Desirable traits in software teams?
In a recent article published in Computing Now, Phillip A. Laplante ponders cultural differences and their impact on software engineering practices:
[T]he question I’m addressing here is in the actual practices of software engineering— not the management of it. In other words, do people practice software engineering differently because of cultural differences?
He cites some data from Geert Hofstede's social studies - page 3 contains a neat looking graph which is particularly telling. This reminded me of Paul Graham's essay Made in USA:
Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We're good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at what we're bad at. We're impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it.
Ignore for a moment the fancy-pants practices of software engineering, and let's just agree that some of the best software innovation comes from North America despite efforts to ship it off to "software factories" in the East. Does this mean that, all else being equal, you should hire the tattooed and pierced guy who talks back to you, with a short term focus and high risk affinity for your next software project?
Quick and dirty web service testing
For command line geeks (on Windows the easiest way to get these utilities is to install Cygwin):
curl -s -d @request.xml -H "Content-type: text/xml" \
http://example.com/endpoint | xmllint --format -
Create a file request.xml with your XML input, pretty XML output will appear on the standard output. Curl is an HTTP swiss army knife, xmllint is a XML verification and manipulation tool.
SWI-Prolog has a sense of humor
Deep Thought jokes just never get old! SWI-Prolog, when asked an open-ended question for which no rules are defined, answers like so:
?- A. % ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later % % >> 42 << (last release gives the question) ?-
That's just awesome 
Reminded me that I haven't (re)read HHGG in recent years - maybe I'll put it on me phone. Seems like the perfect book to read a chapter here and there when bored.
Annotation-based dispatch for Spring ApplicationEvents
I created a little extension that allows you to dispatch Spring application context events in a clean and type-safe way to POJO beans. Instead of implementing the ApplicationListener interface, one can simply create a handler as follows:
public class EventListener {
@EventHandler
public void onAppEvent(MyCustomEvent event) {
// ...
}
}
Update on 2011/05/07.
The code was moved to Github.
Please also see the Spring Custom Annotations project on Google Code.
Quick and easy image resizing with Java ImageIO
There are quite a lot of examples of image resizing floating around the web but they all seem to access all sort of hidden features and classes deep inside the JDK to achieve their goal. Here is the most straightforward method that I could come up with - all in all just 5 lines of code. It requires ImageIO and requires Java 1.4 or later to run. If the ImageIO.write() method accepted plain ol' AWT Image arguments it could have been reduced further still to three lines, but you have to give it a BufferedImage instance as input.
The snippet below assumes that there exist the following variables (coloured green in the code):
- an input stream to read from
- a desired width variable (specifying the height as -1 tells the toolkit to preserve the original aspect ratio)
- and an output stream to write the encoded image to.
Sample code:
import java.awt.Image; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
// ... BufferedImage sourceImage = ImageIO.read(inputStream); Image thumbnail = sourceImage.getScaledInstance(width, -1, Image.SCALE_SMOOTH); BufferedImage bufferedThumbnail = new BufferedImage(thumbnail.getWidth(null), thumbnail.getHeight(null), BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB); bufferedThumbnail.getGraphics().drawImage(thumbnail, 0, 0, null); ImageIO.write(bufferedThumbnail, "jpeg", outputStream);
Recent tweets
- I love how IETF documents still come out in a fixed width font, hard wrapped at 80 characters. Something very reassuring about it. #oldskool 3 days ago
- Gorgeous! RT @RichieInTheCity via @cbaccus: Old school #BMW 3.0si http://t.co/xTJwNxEY 4 days ago
- Ph34r! RT @BBCWorld: US researchers turn brain waves from thoughts of words into real words http://t.co/KJmbFb51 4 days ago
- Love this week's The Economist cover illustration: http://t.co/0LVeJ2Z4 ("The rise of state capitalism") 2 weeks ago
- @Krutch_SnS_Ed quite an unexpected ending to S2! I didn't think he was gonna do it… best show on TV at the moment, methinks 2 weeks ago
Recently read
- Secret Codes in Bacteria October 27, 2011
- Why the current revenue model of higher education is in trouble October 27, 2011
- The Security of SSL October 27, 2011
- The Limits of Human Rationality October 26, 2011
- New Malware: Duqu October 19, 2011
