I fixed my PC

I have a 3 years old PC that I am afraid to turn off because Vista boot would hang at loading bar every time it boots. I have developed a set of routine to get it to boot which involves repeatedly power it off and on, and select 'use last good configuration'. It becomes such a drag that I had to turn off auto windows update fully aware that it is a bad thing to do.

Today I finally found the solution - install latest motherboard drivers. I don't know why it takes me that long to think of that. Stupidity, I suppose.

No to Kindle, Yes to Audible.com

While Amazon's new Kindle is quite attractive at $189 price point, I simply don't have time to read books. Instead I am trying out Audible.com. Incidentally, Audible is also an Amazon company.

Broken advice - buy and hold

One popular advice offered to small investors like you and me is buying mutual funds in small amount and never touch it till retirement. The theory is that stock prices go up in long term and market timing doesn't work out in long run.

This advice clearly does not work to our advantage at a time like now. Take Vanguard 500 Index (VFINX) for example, its value dropped more than 30% between 2008-09-19 and 2009-01-30. In other words, if you sold it in mid September last year and kept the money in a checking account, you would come out 30% richer than if you had not.

It is a big difference between not sweat over normal market fluctuation and seeing a disaster coming and not get out of its way.

Best gadget 2008 - ooma

The best gadget I bought in 2008 is ooma.

Ooma is a VoIP phone that doesn't charge monthly subscription fees. I used to pay $27.95 a month for a local only land line + caller id + other government fees and taxes. Now I pay zero and get unlimited domestic calls within US. I am looking to recoupe the cost in about 9 months.

If you need to make oversea calls, you can purchase credit from ooma. The cost is comparable to skype.

If 911 support is important to you. According to http://www.ooma.com/learn/ooma_faq.php#q8, ooma supports e911.

I am very happy with ooma. Setup is straightforward; sound quality is great; and virtual voice mail allows me to listen to voice mails remotely.

Rule of Thumb: Unchecked Exception vs Checked Exception

If caller can not do anything to resolve the problem when exception happens, make the exception unchecked.

Technorati Tags: Java

JavaBlogs is broken

No entry for past two days. http://www.javablogs.com/ViewDaysBlogs.action?date=23&month=0&year=2007 and http://www.javablogs.com/ViewDaysBlogs.action?date=24&month=0&year=2007 turn up empty.

Firefox, run!

Pango-enabled firefox is much slower

export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

Add above to .bashrc. Make sure to log out to let it take effect. Now only if I can figure out how to get it run faster on OSX.

Exception Breakpoint and Field Watchpoint in Intellij

Exception breakpoint and Field Watchpoint are great timesavers when troubleshooting bugs that result in exception. No more staring at the code; sprinkling line breakpoints everywhere. Simply set up the exception breakpoint, reproduce the exception according to the bug description. Volia, Intellij suspends the program when it hits the exception and now it is easy to go through the stack and pinpoint what the problem is.

Technorati Tags: intellij

TDD Infected

In the past, I did not get what is the big deal about the whole TDD (Test Driven Development) thing. When I previously skimmed Kent Beck's "Test Driven Development book, I found the example in the book to be ridiculously simple or even dumb sometimes.

That is until I had chance to pair with Edward and watch the TDD in action.

We had a bug to fix and Edward had a hunch about where the bug is. But instead of going straight to fix it, he insisted on writing a test to reproduce the bug first. Unexpectedly, the first version of bug reproducing test didn't turn red. This lead us to fire up debugger and started tracing the code. Along the way, we discovered that our hunch was in fact wrong. When the test finally turn red, we knew exactly how to fix the bug. And sure enough, it took us no time to make the test green and we were confident that we indeed fixed the bug.

It is truly an "Aha!" moment for me.

So I revisited Kent Beck's TDD book afterwards. The book's example still read as ridiculous. But as I can relate to my personal TDD experience, the messages in the book begin to resonate with me.

