There are fewer twists and turns in a ball of yarn. This movie had me on the edge of my seat until the credits. There were a couple of places where you know what the outcome is going to be, but only for that next 5 minutes. After that the writers switch it up and go in a different direction. "Basic" is a classic "Who dun it" and makes the plot twists in "The General's Daughter" look like "Clue".
Unfortunately, the story has a couple of holes. The motivation for all of the twists and turns is not very apparent, even at the end when you know the whole story. I left thinking, there had to be a less elaborate way to accomplish finding out "who dun it". Overall, it is a good movie.
This is one of the primary things that I have trouble with at my day job. I am a lead, and definately one of the "smarter" people on the team. But my hair isn't gray enough to be able to say, "This is the way it will be done." As a contractor, I also have to remember that "the customer is always right" and not buck the system to often.
So there are really three challenges that keep me from leading. I am not experienced/old enough. I don't have a strong ego. I am hampered by environment.
I am not experienced/old enough. There isn't much that I can do about that except grow older and continue to extend my skills. They funny thing about this challenge though is that it is largely based on perception. How do others perceive me? Well, I start out a nice, intelligent, wise and respectful young man. But, as time goes by, I start to loathe my peers that are not as open minded or bright as I am. I become very short with them and avoid them as much as possible. If they are in a posistion over me, it doesn't really change much. I still try to avoid them, and often argue with their decisions.
I have a friend that is the same age as I am. He is currently managing a large project. He isn't a technical guy, more of a true "consultant". But he would manage this situation much differently than I do. I plan to sit down with him in the coming days and pick his brain to see how he thinks and deals with others.
I don't have a strong ego. Or maybe I do and I just don't express it correctly. Maybe I go from being nice guy, to being "this has to be done" and then back to nice guy. This may confuse my co-workers. It sure as hell confuses me. My ego is easily bent as well. If I think I am having a good day, and someone insults me, even in jest, my ego takes a hit. That hit is even worse when I am already doubting my abilities. How is it that *I* got to this point? That question is usually the very beginning of my downward spiral.
I am hampered by environment. I don't think this will ever change. I love the type of work that I do. I love being a consultant and helping other companies do their job better. I think the discussion with my manager friend will help in this area as well. We shall see.
My father asked me the other night, "Why are you right and they are wrong?" My wife asked me that today. I explained one situtation at work where a guy doesn't want to make an architectual change because he will have to redo some paperwork. Even though this change will close a known security hole, he gives lame examples of why it should stay in place. One example that was completely ludicris was that the system will have better performance. I can't give more details than that, but lets just say, would your system run better if you were running one copy of Photoshop or two? I want to remove the second copy of Photoshop. His performance arguement is basically, since we have two copies of Photoshop running, the system can get more accomplished. Since this guy is the "lead", there isn't much I can do. So, as Vic suggests, I went and surfed the net.
The future is coming. And there is no stopping it. But the future can be a nicer place, but I think it will require me to study myself and make appropriate changes. The first thing I need to work on is the way I speak to those that I loathe. I think I will start by capturing what it is that I am thinking while they are talking. This way I will know what the signs are that I am starting to do something wrong. Then, I will try to alter those thoughts to something more positive.
The loathees are people too, and they have thoughts, and think they are just as right as I think I am. Somehow I have to figure out how to present an alternate idea that they will understand and agree with. That my friends, is going to be a difficult task.
I have been trying to develop using XP practices where you build a test that fails, then build code that makes it work. This is sooo different than the way I used to write code. It seems that XP takes MUCH longer to get something working. Maybe it is just the fact that I am trying to learn Hibernate as well.
My friend Michael has this to say:
First was the noble cause
Then came the war
And close behind the protestors against the killing
And then the protestors against the government
And then the protestors against the killers who wore green shirts and then the protestors against the 'would be' killers who wore green shirts and then the protestors against the green shirts
I know........I am a Viet Nam Veteran
So when do they begin protesting against the 'sand storms' ?
I think Americans are starting to lose respect for protestors that do not have a logical complaint. PETA is afraid there will be Terrorists waiting for our dolphins next to the mines in the Gulf... Yeah, sure, uh huh, ooookay...
After reading several blogs against the war, I just gave up thinking people had a clue. I thought everyone had lost there sense and lost their love of our country. Then, one of our helicopters went down overseas. The Baltimore televsion stations kept playing a quote from Michael Waters-Bey about how he lost a son, and he blamed the President. The first time I saw the quote, I was hot, so hot, my wife had to tell me to quiet down so I didn't wake up the kids. Then, I saw the protesters marching in New York City. And the blood got hotter.
For some reason, at that point, I remembered that freedom of speech is what makes this country what it is. Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Waters-Bey died so his father could say that the president was wrong. But, I like what the Staff Sgt.'s son, Kenneth, said best, “I was proud of him. He’s going to stay my hero.” Kenneth, your dad is my hero too.
