Days of …|Just another rants and opinions weblog

Moved my blog to a cheaper VPS. Also now this blog is served by Lighttpd instead of Apache. Everything seems to be a bit faster!

The essence of London, originally uploaded by CTPEKO3A.

This is my best photo so far. It has been seen 350 times as of 7th of May, 2006.

My Personal Dna Report

Always shining sun at Blizzard Beach, originally uploaded by CTPEKO3A.

I like this picture very much. It reminds me of good old times, when I was living in Miami…

Ramit Sethi writes about capturing and keeping a records of every calls to customer services and provides an Excel file to do that.

This is wonderful idea. I do some of the call notes in my Moleskine, but never though of having Excel of Word file for this purpose.

The corporate policy setting on my work notebook always sets the screen saver to 15 minutes and require login password. I don’t mind to have a screen save 15 minutes, but that login requirement… I just hate it! And I hate it mostly because the screen saver tab in the Display Properties dialog is disabled by the same policy!

Now I found the way to cheat on corporate policy – I created a simple .reg file, which will change one DWORD value:

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaverIsSecure = “0″

Ahh, back to work…

annoyance, windows, registry, hack

…is Kevin Gibbs. He announced a latest Google addition in the Google Blog Live. Now this giy from SlashDot can send him a cash donation.

Listened to a Webinar at Jboss.org about EJB3. What a nice piece of technology! Basically everything will be defined in attributes: @Session is for session beans, @Entity is for entity beans. It’s like having metadata injected into actual classes – nice, very nice idea!

Though I must say that it’s picked from .Net, but who cares?

Tomorrow I will look closer to Hibernate and entity EJB inmplementation in JBoss Application Server. I need to have a knowledge which way is best:

• performance,

• programmability,
• availability of developers who are familiar with technologies

Also need to spend some time analysing Cocoon2/Struts 1.1 integration.

Well, one more day reading book, I think I have to go straight to third “real life” architecture sample because second one was about another unreleased project. Now it’s about Air Traffic Control project, which was funded by FAA, but never was implemented “because of budgeting issues”. In real world that means “project was well over budget even before implementation started”. Which, in turn, speaks against architecture, because architecture supposed to help projects to be on budget…

Yesterday I subscribed on Channel9 Forums RSS and somebody wrote there that Visual Studio 2005 designer does not support UML. “Huh?”, – I thought and went looking for more information. Read three or four articles and found that MS decided not to extend UML 2.0 with their extension, but to create whole new diagram language. Nice turn for Microsoft, wrong for developers. As far as I can see, MS research recognised that most developers use only class diagrams and never use any of the other UML artifacts and developers seldom use Visio, which Microsoft recognizes as full blown UML editor. That’s fine, but what about architects? Should they use only class diagrams, which is by definition static views, to describe systems? There is no answer.

I use Enterprise Architect for my work. It is way better than Visio, much better than Rational XDE and would continue to stay better, than rudimentary Visual Studio 2005 tools. And it supports UML 2.0 and extensions. And there is a add-on for Visual Studio, though I haven’t tried it.

Back to work…

Started reading “Software Architecture in Practice, Second Edition“. It looks like a good book, though first 20 pages have too much of “we mention it here, but for details refer to Chapter X”. Which breaks logic a bit.

At work got through two meetings so far:

1. mini one, about job spec for Program Manager.

   Removed all “new media“(wtf is that, anyway?) and added knowledge of RUP and UML as mandatory attributes. Is it a part of the job of Technical Architect to create a job specs for managers?

2. about status of the Product we are building.
   

   We are oficially late now.
   Not because of our bad work, but because of a low priority our requirements gathering work has in the eyes of our client. And we lost BA down the road. Account manager wants to know why we don’t need a full blown Content Management System in this project. Well, that’s the question: why do we need it if everything visible will be generated from database?

   Now I have date of my first deliverable: I need to deliver first version of Software Architecture documentation next Wednesday. I pretty confident that I will be able to finish most of that document, so no worries here.

Changed database schema a bit. Now Promotions are handled the same way as any additional information related to Product Catalog Items.