As I read a book or magazine, I take notes as a JE. Today I started reading Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide From the first edition - 2000

HTML was orignally a structural language. Later, presentational tags (B I TABLE) were added to allow more control of the presentation. Many web pages have more presentation than structure, hiding the intended meaning. CSS allows the clear separation of structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS).

CSS allows for richer styling than HTML. There are more styling options available. Style commands are centralized, rather than spread out among each web page meaning you can change the color of all the H2 tags in one place rather than everythere they occur, both in a single page and across multiple pages.

Cascading means that the local page can override the general style. Also, the user might be able to create a reader style sheet and further personalize the display.

There are several deprecated tags including: FONT, I, CENTER. These functions are better handled by CSS.

CSS1 does not deal with tables, CSS2 does. CSS1 is weak in positioning of elements. It does not support downloadable fonts. Media types, other than the computer screen, are not well supported. CSS2 corrects some of these deficiencies. Unfortunately, some older browers do a poor job of implementing CSS. Most modern browers do a good job though.

If you don't get CSS see Zen Garden for a great example of the power and uses of CSS, as well as some good references.

Apache James

This article includes a basic review of email terminology: MUA, SMTP, POP3(110), MX, IMAP, etc.

Apcahe James can be downloaded from http://james.apache.org and it required JRE 1.3 or 1.4. There are some config and admin tips for getting James off the ground. Also, James includes a Mailet API to allow it to be extended through Java code, much as a Application Server is extended via servlets.

What is James? The Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server: an open-source mail server.

Alfred Chuang: Founder, President and CEO of BEA

• J2EE was too difficult in 2001 to develop against for "broad" acceptance.
• JCP is a good thing, but slow. If solutions and standards are not provided faster, Microsoft .NET will catch up.
• In the real world, J2EE and .NET will need to play side by side and be integrated.
• BEA is banking on people buying an entire application platform suite.
• Complexity is inherited.
• Java's big win is to give IT some hope of a standard.

Foiling Failure

How can we keep from making the same mistakes over and over again? One problem is that developers are so rushed that they never take time to understand the mistakes of the last project before starting the next. An experience mangement system could be used to keep from repeating past mistakes.

An experience factory is a separate department that monitors projects for lessons that can be applied to future projects. You want to reuse the experience gained, not just the code. Building an experience factory requires resources because the people in the experience factory need to not be associated with other projects.

Unfortunately the article does not give any hard examples of what an experience factory is or how it does its work.

Future Fixes

How much time to plan for bug fixes in a project plan?

• Reduce bugs by completing tasks, rather than half completing and "getting back to it later".
• Use data from previous projects: size of the completed project, number of people, number of bugs, etc.
• Track your estimates. Each week reestimate the project end to see how you are really doing. If tasks take longer in the beginning you can start preparing to go long.
• Measure how many "fixes" cause other problems with FFR ( fix failure ratio, the number of bad fixes to all fixes).
• Critical chain buffer management. Keep track of hours versus the real estimate, not the fudge factors.
• Be Agile: test first, automated unit testing. On large projects, add a defect search and destroy iteration

By keeping things in the open and using EQF to analyze schedule and FFR to determine developer accuracy you can better predict the outcome of your project.

Subject: OT: WMD (Original Humor)
From: "Sanford Manley"
Newsgroups: alt.obituaries

US Soldiers Uncover Iraqi Nuclear Threat
by L.S. Clossey

BASRA, IRAQ (LSC)--Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson announced Friday the discovery of
vast hydrogen reserves concealed in the Persian gulf. Other alarming
evidence suggested the Hussein regime had been planning on using the
hydrogen to construct hydrogen bombs, or to crash a hydrogen-filled
dirigible into a soft target.

Every two hydrogen atoms had been carefully attached, possibly by Iraqi
scientists, to an oxygen atom. Indistinguishable from water, the
resulting compound had been stored in the Persian Gulf, possibly for
future use in hydrogen bombs. The total amount of hydrogen concealed is
still unknown, although the hydrogen/oxygen compound has been founded
throughout the Gulf, which covers a surface area of 92,500 square miles
(239,600 square km).

