. IDEA ships with a pdf keymap. There are keymaps for [...]

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Most of the time, I work with various APIs. The quality of the API documentation significantly influence my efficiency. My favourite is the cookbook-ish API doc always with some quintessential examples showing how to use the API calls to accomplish a certain task. A cookbook-ish User-Howto plus API reference listing the UMLs of the API [...]

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The puzzle The participation rules First of all, many thanks to the participants, all the people who are interested and I apologize for the delay of result delivery. A lot of things has happened in my life during last several months. My daily job has very little to do with Java or Rete-based rule engines [...]

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