Since I started to practice TDD couple weeks ago, the most important change is that I no longer try to "over-apply" patterns up front. I am able to delay that decision till the needs arise knowing comfortably that I can always refactor to pattern without fear of breaking anything. A big plus in my book.

Technorati Tags: programming

Kinesis Advantage and TypeMatrix 2030

My wrist starts to bother me. To avoid RSI, I researched on ergonomic keyboard and narrowed my choices down to:

1. TypeMatrix 2030, $100 from ebay.
2. Kinesis Advantage, $250 ordered through fentek-ind.

I ordered both keyboards to try out and hope they will save my wrist.

UPDATE: Verdict is out. Kinesis Advantage is an instant love and TypeMatrix went straight back to ebay.

Technorati Tags: ergonomic, gadget

Sony eBook Reader

This is the widget gadget I am going to get in year 2006.

Technorati Tags: gadget

Relocation

Packing, now. Hate it!

New job, next month. Love it!

Running SQL script from Ant

An alternative to shelling out to SQLPlus is to use Ant's task - Sql.

SICP Lecture Video

MIT lecture video. Great stuff!

Looking for programmer heaven

Besides the obvious candidates such as Google, Yahoo or Amazon, where else? Where can I find this kind of information?

No management material

You know you are no management material when you prefer "The Algorithm Design Manual" (Steve S. Skiena) to "The Art of Project Management" (Scott Berkun).

Max method size breached

I have to admit that I only learnt the existence of the 64KB size cap for a java method last night.

Thanks to someone who managed to write a WTF worthy JSP with a whopping 8000 plus lines.

enum

If you know javac turns enum declaration into a subclass of Enum, and understand what the heck is Enum<E extends Enum<E>>, my hat off to you and please stop reading.

For the rest of us, there is a through explanation of enum.

What servers Google uses?

Ever wondered what servers Google uses to serve up gmail page?

Server: GFE/1.3

Server: GWS/2.1

GWS must be acronym for Google Web Server. Anybody knows what GFE stands for?

Servlet Forward vs Redirect

To do redirect, server sends back a HTTP response status 302. Upon receiving such response, browser is obligated to request page from the new location, hence redirect happens.

HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Location: somewhere/newlocation.jsp

Forward, on the other hand, happens internally on the server, and browser is not aware of it at all.

That explains why we need to encodeURL before redirect but not before forward; why states are kept when forward but not when redirect; why redirect method is on Response object but forward is on RequestDispatcher object.

Technorati Tags: Java

Hit by Lucene Hits

java.io.IOException: Bad file descriptor
 	at java.io.RandomAccessFile.seek(Native Method)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.FSInputStream.readInternal(FSDirectory.java:415)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.refill(InputStream.java:158)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.readByte(InputStream.java:43)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.readBytes(InputStream.java:57)
 	at org.apache.lucene.index.CompoundFileReader$CSInputStream.readInternal(CompoundFileReader.java:220)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.refill(InputStream.java:158)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.readByte(InputStream.java:43)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.readInt(InputStream.java:73)
 	at org.apache.lucene.store.InputStream.readLong(InputStream.java:96)
 	at org.apache.lucene.index.FieldsReader.doc(FieldsReader.java:59)
 	at org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentReader.document(SegmentReader.java:237)
 	at org.apache.lucene.search.IndexSearcher.doc(IndexSearcher.java:74)
 	at org.apache.lucene.search.Hits.doc(Hits.java:101)

The Hits should only be accessed when its corresponding IndexSearcher is open. Attempting to access the Hits after the searcher is closed may result in above exception.

The most disturbing thing is that this is not mentioned in the Lucene Javadoc, nor in the "Lucene In Action" book. Thus guarantee any newcomer will be hit by the hits issue! (pun intended)

Technorati Tags: debug, Java

Why using Boolean to represent ternary states is a bad idea

The intention of my previous entry is not to advocate the usage of Boolean to represent ternary state but to document a usage I found while reading some open source code.