Tonight I made my first successful entry into PostgreSQL with Hibernate. I think I have logged a total of 12 hours trying to get Hibernate to work. My first mistake was trying to use HSQLDB. I had PG set up and working, but I wanted something smaller, less of a headache to maintain and simple to start up. I will have to figure out how to get PG to run as a service to get the simple start up. Anyway, after chasing after HSQLDB for a couple of hours, I finally gave up and went back to PG. After tracking down all of the Exceptions and settings... I finally got a new record at 10:32pm! Now I can actually start learning how to USE Hibernate. I am almost convinced that all of this persistence layer stuff is for the birds. Vic has a really nice and simple DAO, and I am not afraid of SQL so maybe I should give it a shot.
I was trying to get Ant to build me some JUnit Tests using JUnitDoclet. I kept getting this strange error = 2. Did some searching and leave it to Google to figure it out. JavaDoc was not on my Path. Open up the environment variables, add a JAVA_HOME, add JAVA_HOME/bin to the PATH and get a new shell. VOILA! I have a bunch of kickin Test Cases now!
I wonder if I have coined a new phrase: IntelliJunkie? I use it to refer to those developers that have fallen in love with IntelliJ's IDEA and love to tell other people about it. I pretty much keep my opinion to myself when it comes to IDE's simply because the debate can get so feirce and heated. However, I like IDEA so much that I actually purchased it with my own cash when my company would not buy it for me. Would I pay $3000 for it? No. I don't think any tool is worth $3000. If IDEA was $3000, then I would be using Eclipse or J, but since it is affordably priced and is so awesome to use, I gladly pay to own it. It isn't like Windows, where I almost feel guilty for purchasing it. I am happy about it, proud of it and want to tell the world, "World, I did an honorable thing. I purchased software!"
I am working on a little application. REALLY small. Two views, 4 tables. I am creating this little app for my kids to use for a project, and so I can learn Tiles and Hibernate. I have the basics of Tiles down, and Hibernate is coming along nicely. But what should hold my database? I have been looking at hsqldb which is a nice LITTLE database. But I already have Postgresql installed on my computer, why not just use it? These are the questions I need to answer for myself but any guidance from the world would be nice to have.
So, Struts wants you to use Coarse grained Beans for viewing. Hibernate wants you to use fine grained beans for modeling. Commons provides a nifty copyProperties method, but I don't know what that is going to buy me.
While attending Vic's class, he pounded into our heads "Code to contract". There are basically three steps that constitute the contract.
I am building an app and have finished the first two. They went SOOO Fast I was totally impressed with myself. If I wasn't trying to learn a new technology for the model I would have finished the app in record time.
At work we use WebLogic. It has it's idiosyncracies, but this one takes the cake. Two developers have WebLogic set up on their boxes, setup is identitical. One has a problem with searches, so, he asks the other developer to do a search, it works fine. Copy over the war file from one machine to the other, it still blows up. Same war file, same setup, different boxes, different outcomes. This will obviously need investigating, but it sure is frustrating.
I am wondering what UML tools everyone uses? Who actually uses Rational Rose? Let me know what tools you use!
So, as I work here tonight on my little app, I am reminded of one of Vic's sayings. He said, "Anyone can make a web page today. Engineer's can make them quickly." One other quote that sticks is, "Under promise. Over deliver." I have been living by those words since I took his class.
I laugh as I read about Matt's experience with Struts Training with Vic. Vic is a great guy and I really enjoyed his class. So why am I laughing at Matt? Because his thoughts are almost exactly what mine were when I took the class. His notes from the first day were almost word for word copy of what I have in my notebook. Very scary. If you need training, Vic is the guy to see.
I have been wrestling with Tiles for the past two hours. It was really stupid problem, that I probably could have found the answer too, if I had just read the docs. It is time to go out now.
Inspired by earlier posts, I put off writing code so that I could play with the CSS and layout of the site. What do you think? I may have to swap the heading colors for the link colors, just to make the links not so "THERE". Suggestions are welcome!
So Patrick is wondering about the damned calendar because Russell got rid of his. Well, I hate the thing! and wanted to get rid of it when I installed MT. Now that everything is stable and working, things are gonna change.
First, I want 3 columns. On the left will go all of my links for archived articles and pages I like to visit. In the middle, the blog (duh!). On the right will be the feeds that I like to monitor. I agree with Patrick though, Matt's Hide-O-Linksare pretty nifty and something along those lines may end up on my site.
I may move away from all of the heavy CSS. My work box only has Navigator 4.7 installed and I have NO priveleges on that box other wise I would have upgraded LOOOONG ago. I want my new look to work for NN too.
