Finding (and Naming) Classes

Posted 4:03 PM

In the OOA/OOD class I'm teaching at UC Irvine Extension, the most recent meeting included a discussion about finding and naming classes in a system. Although I often refer to Bertrand Meyer's Object Oriented Software Construction as the definitive text for this sort of thing, my fear is that few students will immediately buy OOSC based on one crackpot's recommendation.

Luckily, they (and you) can sample Bertrand's discourse for free on the Eiffel Software website. Lots of goodness in here, even if you think you already know what you're doing:

http://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/oosc/finding/page.html

On Mending Wall

Posted 3:28 PM

I've pretty much kept true to my intent to have an apolitical face, thinking that nobody really cares how I feel about politics one way or the other. But I've got to jump in on this one. Ariel Sharon was on MSNBC today, and used that famous quote from Mending Wall, ".. good fences make good neighbors..." to justify the security wall being built by Israel.

Still no comment from me on the political front, but Frost was not advocating building fences as a way to ensure good relations with neighbors. He was being ironic. Now, if you want to be the clueless, momentum-driven lunkhead in the poem that wants to rebuild the fence every year, be my guest. But don't rewrite great literature to justify it.

Meatshake!

Posted 1:50 PM
Homepage for the elusive Meatshake.

Werner the Distributed Computing Scout

Posted 8:02 AM
Werner always gets to go to the coolest distributed computing conferences. Rio, Cambridge, Budapest, Pisa. Fortunately for us, he blogs while he's there so we mortals get some benefits, too. He's just blogged about the MSF meetingsin Redmond, and includes a pointer to an MSR paper on X#, which turns XML into a first-class citizen in the language. Very nice.

Races, races everywhere...

Posted 12:22 PM

Just a few weeks ago, it looked like a quiet summer for slalom racing. Suddenly, my dance card literally overflows, and there's no way I can get to all the races just in California. In the past few weeks we had:

• A night-time tight slalom race on Bicknell street in Santa Monica
• An outlaw fast-GS race at JPL
• Two races (GS and tight slalom) at West LA College

And in the next few weeks:

• An outlaw race run by the LCB/Gravity gang at Loretta Street on August 3^rd
• An FCR race at Northstar-at-Tahoe the weekend of September 13^th
• The World Championships in Morro Bay the weekend of September 26^th
• And just in case I want a case of jetlag, the European slalom championships are the weekend of September 20^th in Antibes, France between the Tahoe and Morro Bay races.
• Not to mention the Habu's weekly bleed-a-thon at Loretta St.

Also, there's a Redmond trip September 15-19. I'm planning on the WLAC monthly races, the weekly Loretta St races when I can make it, and Catalina. And it looks like I'll try for the World Championships, too

Too darn busy to talk...

Posted 10:40 AM

Way, way too busy to blog lately. In the last few weeks, I've:

• Promised my long-term long-suffering editor/publisher Brad! an article on C# generics
• Nearly finished some generic containers for Rotor
• Hit some milestones at my consulting gig
• Took on a second class at UC Irvine Extension (teaching Object-Oriented Analysis and Design on-campus in addition to the sequence of NET courses I'm teaching at a Northrop-Grumman)
• Started working my way through BizTalk 2004
• Raced at WLAC II and got a good result in tight slalom
• Started making plans for competing at the Slalom World Championships in September

And now the VSIP registration is wide open. What's a geek to do?

VSIP Now Open

Posted 10:29 AM
The VSIP program is now wide open! As if I need more geeky stuff to do... [From Chris Sells]