Use NULL to represent state is technically valid and common practice. Nullable column is often used in database design and many APIs return NULL.

However, people seem to really hate this idea. Why?

I believe the reason is that the usage violates the "least surprise" principle. As programmers, we are hardwired to think of boolean as binary state. The usage in this case, although valid, is against human psychology.

Use Boolean to return ternary state

By using Boolean as return value, it is possible to represent ternary state by - Boolean.TRUE, Boolean.FALSE and null.

Technorati Tags: Java

Be wary of "IN" clause

In my current project, some queries share a pattern of "where category.id in (:categoryids)". To be "DRY", I implemented a routine to extract a set of category ids; then use Hibernate's setParameterList(). Nice and clean... and WRONG.

The problem is that database has limited buffer for parsing sql query so that there is a limitation on the length of the "IN" clause. The above approach works with small set of data but bombs out when data gets larger.

The solution is to place the query for extracting category ids directly in the "IN" clause as subquery. The result is messy with lots of string concatenation, special case handling. But CORRECT.

An example of leaky abstraction and a reminder to test with large data set early on.

Technorati Tags: sql

com.octo.captcha.service.CaptchaServiceException: no captcha for specified id is found

com.octo.captcha.service.CaptchaServiceException: no captcha for specified id is found
  at com.octo.captcha.service.EhcacheManageableCaptchaService$EhcacheStore.getCaptcha(
    EhcacheManageableCaptchaService.java:909)
  at com.octo.captcha.service.AbstractCaptchaService.getChallengeForID(
    AbstractCaptchaService.java:534)
  at com.octo.captcha.service.image.EhcacheManageableImageCaptchaService.getImageChallengeForID(
    EhcacheManageableImageCaptchaService.java:505)

This is due to a bug in jcaptcha implementation, as detailed in here.

To spend 1 hour to get Maven running so that I can build from source to fix a bug known since June is not exactly fun for me at midnight running in "death march" mode.

Technorati Tags: debug, Java

No Fluff Just Staff (PHX) 2005

I went to NFJS at Phoenix last weekend. Just as expected, the conference is well organized and speakers are great.

What I did not expect is the kind of comradeship I felt strongly towards fellow conference attendees whom I have never met before. When Larry pulled out the "Core Mac Osx And Unix Programming" from his bag and raved about the bignerdranch.com, I felt connected as I was planning to start learning Cocoa programming and the "Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X" by the same author is on my Amazon wish list. When I noticed Tim uses fisher pen and Moleskine Notebook , I knew instantly that he is a fellow Hipster PDA user for I have the same setup myself.

Although we are strangers, we are alike. We are all "geeks".

[Book] JBoss : A Developer's Notebook

JBoss : A Developer's Notebook is a little book that packs a surprisingly good amount of information.

I find the last chapter on how to harden the JBoss instance alone worth the book's price. Do you know that an out-of-box JBoss installation exposes

• the jmx console and web console without protection so that anybody can remotely shutdown the JBoss server?
• the remote class downloading service so that anybody can remotely download any file?

If the answer is "No", you probably own it to yourself and your client to check out the book. Flipping it through for 10 minutes at your local bookstore might save you from having to deal with a security break in.

Technorati Tags: book

org.jboss.mq.SpyJMSException

org.jboss.mq.SpyJMSException: Could not store message: 2 msg=1 hard 
NOT_STORED PERSISTENT queue=QUEUE.teema_email_queue priority=4 
lateClone=false hashCode=28390332; - nested throwable: 
(java.sql.SQLException: Io exception: Connection reset)

Above exception is thrown when trying to enqueue object into a JBoss JMS queue that is backed by a Oracle database.

