Great technical screencasts

The http://www.techscreencast.com/ - lots of great content about operating systems, tools, technologies, languages and generally “stuff that matters”(TM).

Recommended …

The (most ?) underappreciated Java pioneers

I still remember back in 2003/2004 when Rod Johnson wrote his books “J2EE Design and Development” and “J2EE programming without EJB” and presented his POJO based inversion of control framework - at that time, still packaged as com.interface21.* - that eventually evolved to Spring Framework.
Idea of composing J2EE application from basic Java Beans, that were [...]

On positives of negative experience

A comment got to me via friend mentioning why am I suddenly so negative about Apple and Macs, which quite surprised me. True, I have had some serious hardware issues in first two weeks of June, but this negative event was about as much positive experience as hard disk crash can be.
Thinking back what I [...]

Quote of the day

I’ve been writing a lot of code for the past 6 months. I have to admit, it is a welcome change from Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Java, unlike text and graphics has a clearer definition of correct and finished.
From Software Is A Craft by Dan Pritchett

Unit testing debt

I had the pleasure to listen very interesting podcast where Scott Hanselman and Quetzal Bradley discussed unit testing named “Testing after Unit Tests“. To increase the Google Karma of the information discussed I have decided to rehash and sum up few main ideas of this discussion.
Quetzal introduced the idea of “negative coverage” - meaning that [...]

Rogers, Bell and Net neutrality

I do not blog on political issues, but this one is kind of different.
Couple of weeks ago I received a letter from my ISP provider (Rogers Cable), stating that days of unlimited downloads are over. More or less. Rogers capped the monthly transfer depending on your subscription plan, which in my case means maximum 95 [...]

Heroes Happened … here

Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).
I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather [...]

Why so quiet

I have been sick for last two weeks, most of the time offline, listening to podcasts and audiobooks and doing more or less nothing. I have caught up with the backlog of episodes, saw lots of videos from Macworld.
Among the audiobooks I was listening two, some recommendations:
The Company is good parody of the corporate life. [...]

Excellent comparison of C++ and Objective-C

One of the languages that I managed to completely ignore for almost 20 years was Objective-C. I always saw it as less developed, dead-end version of C++ that has little perspective - despite that GCC supported it since early days. I guess I was wrong on two of three counts - that of little perspective [...]

Who said government’s Web pages are boring ?

Look how creatively did French government - more specifically Ministère de la culture et de la communication - approach even such mundane subject as the 404 page :-).