SOLID principles are about habits

Last February there was a furore in the .NET world that started when Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) went on Hanselminutes #145 (link). Joel Spolsky later went on the Stack Overflow podcast and was widely quoted as saying that quality doesn’t matter much. And the blogosphere went nuts…

Remembering back to when I learned to program – I learned syntax and so on. While we were instructed to focus on design, we were never really taught how or what constitutes good design (of which the SOLID principles are part of). So I never developed good design habits. Now that I’m trying to learn and apply them, it’s more difficult as I already have some bad ones. It’s like learning to ski as an adult while watching 5 year olds zoom past backwards… it’s so much easier to learn early on.

Blog post on programming language selection

I liked this article. It describes one person’s process of selecting a language for a project. He briefly describes the process of choosing between Java, Ruby, PHP and Python.

http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2008/06/whyhow-i-ended-up-selecting-python-for-my-latest-project/

Oracle set to slash Sun jobs

Sun seems to be a bit happier to be bought by Oracle than IBM. But probably not by much.

Oracle’s said to be offering about a billion $ more than IBM so maybe that’s helping to smooth egos.

But try telling that to the holders of those jobs that Oracle is tipped to cut.

Oracle set to slash Sun jobs

Goodbye to Easter 2009

Well, I’m back at work from the 4 day Easter break. I’m afraid it just didn’t last too long.

I’m flat out with my uni study at the moment. I attended two project meetings at uni, with the first assignment due on Friday. the ping ponging between subjects is hard going, yet I’m turning in some pretty alright results.

Both subjects this semester have been very engaging.

Business Applications and Architectures is basically about enterprise architecture. Mark Dale has taken the approach in this first assignment of having us dig into several architecture frameworks such as Zachman and TOGAF in order to discover how they’re structured, the role of views and viewpoints, etc. His intention is to give us some insight into the rationale and values behind various frameworks, so that we can evaluate their suitability to a project and select and modify them as needed.

Knowledge Management Systems is providing another overlay on top of our analysis and design methodologies. It is investigating the role of knowledge within an organisation, how it is shared and stored and how a knowledge strategy can be formed.

So all in all, my Easter has largely disappeared in a flurry of assignment writing and team meetings. My house is still only partly unpacked and I think a week’s leave to get on top of this will be sweet medicine.

Cheers

40 per cent of execs trust gut….

I found this article today on CIO.COM.

So for a quick quote from the article (italics are mine)…

‘Of those respondents who said their companies still make decisions based on judgment rather than business analytics, 61 percent said it was because good data was not available, and just over half (55 percent) said their decisions relied on qualitative and subjective factors. Other reasons related to workforce challenges: 23 percent of respondents said "insufficient quantitative skills in employees" were a main impediment at their company, and 36 percent said their company "faces a shortage of analytical talent."’

Good data was not available… ouch

SEEK.COM.AU RSS Feeds – Bad SEEK!

I’ve been trying to adjust the display of a SEEK.COM.AU RSS feed within SharePoint 2007. FYI – SEEK is one of the top job search sites in Australia.

I’ve found that while SEEK’s RSS feed for a job search “complies” with the RSS standard: ie it passes the Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org, it will produce HTML markup that is non-compliant with the HTML standard when your XSLT displays more than one record at a time.

   1:  <item>

   2:    <title>Network &amp; Desktop Support</title>

   3:    <description><![CDATA[

   4:        <html>

   5:          <head>

   6:          <title>Latest jobs from www.seek.com.au. Australia's #1 job site</title>

   7:          </head>

   8:          <body>

   9:            <div id="rssFeed" style="margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:8px">    

  10:            <div id="rssListedDate"><strong>Date & time listed: </strong>10/03/2009 5:22:30 PM</div>

  11:            <div id="rssJobSummary" style="margin-top:10px">

  12:              <div id="rssDes"><strong>Job ad summary: </strong><br>The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia is seeking a suitably experienced person to work as part of a small team</div>                            

  13:              <div id="rssSalary" style="margin-top:10px">

  14:              

  15:              </div>

  16:              <div id="rssNewFeedLink" style="margin-top:18px">

  17:                <a href="http://www.seek.com.au/rss/index.ascx?catlocation=1002&catindustry=1215&Keywords=Sharepoint&RM=it&RMO=model-main&RUS=SEEKMAIN_USR&RID=1fb856cd-dbe0-4cdc-8530-d1e5300fa83a#RSSReader">Create a new feed with different search criteria</a>

  18:              </div>

  19:            <div id="rssFeedBack"><a href="http://www.seek.com.au/if.asp?loc=rsscontact">Send us feedback about these feeds.</a></div>

  20:            </div>        

  21:            </div>

  22:          </body>

  23:        </html>]]> 

  24:    </description>

  25:    <link>http://www.seek.com.au/users/viewdetails.asp?Action=jobsearch&amp;JobListAction=ViewOneAd&amp;JobSearch=true&amp;AdID=15075376&amp;SearchType=5</link>

  26:    <author>ETM Search &amp; Selection</author>

  27:    <category>Help Desk~Support|I.T. &amp; T</category>

  28:    <pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:22:30 GMT </pubDate>

  29:    <guid isPermaLink="false">15075376</guid>

  30:  </item>

Note within the <description> tags that the DIV elements have ID attributes! As these IDs are the same for each <item> in the RSS file, the HTML that is output will have multiple DIVS with identical ID attributes when displayed with the SharePoint RSS Viewer (multiple results are visible per page). This is not valid markup (see: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-id)

I really want to get rid of a couple of these DIVs, so that only the Title, Summary and Salary are listed and am trying to use jQuery to hide the DIVs I don’t want (lines 16 to 19). Initially, I tried to hide DIVs with the relevant IDs. I discovered that Firefox happily parsed the whole document and hid all the DIVs with the correct ID. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, quite correctly found the first instance of the ID and left the others alone.

So thanks to a poor design, we’re left with something unpalatable – trying to locate and hide strings instead. Yuck.

The uni semester starts on Wednesday night!!!

Hooray!!!!!!!!

I always get like this before the semester starts. I'm chomping at the bit and ready to go. As the semester drags on, I start to feel a little over-whelmed. 2008 was a shock. I hope to make 2009 a better year.

This semester I'm taking on Business Applications, which is all about enterprise architecture and Knowledge Management Systems.

Business Apps is taught by a practitioner in the field - a Dr Mark Dale who works at ANZ Bank and lectures part time. It could be really useful for adding some additional context to what I did with Enterprise Systems last semester.

Knowledge Management Systems is taught by a couple of staff members at the uni - Wally Smith and Rachelle Bosua. I'm afraid I don't know much about either of them yet. The subject will help to add some theoretical framework around my work with enterprise portals.

Woo Hoo! Let's get stuck into it!

Cheers