The cryptic error message is not much help. Neither does Google. Not able to find stock anwser, I started to lay down facts in order to piece together the puzzle. The first clue is that the error appears only in a particular use case, but not in others. What is the difference, I wonder. One noticeable difference is that the object to be enqueued in the failed use case is quite large compare to those in other use cases. May be size of the object is the deciding factor here. A quick testcase confirmed my suspicion.

As I know JBoss saves JMS message as blob, this looks like a problem in handling blob data. Googling "oracle blob size" turns out both explanation and solution. Apparently the older Oracle thin JDBC drivers require non-JDBC compliant way to properly handle blob data. In other words, calling setBlob() doesn't work as expected, which is exactly what JBoss JMS implementation appears to be doing. When data is less than 4000 bytes, Oracle stores it inline, directly in the column, therefore setBlob() works for small data. For larger data, Oracle stores it as LOB and that is when setBlob() breaks and our problem begins. Upgrade to Oracle driver for 10g, which is compatible with Oracle 9 database, fixes the problem. According to its release note, 10g driver adds direct support for lob/clob/blob at JDBC level.

Technorati Tags: debug, Java, oracle

Course Collision!

The Desert Southwest Software Symposium changed the presentation schedule. Two sessions I am most interested in, "Herding Racehorses and Racing Sheep" by Dave Thomas and "Advanced Object-Relational Mapping with Hibernate", are running side by side.

Now, that is a real bummer.

How to start isqlplus

To start isqlplus, a web version of sqlplus, issue

isqlplusctl start

Thereafter, the isqlplus is accessible from http://localhost:5560/isqlplus.

Technorati Tags: oracle

How to run native SQL from Hibernate?

Hibernate 2 provides createSQLQuery() method on the Session for native SQL. However, this method must return a persistent class and can be costly at times.

When raw power is needed, get a JDBC connection by calling connection() method on the Session.

Technorati Tags: Hibernate

What to do when dbca does not start?

Yank the network cable.

Yeah, you heard me alright. If On OSX, if the dbca just sits there, no GUI, no message, no nothing, yank the network cable. This is what I learnt after having tried to reinstall Oracle - twice.

Technorati Tags: oracle, osx

How do you develop Oracle PL/SQL on OSX

Let me take back my words. JDeveloper on OSX is useless for PL/SQL programming. Attempt to compile a simple procedure will crash the JDeveloper. Now I am back to using SQLPlus. Is there any tool, preferably free, that works well on OSX for PL/SQL?

After posting, I remembered that I am using Apple's JDK 1.5. Maybe JDeveloper doesn't work so well with 1.5, I thought. So I switched to JDK 1.4.2_08 from Apple and sure enough, it crashes no more.

Now if you excuse me, I have got some triggers to write.

Technorati Tags: oracle, osx

Collections.sublist() returns a non-serializable list

This gotcha me today. The Collections.sublist() method returns an instance of java.util.RandomAccessSubList, which is obviously not serializable. Solution is easy - just add all contents to an serialziable list implemenation such as ArrayList.

Technorati Tags: Java

Prevent .DS_Store creation on network volumes

Note to myself: Execute following command in a terminal

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Technorati Tags: osx

First LAJUG night with Si Chen

Went to my first LAJUG meeting tonight. Si Chen @ Open Source Strategies, Inc presented Open For Business In A Nutshell. I have to confess that I almost passed the meeting for mistaken it as some talk on open source business model. Turns out it is about ofbiz open source project and I am glad that I didn't miss the presentation.

Si is not only a commiter on the ofbiz project but also build his own online shopping site using ofbiz. The fact that he eats his own dog food makes him much creditable to me.

I briefly checked out ofbiz workflow about two years ago. My major reservation at the time was its map based API. I was worried about the loss of compile time check, refactoring support in IDE etc. When I raised the question tonight at the meeting, Si responded that he does not find this to be a problem in his experience. In fact he actually finds the map based API is easy to work with than traditional type based API. I didn't get a chance to ask him what kind of team he had to work with. My current take on the issue is that such a approach may be more suitable for a small and competent team, but probably not in a large team consists of programmers with various experience level.

