So here I am ripping my CD’s into iTunes and blogging because I’ve got nothing better to do while I’m waiting, and half of them appear to have evaporated. So far I’ve found about 15 empty boxes. I know its been a while since I listened to a lot of them but where the hell are they? Did they feel unloved? Get bored? Take a slow boat to China? Am I going to open a cupboard door in the near future and be felled by a cascade of naked discs?

Come on Sun, when’s 1.5 being released? Java’s boring at the moment, give us something new to play with.

Personally I am looking forward to having fun with all the new concurrency constructs, and I’m hoping that the (mysteriously missing from 1.4) non-blocking form of multicast sockets will make an appearance.

Fascinating. Frequency of blog posts appears proportionally related to current interest level.

And for some reason I appear to have written that last sentence in the style of ‘the architect’ from Matrix Reloaded.

So, there I was in the middle of the world’s most profound blog post ever, when I mistyped a word, and purely by instinct hit ctrl-w, which in IDEA is the shortcut key to highlight a word. Turns out in mozilla its the shortcut key to close the window.

Bollocks.

Downloaded the windows version of iTunes last night. Told a few colleagues about it this morning, who did the same – and we discovered that the windows version also includes the Rendevous-based song sharing capability!

Very cool.

This paper by Richard Gabriel and Ron Goldman describes a potential future for software development, extending the open source concept and trends.

What I found most interesting was the description of software as literature. Alan Francis made a similar comment the other day. Programming is often still seen as the bottom rung of the software industry ladder, a distasteful task to be done only as long as necessary to enable promotion to analyst, manager or other non-programming role. How many software companies hire graduates as developers? How many hire graduates as architects or project managers?

Now consider programming as literature. A programmer’s mental activities bear a striking resemblance to those of an author. The programmer’s task is to find the means of expressing the concepts in their mind in terms a computer can understand, ie a programming language. There are a multitude of ways of telling a computer to do something, even within a single programming language, just as there are a multitude of ways of expressing a concept in a spoken language. Some are mundane, some rude, some inappropriate, and some win their originators literary prizes.

The other analogy is that of how great authors become great. Most great authors are also great readers. The writers of tomorrow are influenced by the work of yesterday. In the programming world, this translates into open source. Open source represents the beginnings of a body of software literature. The closed source model, when viewed from a literary perspective, seems almost scandalous. Imagine if Dickens had only ever read his own work?

Yes it’s true. Prevayler is not a new idea. Mainframes have had transparent persistence for years. Only difference is that its handled at the operating system level. What applications see is a huge amount of addressable memory, what they don’t know is that some of that is actually stored on disk (or, given the context, on big rolls of magnetic tape). The operating system hides the various implementations of its memory storage behind a common interface. (Couldn’t resist that one).

So here’s an idea: how about using AOP to intercept and monitor object access patterns, moving them to and from disk-based storage as usage warrants. Seems to me like a natural extension to java’s generational garbage collection.

JAOO was great. Met tons of really interesting people, talked to Ward about FIT and watched Aslak tell him about Wikis, discussed whether Denmark should join the Euro with Bjarne Stroustrup, lent Matz my power supply for his Ruby seminar and drank too much beer.

Could have written a whole lot more, but those were the high points.

Some bedtime reading, courtesy of a bout of surfing at CiteSeer:

• Keep Your Options Open:
  Extreme Programming and Economics of Flexibility
• Scaling The Management Of Extreme Programming Projects
• No Pain, No XP Observations on Teaching and Mentoring Extreme
  Programming to University Students
• Value of Commercial Software Development
  under Technology Risk
• Retrofitting unit tests
• Automatically Generating System Mock Objects
• Distributed eXtreme Programming
• The XP of TAO – eXtreme Programming of Large, Open-source Frameworks
• Program Comprehension Risks and Opportunities in Extreme
  Programming
• EasyMock: Dynamic Mock Objects for JUnit
• Knowledge Sharing: Agile Methods vs. Tayloristic Methods
• Do we need ‘agile’ Software Development Tools?
• XP + AOP = Better Software?
• eXtreme Programming in Open-Source and
  Distributed Environments
• Leveraging Open-Source Communities
  To Improve the Quality & Performance of
  Open-Source Software
• Empirical Findings in Agile Methods
• Distributed Pair Programming:
  Empirical Studies and Supporting Environments
• Perceptions of Agile Practices: A Student Survey
• Supporting Distributed Extreme Programming
• Knowledge Management Support for
  Distributed Agile Software Processes

All the papers listed above were found from CiteSeer’s links from a single initial page.

Scratched the gadget itch by getting myself a wireless router. There’s something strangely liberating about blogging from your armchair.