Random Developments

One thing I forgot to mention about the testing procedure for the certification… the testing software runs on Windows, of course. The look-and-feel is very “Windows 3.1-like”, so it was like being back in time. But what amazed me the most was that, on the first screen, before you even start the test, the top-right corner of the window was showing the current date.

It proudly displayed “08/29/103″.

As of today, I’m officially a Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform, version 1.4. The test was not very hard, and I don’t think I was particularly well-prepared for it. In fact, I was a little surprised at not seeing any questions about Swing (which I know about); now, looking at the test objectives, I noticed that they do not mention Swing at all. In fact, none of the Java certifications mention Swing, but the Certified Developer test includes creating an application with a GUI, so I guess it would be necessary, after all.

I did see questions about assertions, which I have never used or even studied. They were mostly “common-sense” questions about what you would use assertions for and how, so that wasn’t a problem.

I got the worst score of all sections in the one about “Fundamental Classes in the java.lang Package”. My guess as for reason for this is that the documentation for the classes is always right at your fingertips when you are programming, so it’s not something you need to memorize. You eventually do, of course, but you don’t have to.

Best scores: “Operators and Assignments” and “The Collections Framework”. No big surprise there, I guess.

The next steps from here are either “Certified Developer” or “Certified Web Component Developer” (J2EE). I honestly don’t know which direction to follow (and yes, I know the are not mutually exclusive), but I’m leaning towards J2EE. I guess I’ll just toss a coin…

In one of the Macromedia weblogs today, Christian Cantrell brings up the age-old question: which editor do you use, and why ? A little surprisingly (to me), he says that vim is the one he uses the most.

For a programmer, the choice of a text editor is very personal, and usually it says something about the person, unless he/she is being forced (by his/her employer, the environment or something else) to use something that is not his/her first choice.

Me, I’m with Chris: my editor of choice is vim, everywhere I can use it. It’s great because it gives me a consistent look-and-feel and set of commands in any platform (including Windows), can be used over relatively slow links and won’t result in any surprises in the file content. I can even use it to edit binary files, if the need arises.

Other editors I use on occasion include jEdit (mostly for Java) and HomeSite (for HTML; the set of features it gives me is, basically, everything I need).

All in all, if I have a philosophy for choosing editors, it is: the best tool for the job at hand. I’m not religious about any editor, but I know some people are.

What happens when a 737 meets a hail storm ? This. (warning: large images)

Never complain if you think you’re not being hit hard by the new virus on the block. Your wish may just come true. I had to delete some 2MB of viruses and returned messages just today. Still, it’s not even close to what some other people are reporting.

By the way, if this virus grabs two e-mail addresses from the victim’s address book and mails itself to one of them pretending to come from the other one, that means that, whenever I receive a failure report from a message with the virus that faked my address, someone out there had both my address and the intended victim’s address in his/her address book, right ? Can’t this be used to establish a web of social relations around the globe, in a “six degrees” sort of way ? Or am I thinking too far out there ?

Isn’t is terrible when something you thought was microwafe-safe isn’t ?

For the record, I did receive several more copies of the Sobig virus over the weekend. It doesn’t come close to approaching the number of spam messages I get in the same period but, at 100KB+ per virus, it surely is heavier than your regular spam.

This is a problem I have and, I’m sure, so do many others: how to interview programmers. This article has a series of tips (some of them conflicting) from people with several years’ experience both programming and managing programmers.

The book Expert C Programming (Peter van der Linden) also has a full chapter dedicated to this subject.

The Washington Post has an article describing in detail what caused the Columbia accident earlier this year. Reading the description of the last minutes of the ship, it is amazing that it resisted for so long, given the amount of damage it was taking during the descent. The onboard computers were able to keep the ship remakably stable, even though one of the wings was rapidly desintegrating.

According to the article, the fifth day of the 16-day mission was the deadline for NASA to do something to save the astronauts; after that, there was no time to send a rescue mission before the life-support systems failed. And there was never a chance of taking the astronauts into the ISS, since the ship was not prepared to dock.

Wired has a story about Extreme Programming. It includes testimonials, as well as the 12 commandments of XP. It all seems very interesting, and I’d like to try it some time.

I’m not that thrilled about rule 11 (”include a real user on the team”), though.

This has got to be one of the most original websites I’ve seen in quite a while. At www.diddly.com/random there is a script that generates random file names in the same style as the ones used by default by popular digital cameras. It then looks them up with Google.

The result ? A collage of random pictures of random people. I don’t know about you, but my reaction was “this is so cool!” This is a window to the world, a window into the life of the people out there. A random selection will include several pictures of a bus, plus what look like clay models for hands, a golden retriever, a tennis player and a close-up of a flower. The next one will include some guys working in an office, someone’s vacation in Texas, snow falling on a lake, a baby and so on.

It’s very cool. It’s our world. Try it.

I have to admit that I was feeling very unpopular lately. Everywhere you look, you read about this Sobig-thingy, everyone says it’s the worse virus ever, the fastest to propagate, millions of people are infected, and I get almost no copies of it.

There are still very few copies trickling into my mailbox (six today, two or three yesterday, out of a few hundred messages in total), but at least I found out that the provider for one of my mail accounts is filtering infected messages before they get to the mailboxes. So, I still don’t know how many copies I would have received, but at least I don’t feel left out anymore.