Technorati Tags: Java

Why there is no GUI tool to configure JBoss?

I have long been wondering why there is no such tool to ease JBoss configuration. Given the popularity of the JBoss server, I would thought somebody must have written such a tool already. Please leave me a comment if you know such a tool.

Programming Jobs Losing Luster in U.S

Programming Jobs Losing Luster in U.S. What do you think?

Oracle DBA for Dummy

Note to myself: set up Oracle user.

renegade:~ oracle$ sqlplus "/ as sysdba"

SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.3.0 - Production on Sat Jun 11 07:29:50 2005

Copyright (c) 1982, 2004, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.1.0.3.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options

SQL> DROP USER user1 CASCADE;

User dropped.

SQL> CREATE TABLESPACE user1 
  2  DATAFILE '/Volumes/u02/oradata/test1/user1.dbf'
  3  SIZE 100M
  4  AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 10M
  5  MAXSIZE 2000M;

Tablespace created.

SQL> CREATE USER user1                    
  2  IDENTIFIED BY user1
  3  DEFAULT TABLESPACE user1
  4  TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp;

User created.

SQL> GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE TO user1;

Grant succeeded.

SQL> ALTER USER user1 QUOTA UNLIMITED ON user1;

User altered.

Technorati Tags: oracle

Set up Oracle 10g on Tiger

This describes how I set up Oracle 10g on OSX Tiger for development use.

Sergio has an excellent instruction on how to install Oracle 10g on Panther. However because the Oracle requires gcc 3.3 and Tiger uses gcc 4 by default. Some hacks are in order.

Following Sergio's instruction to prepare Oracle installation environment. Issue the following commands as root before launch installer.

sudo nicl . -append /groups/admin users oracle
sudo gcc_select 3.3

Then launch the Oracle installer. The installation will fail towards the end complaining lost TNS when running database creation wizard. Simply abort and do following extra steps.

Step 1: Firstly, set up $ORACLE_HOME and $PATH in your .bash_profile. By default, the ORACLE_HOME is at "/Volumes/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.0/db_1" if you follow Sergio's instruction. While logged in as oracle, add following two lines to .bash_profile, adjust the ORACLE_HOME value as necessary.

export ORACLE_HOME="/Volumes/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.0/db_1"
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin:$ORACLE_HOME/bin

Issue following command to activate new settings.

cd
. .bash_profile

Step 2: Relink Oracle libraries.

cd $ORACLE_HOME/lib
mv libnnz10.dylib libnnz10.dylib.ori
relink all
mv libnnz10.dylib.ori libnnz10.dylib

Step 3: Run 'dbca' to create a database. What to do when dbca does not start?

Step 4: Run '$ORACLE_HOME/root.sh'. This script will appear hang at end and displaying a message "Expecting the CRS daemons to be up within 600 seconds." The CRS is only available on OSX Server so simply Ctrl-C terminate the process.

Step 5: Download Oracle startup and stop script and extract it to 'oracle' user home. Now you can start and stop Oracle instance by running 'startup.sh' and 'stop.sh' respectively.

Step 6: If your machine has a fixed IP, you probably don't need to perform this step. Since I run Oracle on my powerbook and I am only going to use this Oracle for development purpose, I change listener.ora and tnsnames.ora under $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin to make it work with dynamic ip like 192.168.0.1 and only connectable from localhost.

