skizz.biz

another possible Grand Unified Theory (GUT) raises its head… Scientific American: Throwing Einstein for a Loop

Joe and I had a good coding session on Dondo (DOt Net Data Objects) at Xtc last night - with some really useful coaching from Martin fowler. we have some code and some ideas, after doing a couple of hours of beating around the bush we focussed on a really simple interface, and chaining really simple Decorators to provide discrete bits of functionality. Still early days, but can’t wait to hit it again.

Last Friday Andy and I went down to the Borough Markets for lunch. I hadn’t been there before and was surprised to find such an amazing market so close to the mess that is London Bridge station. That whole area is a warrren of peculiar streets and alleys. It is next to Southwark Cathedral - surely the only cathedral that appears to be built several metres lower than the surrounding area.

The market sells mostly to restaurants during the week, but on Fridays and Saturdays its open to the public. Apparently friday is a much better day to go though, as on the weekend its insanely busy.

The market is somewhat similar to Adelaide’s Central Market. But where the Central Market has fresh SE Asian food and imported European delicacies, the Borough Market is the other way around. It has a stall with tons of different types of chorizo sausages, game vendors with rabbit and pheasant, venison, olive oil stalls and so on.

But the piece de la resistance is the Wild Mushroom stall. We just can’t get these mushrooms in Australia - they just don’t grow there, well, except for the magic sort, so for a ’shroom enthusiast like me this is going to be a favourite haunt while I’m in London.

Another great stall is the Neal’s Yard dairy, specialising in real english cheeses. Unpasteurised and tasty. I bought several really nice ones, including a wonderfully antisocial Stilton that caused Kathy’s boyfriend to change tube carriages on Sunday to get away. While we were tasting it we were introduced to the farmer, who just happened to be visiting.

And best of all the market is at the end of the bus route that goes just outside my front door. So it looks like the Saturday ritual visit to the market might become a goer again…

Ben just sent me this link to amazon’s page for Charles Reade’s ‘A Simpleton’. Thanks to Amazon’s new clothing store you can find out what people who read your favourite authors are wearing. Just in case this page disappears:
Customers who shopped for this item also wear:

• Clean Underwear from Amazon’s Target Store
• Ladybug Rain Boots from Amazon’s Nordstrom Store
• Flannel-Lined Jeans from Amazon’s Eddie Bauer Store
• Cheetah Print Slippers from Amazon’s Old Navy Store

Finally. Can’t wait.

I’ve been trying to start on an XML+CSS editor in Java for ages - without much success. But I bit the bullet on the weekend and bought the book: O’Reilly - Java Swing. Six hours later I had a class reading from a SAX parser into a DefaultStyledDocument. The book is a bit old but not too much in swing has changed - it does a good job of explaining the arcana of the text framework. Anyway - it made me happy. Now for the fun bits…

I’ve been working on the hairball project again - we’re nearly done now - deleted half the classes in the source tree the other day. A good feeling!
If I was starting it from scratch, this is how I would do it:

• Write integration tests that treat the project as a black box
• Don’t refactor *
• Don’t delete functionality *
• Do add methods to trigger the black box functionality
• Write lots of coarse grained tests - ‘I do a trade on the market and this record appears on the database’

*well, not yet - wait until the tests have good coverage.
The utility classes that you use to help write the tests become implementation classes for the new system.
It’s a kind of top-down agile - using Integration Tests to capture the current system’s functionality and reverse engineer its implementation. And like normal bottom up agile, if it isn’t in the Integration Tests then it isn’t a visible part of the system, so you can ditch it.

Just got my new domain name organised - this site is now accessible through http://www.skizz.biz

I’ve now also imported my old blog entries into the new blog - no pictures yet but coming.

I am trying to develop a swing XML/CSS editor - something I have hankered after for a long time. The problem is the swing text package is complex. And bloody hard to get your head around. So I’m wondering whether to do the simplest thing and ditch it, and try for a new version based on an applet I wrote in (gasp) 1997. Maybe I still have the code somehwere…

…at last. This means that it is much less painful to blog, so hopefully I’ll speed it up a bit