Working Standards

well, i've now been working at yell adworks for almost three months, and i'm really enjoying it so far. after spending (probably too much) time on design, we have got started on development of a workflow engine system. i'm using spring, hibernate, mule, cxf, jbpm and other interesting technologies, some of which i'm still learning about (mule and associated esb technologies) or, in the case of spring, updating myself on - until now the most recent version of spring i had used was 2.0.9 and we are using 2.5.6, with attendant annotation based goodness and so on.

one of the only problems so far is the continuous integration system, which is set up with a very strict set of checkstyle and PMD rules for code quality. i'm all in favour of managing code quality as an automated process and continuous integration with these tools is a Good Thing, but i keep falling foul of some of the rules, in particular the checks for multiple return statements in one method, to enforce single exit points. i believe writing methods with guard clauses up front is the most readable and elegant way of expressing certain types of logic, and apparently martin fowler agrees (see his refactoring book) with me. the following discussion on stackoverflow is relevant, too. also, there are strict rules on long variable names, which keep me from naming things like constraintDefinition or workflowInstance although i do agree with the restriction on short (less than four characters) names.

i'm (really) going to try and make more of an effort to keep this blog updated more frequently, since it's over a year since i last posted ;)

development,personal,checkstyle,standards,java

images from outer space...

I recently managed to obtain some images of the asteroid (7166) Kennedy, which is named after my father, Malcolm Kennedy. The discoverer Ted Bowell, and his colleague Bruce Koehn, sent me a set of four images from their frame archive. The Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search (LONEOS), which is funded by NASA, looks for objects that may present a hazard to the planet, such as asteroids with orbits that are close to or intersect earth's. As far as I know, we are in no danger from Kennedy, which is comforting.

I uploaded the images from Bruce to a Flickr set, and tagged them with a note indicating the asteroid's location, since it's very faint (magnitude 16.6 in these images). Also, to see more details, including the IAU discovery details and citation, as well as confusing orbital ephemeris and data, I have updated the Wikipedia article. This contains the image you can see here, which is a composite of the LONEOS frames, saved as an animated GIF to show the motion across the fixed stellar background. I really can't explain how much I appreciate the fact that Ted named this object after Malcolm, so I'd like to publicly thank him anyway.

astronomy, asteroid, LONEOS, personal

bandwidth gadgets

ok, i better post something since otherwise it'd be a full year (well, in a fortnight it would...) between posts. and, of course, fifty weeks is a perfectly reasonable gap instead.

the other reason for posting is that i finally got myself an interweb thing and my email and web-browser suddenly started working again! but no ADSL (no land line, rented property) or cable (not in my postcode, anyway) for me. instead, i now have a vodafone 3G data card in my laptop. it goes in the expresscard slot (although it does come with an adapter for PC card slots) so it looks nice and tidy, as opposed to the alternative white brick on the end of a USB cable i was offered. it does cost GBP 50.00 for the internal card, and the USB dongle is free, but there's no competition when you see them, and what else am i going to put in that slot anyway?

i also grabbed a new mobile phone, too - the sony ericsson W880i walkman phone. beautiful shiny steel case, really thin, candy-bar phone, plus it's 3G. the walkman features are pretty cool, and since it came with a 1Gb M2 data card and proper sony in-ear headphones (i.e. the ones with changeable rubber seals that stop noise escaping and irritating other people...) i might even start using it instead of my ipod. to complete my sony collection, i'm just holding out for the MBW-150 bluetooth watch, supposedly shipping in october...

it's still the 3g data card that amazes me, though. i remember my first GSM modem card (in an apple newton, actually, connected to a motorola star-tac) which gave me 19.2Kbps with compression, if i was lucky. this card gives me 7.2Mbps (peak, confirmed) or 1.4 Mega-bytes per second. boggle.

mobile,phone,gadgets