My listener.ora looks like:

SID_LIST_LISTENER =
  (SID_LIST =
    (SID_DESC =
      (SID_NAME = test1)
      (ORACLE_HOME = /Volumes/u01/app/oracle/product/10.1.0/db_1)
    )
  )

LISTENER =
  (DESCRIPTION_LIST =
    (DESCRIPTION =
      (ADDRESS_LIST =
        (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC))
      )
      (ADDRESS_LIST =
        (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = localhost)(PORT = 1521))
      )
    )
  )

And my tnsnames.ora looks like:

TEST1 =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = localhost)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = test1)
    )
  )

EXTPROC_CONNECTION_DATA =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS_LIST =
      (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC))
    )
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SID = PLSExtProc)
      (PRESENTATION = RO)
    )
  )

One final point, Oracle 10g has its own JDBC driver. Drivers for Oracle 9 won't work with 10g.

Update (Tue Jul 26 08:48:23 PDT 2005): how to start isqlplus.

Technorati Tags: oracle, osx

Pragmatically set up JMS retry strategy in JBoss

JBoss uses so called "Dead Letter Queue" to handle undeliverable JMS message. It can be configured with "conf/standardjboss.xml".

In times though, you may want finer control over JMS retry strategy. By setting JBoss specific properties before sending message, you can pragmatically override how undeliverable JMS message is handled.

• JMS_JBOSS_SCHEDULED_DELIVERY : scheduled time for message delivery
• JMS_JBOSS_REDELIVERY_DELAY : delay between retry in milli-seconds
• JMS_JBOSS_REDELIVERY_COUNT : count of retry
• JMS_JBOSS_REDELIVERY_LIMIT : max number of retry attempt

TextMessage outMessage= topicSession.createTextMessage(outString);
            
outMessage.setLongProperty("JMS_JBOSS_REDELIVERY_DELAY", 10000);

outMessage.setLongProperty("JMS_JBOSS_SCHEDULED_DELIVERY", 
    deliveryDate.getTime());

topicPublisher.publish(outMessage);  

Technorati Tags: Java

Invalid RSS feed from JavaBlogs

invalid_javablogs_feed

I noticed that there is nothing from JavaBlogs since late last night. So I did a little investigation. Turns out that the RSS feed is invalid. Instead of a valid XML document, the RSS is wrapped inside HTML mark up and this chokes any RSS parser. In addition, the "title" element is missing.

Updated my javablogs preprocess script to handle this unexpected scenario.

Technorati Tags: NetNewsWire, osx, Ruby

Macally BTMICRO

Stay away from Macally BTMICRO mouse.

It is too small to hold comfortably. My hand is in great strain after only a few days of usage.

Its light sensor is very picky at the surface.

Technorati Tags: gadget

OSX JDK fix

Note to myself

sudo su -
mkdir -p /Library/Java/Home/jre/bin
mkdir /Library/Java/Home/jre/lib
cd /Library/Java/Home/jre/bin
ln -s ../../bin/java 
cd ../lib
ln -s ../../../Classes/classes.jar rt.jar

Technorati Tags: Java, osx

Master in Software Engineering

The difference between a software engineer and a computer programmer as similar to the difference between a civil engineer and a carpenter. -- T. Scott Ankrum on comp.software-eng

Only recently, I found out some Universities offer such programs as Master in Software Engineering. The curriculum is definitely interesting for it addresses many skills that are missing in CS education but are essential for man in the trench. I only wish I had time and money to attend such a program.

Technorati Tags: software engineer

CAPTCHA

Well, if you know what CAPTCHA stands for, you are definitely geekier more geeky than me. A Java implementation is available at http://jcaptcha.sourceforge.net/.

Technorati Tags: Java

Nice IDEA

While reading this, it suddenly hits me that IDEA is really a play at IDE A. Nice.

Technorati Tags: Java

Help: do you know what this error message means?

While porting our application to Websphere 6.0 Express, we see following error message.

TRAS0014I: the following exception was logged java.lang.SecurityException: Attempted commit in subordinate
    at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.UserTransactionImpl.commit(UserTransactionImpl.java:251)
    at net.sf.hibernate.transaction.JTATransaction.commit(JTATransaction.java:55)

If you know what this error message means, please drop me a note. Thanks!

