Paul Graham wrote a fascinating essay based on lectures at Harvard and Northeastern. Couple things that resonated with me:

“Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.” — working at a company that writes software for other companies (read: I work as a consultant), I see this tendency alot. We’ll have ideas that we think could really be something, but end up getting shot down becuase you can’t stray to far from the beaten path for fear of sucking.

“… a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job. This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. More generally, it means that you have one kind of work you do for money, and another for love.” — how true!

and … “It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn’t. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can’t do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own.”

[via Tim Oreilly]

Manning formally released Eclipse in Action today. I glanced through it last night at Barnes & Noble, looks like a great book.

I learned about a feature called Java scrapbook pages, described in Chapter 2:

“… by virtue of its incremental compiler, you can enter arbitrary Java code into a scrapbook page and execute it—it doesn’t need to be in a class or a method.”

Scrapbook pages allow you to test code directly in Eclipse without having to create a class/project with a main() method and then run it from the command line. Pretty handy, reminds me of the demo I saw of Jython at JavaOne.

This article popped up in the JavaOne Today newspaper so ubiquitous at the conference. It’s a fascinating interview with Richard Gabriel, an engineer at Sun, who thinks that software engineering is less about engineering in the sense of building a bridge and well…

“Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it — the software that’s interesting to make is software that hasn’t been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, “Well, how come we can’t build software the way we build bridges?” The answer is that we’ve been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that’s been built. Someone says, “Oh, let’s build a bridge across this river. The river is this wide, it’s this deep, it’s got to carry this load. It’s for cars, pedestrians, or trains, so it will be kind of like this one or that one.” They can know the category of bridge they’re building, so they can zero in on the design pretty quickly. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Another tidbit from the article was the mention of Paul Feyerabend, “… who argued that for knowledge to progress, people must violate some of their methodological principles.” What methodological principles have you violated today?

Joe mentioned this site a couple days ago, looks like a great resource for developers and architects.

If you use Eclipse, check out this SSH plugin from eclipse plugins: Eclipse SSH Console. Download, unzip, restart Eclipse and then go to Window –> Show View –> Other –> Eclipse SSH Console. One less window I have to have open now when developing.

Also very cool and somewhat related is the Eclipse Tail tool, described as: “… tail for eclipse (like the tail unix command). You can set keywords and your logs will be colorized under 5/6 levels : no matches, debug, info, warn, error, fatal; like in log4J.”

ONJava.com has an article on web testing with HttpUnit: Black Box Web Testing with HttpUnit. Things I didn’t know about HttpUnit:

· HttpUnit supports client-side JavaScript
· HttpUnit can be run using Ant

Joe commented that he uses ethereal as an aid in debugging networked applications, I’ve also used ieHTTPHeaders and I read about livehttpheaders for you mozilla users out there. ethereal is like drinking from a fire hose, you definitely need to setup filters for the data to become information. It looks almost exactly like Network Monitor, the big difference being that ethereal runs on about 23(!) different operating systems. ieHTTPHeaders and livehttpheaders is really only useful for http traffic, but are both much easier to get information out of quickly.