I am very self defacing. And I think it hurts the way others percieve me. I do it in order to be humble, but I am starting to think that isn't really humility. Instead of saying, "I don't know how to Hibernate and XDoclets" I say, "I don't know how to do persistance in Java". There is a very large difference between the two.
I have a problem with determining when I should or should not gloss over the details. My father used to get very frustrated with me because I would "build him a clock" when describing something. So, in an effort to not waste people's time (it wasn't just my father), I started trying to generalize things. This tends to lead people to believe that you don't know what you are talking about or that you don't know anything.
So, for now I will search out the definition of humility and see if I can hit it. I will try to accurately determine when to be specific or general in my communication. If I decide that it is time to be specific, I will try not go on ad nauseum. With that, I am off to read about Hibernate and XDoclet.
Tom Hanks can do it all. Is there anything that Tom Hanks can not do? I am very surprised the Sam Mendes isn't up for Oscars for Directing and Best Picture. It will be very sad if Conrad Hall does not win the Cinematography Oscar. The scenes are spectacular. They didn't have to have special effects of the Matrix, but there was a definate "Comic Book" feel to the movie. This is a definate must see film.
All I wanted to do was get started learning "the basics" of persisting data to a database. Maybe basics is the wrong word. Because I know how to get it done in PHP. I know how to get it done in Perl. I even know how to make it work in Java using JDBC and SQL. What I don't know is how to automate it all so I can write less code. That is where Hibernate comes in.
My goals were simple:
Create Hibernate Object that connects to the database.
Create Test for Hibernate Object
So I started with a read of Hibernate Kickstart
Wowsa. First, IDEA can't find Datastore. Trying to solve that problem I found Raible's blog which helps me with the needed libs.
Then it is time to fire up JUnit. I spent the next 2 hours tracking down needed
jars. Google is my friend. Add dom4j and cglib to my growing lib directory. cglib took two tries because I downloaded the one WITHOUT bcel (whose homepage does not have a download link I might add).
Now the SessionFactoryImpl is complaining about not being able to find org/apache/commons/collections/ReferenceMap. It appears that it is time to upgrade my commons libs. Gonna get struts 1.1rc1 while I am at it. Struts may not have changed much, but the libs surrounding it have. I can't believe I have been working with Struts since September.
I am going to browse Raible's Struts-Resume application and see if I can steal ideas on how to do tests since mine are blowing up. The tests are complaining about not having an InitialContext... hrm.
You know... Sometimes I think Microsoft may have it right. You drag a component onto a screen and VisualStudio takes care of a large amount of the coding for you. It is all done behind the scenes and you don't have to worry about knowing how it gets done. Then I think about the time I wanted to send a friend a JavaScript through Outlook. I wanted to get to the JavaScript after I had sent the email. So I trek to sent folder and open the email. Outlook tells me, you can't look at it, because it may be dangerous. Makes sense, but since I have a clue and knew what I was doing, I looked for a way to FORCE Outlook to give me that file. No such luck. I wanted to shoot Outlook. I was taken care of and didn't need to view that JavaScript because it may be dangerous. Lets not talk about why it was dangerous... that is another story all together that I am sure you can read about elsewhere. Back to my plight...
If I want to be efficient in my developing, I now need to know OOP and all that is the philosophy of how to write good code. I need to know syntax of a bazillion libraries: Xdoclet, Hibernate, Struts, JSTL not to mention, XML, XSL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Allowing the man behind the curtain to control things for me is starting to look nice. Or should I just give it up and go back to writing Perl :) I will stop my rant here because others have said it in greater detail before.
I can't give up on Java now. I like it to much. I just wonder if I will ever catch up to the likes of Matt Railble.
Wowsa. So, first there is the problem with the templates not updating. And readers can't get to the comments because it is password protected. I had my cgi-bin password protected to hide my viewcvs.cgi. I wish that Apache would allow you to password protect just one file. Anyway, to solve the problem I moved out of the cgi-bin directory by installing Chora. Now I have a better cvs browser and my readers can add comments. Ahhh Nirvana.
Wooo HOOOOOO! Thanks to my friends on the movabletype.org Support Forum, the articles are updating now. (Thanks almuhajabah and girlie). It is very frustrating to work with a new "tool" only to have it play tricks on you. HTML and Tag/Template driven site building is not that difficult to understand, but man was this one throwing me for a loop. In the end, I gave it Perl's version of the three-finger-salute, delete the "mess" and start over.
I think I will make a couple of changes (add some links) and then it is time to start back to writing code. First up is Hibernate/XDoclet and testing it all with JUnit. This should be fun. I am determined to do this project the "right way". When I need to refactor, I will. When I need to test, I will. When I need to design and plan, I will. I will not be a coward and go the easy route. Not for this project. Anyway... Happy reading!