"There's enough hydrogen reserves here to build one hydrogen bomb for
every church-going man, woman, and child in America," said Gen. Turgidson.

Specially trained dogs sniffed out textbooks at a partially bombed-out
former high school in Basra. Some books included technical information
about the chemistry of this compound. Others, disguised as history
textbooks, included pictures of the Hindenburg explosion at Lakehurst
Naval Air Station, New Jersey, May 6, 1937. The 804-foot- (245-metre-)
long airship had been inflated by hydrogen.

A senior Bush administration official suggested that the President had
long suspected that the Hindenburg airship had been sabotaged by Saddam
Hussein.

The White House expressed surprise at the sudden discovery, which had been
scheduled for November 1.

It's the Crosscutting

Explains some of the terms used in Aspect Oriented Programming

• concern - An element of a program that can be considered a single unit; think module
• separation of concerns - placing each concern by itself; think module
• scattered - not modularized
• structures - how your concerns are organized

These ideas apply outside AOP. For example, if there is a constant, say number of minutes in an hour that is being used in a lot of places. If you use 60 everywhere, then this "concern" ( number is minutes in an hour ) is scattered. If you define a single global constant, MINUTES_PER_HOUR, in a single place and use it instead then it is called "modularized". By putting all such contstants in the same package, you impose structure.

There are concerns that can't be separated nicely from other concerns. These concerns crosscut the structure. Example: system kernel calls. Cross cutting allows for multiple simultaneous structures, rather than a single hierarchy as we are all used to.

You will need to understand koan

Backslide

This month our intrepid novice learns what happens when you can't prove the code is correct. It may appear to work, but without unit tests that can prove it works, does it really work? Appearances can be decieving

What's new in UML 2.0?

Ok, I've used UML and some of the diagrams aren't all that useful. Maybe things have improved

Activity Diagrams They have improved but not enough, less boxes and more conciseness would be nice

Architecture Diagrams A greater focus on component, deployment and package diagrams to help in architecture.

Class Diagrams They have gotten better with ball-and-socket notation and some new sterotypes. Collaboration diagrams are now communication diagrams. Timing diagrams have been added.

What were they thinking? Business rules, UI and persistance are still not addressed.

Keep your modeling simple, inclusive, cooperative and focused.

State of the Scam

Somehow, in an era of Enron, Arthur Andersen, Martha Stewart and other big fraud cases, Utah is singled out for being the fraud capitol of the world. Why, well, there were the Olympics. Of course, its being going on for some time and Utah was the only ones willing to do something about it. Polygamy? Doesn't seem like fraud but just a reason to bach Utah. Bonneville Pacific? Of course this sort of thing never happens anywhere else.

SCO? Nice but again not endemic to Utah. The Lawyers have a substantial holding in the company and thus have a vested interest in propping up the perceived stock value or selling the company for more than the company may be really worth. The officers at SCO have a classic "pump and dump" scam going. SCO bought Vultus, although no indication of what Vultus is is mentioned.

Conlcusion, open source will survive and the lawyers and officers will get rich.

From Vultus.com

Vultus speeds the adoption of best-of-breed web applications that greatly enhance corporate internet strategies. Our technology provides a flexible, secure platform to facilitate closer business relationships with new and existing customers, suppliers and partners. Vultus products are designed to extend long-term IT and business ROI for our customers by adhering to the latest industry protocols

Oh, now I see why they were bought. They are completely buzzword compliant.

Offshore Uproar

A lot of the magazine is dedicated to offshore development. There is understandable hostility toward it and hopes that it will be slowing down. Other sources mention the same.

The AOP Report Card

Aspect Oriented Systems mentioned:

• AspectJ
• Aspect-Werkz
• JBoss AOP Framework
• Aspect C++
• JAC
• Nanning

AOP ideas presented:

• pointcut mechanism
• advice

How does AOP stack up in these areas?

