…have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they’ll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won’t really get anything done? They’ll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they’ll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip. That’s because programming tasks take so long to task switch.

Yeah, that’s how it is. An old posting but still true – programmers are less productive if they have to constantly switch between tasks that are all super-mega-important for management. In fact each developer should only worry about the task at hand right now and leave it up to the project manager to decide upon the next task.

The full article from Joel is worth reading.

dojox.layout.ScrollPane is an interesting UI, scrolling an overflowed div based on mouse position, either vertical or horizontal.

Not only the behavior is interesting, but also the “lengthy and detailed” documentation:

Available since version 1.0, but still no documentation…

I need to rant about this… the Dojo documentation is simply in very very bad shape… For example the superb description of the dojo.subscribe feature:

This is one of the major features, available since Dojo 0.9. And there is NO documentation available. And I’m even not going to talk about the fact that there are tons of broken links in the documentation or examples do not work on their own site… (if samples are available at all).

“Unbeatable JavaScript Tools” – I agree to this slogan 100%. Unbeaten in performance, bugs and documentation.

</rant>

In the mining model of software companies, the charismatic, flighty founders and their investors stand to make a lot of money. Their workers, their customers, and their secondary investors all get boned, because these companies and their products tend to suck.

So true…

The people who really change the world are farmers.

Unfortunately mining seems to be very popular these days….

Read the full blog post.

A while ago I ranted about “making money in the Appstore” and that EUR 3,- are too much for an application. Most probably the people reviewing those apps never wrote code on their own… that said, there is a great list of 13 reasons why software is not free… and I could not agree more with Brittany… some of my highlights:

• Software is not easy to create — especially not software that people consider easy to use and attractive. It’s a whole heck of a lot of work, in fact.
• Good software takes somewhere between months and years to create. It’s not something you just whip up in a night like they show you in the movies.
• Software is created by hard working people… like you. Do you get paid for your work?
• People who make software have more to do once your purchase has been made. We are here for you when you run into issues by providing a support team to answer questions, walk you through troubleshooting steps, fix bugs, etc.
• You pay for your clothes, gadgets, your movie tickets, your lunch, your plane ticket, etc. So why not your software?

Read the full 13 reasons here and please think about this before you rant about spending money for software…

After writing about Taco Bell Programming I discovered that there is a new movement called “DevOps” which goes into the same direction:

Let’s face it – where we are right now sucks. In the IT industry, or perhaps to be more specific, in the software industry, particularly in the web-enabled sphere, there’s a tacit assumption that projects will run late, and when they’re delivered (if they’re ever delivered), they will underperform, and not deliver well against investment. It’s a wonder any of us have a job at all!

The Devops movement is bold enough to believe that there’s a better way – a way of building teams, and building software that can solve these problems.

Read the full DevOps article.

32 concurrent parallel parsing processes and zero bullshit to manage. Requirement satisfied.

Lots of work can be achieved by using existing tools… so use them, even if they are not fancy, new or hip. That’s true Unix Zen!

Read the full article.

After complaining about Dojo taking so long fixing bugs I found another quite interesting bug report this morning:

Dojo Bug 7844:

• Filed almost 2 years (!!!) ago
• Filed against Dojo 1.2
• Not fixed with the latest 1.5 release, but moved to 1.6 now

Yes, fixing the dojo.back in IE8 is definitely harder than the 1/2 line fix for 8546, but in the end dojo.back is “supported” since Dojo 1.0, so I’d expect that Dojo is tested against new browsers and bugs are fixed in a timely manner…

Recently WordPress 3.0 has been released so I went ahead and upgraded my WordPress installation to that new version. How hard can it be?

Well, it was super-super-super simple… I’ve never experienced such a painless upgrade for any Web application I ever used. Just click one button, enter the FTP credentials and let WordPress upgrade itself. After upgrading WordPress prompts for a few changes (all written down here) and the whole thing just works. It is as simple as using an Apple product!

So congratulations dear WordPress, for the new, great release and the fact that you take care about your users!

iBatis for Java is a good way of abstracting away the SQL statements from the business logic; it relies on XML files which contain all SQL statements and it is pretty simple to access a database. Because accessing DB2 from Java is pretty new for me I had some troubles finding a sample to setup a “insert” statement which returns the last inserted ID.
With PHP I’d use my_insert_id(), but how does it work with Java and DB2? Unfortunately all samples I could find where either based on Oracle or on the Microsoft SQL Server…. no luck.

So here is the XML required for an INSERT statement with iBatis on DB2:

<insert id=”insertTABLE” parameterclass=”TABLE”>
INSERT INTO TABLE
(…)
VALUES
(#…#)
<selectkey resultclass=”int” keyproperty=”id”>
SELECT IDENTITY_VAL_LOCAL() as ID FROM SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1
</selectkey>
</insert>

After that the insert statement can be used like follows:

TABLE_BEAN table_bean = new table_bean();
table_bean.setXXX(…);
mySqlMapClient.insert(“insertTABLE”, table_bean);
// now table_bean.getId() returns the correct id

From now on iBatis works like a charm and the object value is automatically updated… nice!