Update (04/14/2005 23:02:10): it looks like the Hibernate version we use doesn't play nicely with Websphere 6.0.

Technorati Tags: debug, Java

Re: Transaction Model Choices

Dan, are you referring to two phrase locking or two phrase commit? If my memory is not failing me, the two phrase locking refers to the database locking model which ensures serializable transaction. While the two phrase commit is referring to how distributed system can collectively make a decision. It can be used for distributed transaction, but not limited to that.

Technorati Tags: computer science

Sir, am I hired

If I were interviewed by SKI_BUM and given days to think it through, my answer would be as following.

Pick one or more Java API's/Class libraries and critize them (both good and bad). I don't know about you. I can never remember the appropriate IO classes to use to read/write a file. Granted, the use of decorator pattern in the Java IO libraries makes it very flexible and powerful and all that. But for mundane tasks, such as reading text file, it is awkward to use and too complicated to remember. A set of routines handling common tasks in one liner fashion as in Ruby and Python would make developers' life easier and save everybody's trouble to write his own FileUtil.

How do you participate in a team? A productive team doesn't automatically appear when you throw bunch of people together. It only grows as a result of conscious effort by management and an encouraging environment. It takes two to make up a team. So I will make you a deal. I promise I will be a good team player if you work hard to grow it.

If you have a problem in the team, for example a design problem that you can't agree on, how do you usually solve the problem? I used to believe naively that design problem should be argued purely on technical merit and reasoned with rational. That is why my view did not go through even if it was later proved to be right.

Now I am wiser. When dealing with people, even if they are tech people or even geek, we can never ignore the politics at play, or the sociology as said in the Peopleware. I am working on my HTWFIP skills.

When you design a system, what are your objectives (for instance do you care most about performance, the users, etc.)? Simple to use, good default, and easily extensible.

What books on software or programming have you read lately? In the last month, I read Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. and Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

Ruby is the language I plan to learn this year. Bash is something I found myself in need at work. I read Peopleware because I realized, only recently, that tech skills alone is not enough to be a good developer.

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and Design Patterns are the first three books I read when I first started my programmer career 4 years ago and they are on the top of my reading list. But did not read those lately.

How do you keep up with what's going on in the industry? Following Pragmatic Programmer's advice, I try to read a book every month and learn a new language every year. In addition, I read blogs to keep on top of industry news.

What's your experience with design patterns, refactoring and test-first development? There was a period right after I finished Design Patterns book, I could not help myself to refer to a design pattern when discussing code. Now however, after it sinks in, I find myself seldom talk about it anymore. It just blends in.

Although Refactoring is about improving the existing code, I tend to use it as my coding guideline and strive to write good structured code in the first place. With more and more tools supporting automatic refactoring, it is not as important to know how to do a particular refactoring by hand as to understand why a particular refactoring is needed.

I spent last year working on a Swing application and I find it is really hard to write unit testing for it.

How do you design in UML? Do you design everything in details and the code mechanically afterwards? I don't design in UML. I use UML as sketching, as Martin Fowler suggested. I cringe whenever people suggest detailed design in UML. Firstly, I don't believe you can thought of every design detail without actually writing the code. So detailed design upfront means surprise and more surprise when actual coding starts. Secondly, unlike programing language, UML is ambiguous, people tend to interpret differently.

What's your attitude towards code standards, best practices, etc? I think every team should follow a minimum set of code standards, one page at max, so that team can easily review others' code. I have my preference in coding standard but I am not religious about it. I think code standards is a mutual agreement grow out of team members rather than imposed by management.

How do you feel about learning new API's? It is the nature of our business that one has to keep oneself updated. If a new library or framework improves my team's productivity, I am certainly all for it. However I also learnt over the years to be caution of marketing propaganda. That means I will evaluate a library on my terms rather than market hype.

I skipped two questions regarding to what I am working on as my boss won't be too happy to find it here.

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