• Expressiveness : ok and getting better
• efficiency : static deployment (AspectJ) is good, dynamic has some problems with optimization and compiler times
• Intuitive : Seems to make sense but its going to take some time and training to use it properly
• Compatability : AOP code will run on standard JVMs. Some use changes to Java syntax while others use a separate XML file to specify the aspects
• Tool Support : Tools support is weak at this point.

Third International Conference on AOP

I am looking for a moonlighting job. I like my daytime job but I need some after hours sort of thing. The idea is a project I can do from home.

Versatile software engineering professional with broad ranging experience in object oriented methodologies. Top record of performance in strategic and tactical planning, technical processes and product development, and the building of customer relations. Merge hands-on leadership style with excellent communication skills to continually drive focused teams to performance excellence achieving aggressive goals in a competitive and rapidly changing industry. Proven record in assimilating and adapting new languages and environments. Strong background in software development; architecture and design, internet and web-based systems, Java, C/C++, XML, UML, NT, Unix, SQL, Oracle, PL/SQL, MFC, EJB, JSP, J2EE, JDBC, ODBC, CORBA, HTTP, HTML, CVS, Linux, Solaris/SunOS, HPUX, middleware, and networks. Software engineering qualifications include:

New Product Development

Cross-Platform Development & Integration

Team Leadership, Training & Development

Source Code Control Usage & Administration

Software Development Processes

Software Design & Analysis

Build/Release Management

Bachelors of Science in Computer Science

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didnt get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.

Buddha (568-488 BC, Founder of Buddhism)

In the first game of Kasparov V. X3dFritz the computer forced a draw. Actually Kasparov was poised for the win and the best the computer could hope for was a forced draw.

The games are being broadcast on ESPN2.

• Game 1: Nov. 11 Kasparov 1/2 - 1/2 X3D Fritz
• Game 2: Nov. 13 1:00 p.m.
• Game 3: Nov. 16 1:00 p.m.
• Game 4: Nov. 18 1:00 p.m.

From Chessville Weekly

On Tuesday, a momentous event in chess history will occur. The worldwide sports network, ESPN, will begin a series of four live broadcasts of the latest Man vs Machine match featuring world number 1, Garry Kasparov, against a program called X3DFritz. Not since Fischer-Spassky in 1972 has there been this much live coverage of a chess match on US television. The first show will air this Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST with the following shows set for November 13, 16 and 18. If this event gets the ratings, ESPN will look into broadcasting future chess competitions. You can find out further information at the event website.

Kasparov is more than a grand-master at the venerable game of chess. He is not too bad at marketing. This is the 3rd Man V. Machine chess match. Each was a martketing tool for some company: IBM, Chessbase and now X3D.

Does Kasparov know he is being used as a marketing shill? Of course he does! Does Kasparov know he looks silly in 3D glasses? Of course he does. This is a case of a win-win situation. The sponsor gets lots of publicity and chess gets a big boost as well.

What if he loses to the computer? He has before and it hasn't hurt him in the least. He seems to see the computer as a tool both to improve his own game as well as making chess more popular.

I wish him well.

Ok, I saw this story of a timeline for the Matrix movies here. What a great Slashdot topic. It was rejected. However, herring farts was accepted. Go figure.

We had some local elections yesterday. I only got to vote for some local city councilmen. In Salt Lake they were voting for a new mayor, or maybe just keep the old one. On the evening news they were reporting that the old mayor was ahead by about 20 votes with just the absentee ballots counted. Have these TV news types not learned anything?

They then interviewed the mayor asking his thoughts. Gee, lets see, NONE of the votes had been counted except a few absentee ballots. Even then it was almost a dead tie. So what does the mayor think? He is cautiously optimistic. No kidding.

What did he really think? What we all thought. What a stupid question. With the fiasco that was the "reporting" of the last presidential election, all the news outlets claimed they learned something. It is obvious they did not. What should they have learned? That we should report news. What do they do? They grab what ever they can and try to make it news. No matter if its wrong, premature or inaccurate. Being first is all that matters.