Occasional Thoughts

I personally enjoy Agile software development for some years and know that it is not easy for a development team to change its habits. But it's worth the effort. Today I can't image developing without Agile methodologies anymore.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.

• What is an engineer?
• What are engineers doing?
• Are engineers different somehow?
• What do engineers carry around?
• What do engineers like?
• How to engineers dress themselve?

The answers are very funny. Have fun...

The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things. If you drink too much, you can solve that problem by stopping entirely. But you can't solve the problem of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the Internet entirely, as I'd done with previous time sinks.

His proposed solution is interesting and maybe worth a try, when your desk layout allows it:

I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web.

Jaclin 0.1 is a small tool to answer some questions about a compiled Java class file:

• With which Java runtime is the class compatible?
• Are debug infos available in the compiled class?
• What kind of debug infos are compiled in?
• Is it really a Java class at all?

Please see the project page for more information and download links.

If you have questions or comments feel free to add them to this posting below.