Saturday, October 25, 2008

Weekend at last

At last some time to breath. It was a hectic week. Glad it's over, although I did have to bring homework. Somehow a graphic component is sending lot's of drawing events, and it's making a mess with the swing thread.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about: every graphic component draws it self. In order to keep things tidy all the drawing must happen at the same thread. If one component is taking for ever to draw then the entire application stops responding to the user. Not a nice thing at all.

The most probable cause is for a model not to be correct (search google for model-view-controler). If that's the case then I'll be finished soon. Anyway I'll probably just profile the entire application. No wrong can come from that.

There are several ways to profile a java application. I think I'll keep with a standard (now) that is visualvm (part of java 6 development kit since version 6 or 7).

In a next post I'll write how it all went.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Deadline aproaching...

Tomorrow the deadline to deliver the final version of the project where I'm working will be upon my team.

After all the misguided informations, the horrible specifications, the lack of communication with other teams the management decisions over technological ones we come to a end, the delivery. I can say that I am proud of what my team has accomplished: to get on a quite big code base and implement new features without loss of code structure and design.

There is no secret on how to integrate people with new code: let them play with it. By play I mean really do things that are totally useless. And let them explore it's flow of data, how the interactions (he user for example) create streams of information jumping from object to object.

In the end the developers will have a more clear view of what's happening in the code, so faster in creating new code and even faster in detecting bugs and correcting them.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." I couldn't keep myself from remembering this wonderful quote from Douglas Adams, one of my favourite comedy writers.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Volvo Ocean Race 2008-2009

One of the most thrilling races started yesterday (2008-10-11) in Alicante (Spain) and will end, after more or less nine months, in Stockholm (Sweeden). In the mean time it will go around the globe, never a small fit but even less so when on a race.

I am, of course, talking about the Volvo Ocean Race. Go and take a look and envy those that go on board such great adventure.

Migration to blogspot

I used to have a rather simple, although very usable, thingamablog based blog hosted at my university department. Not anymore. I decided to give blogspot a try and move my old (rather few) posts.

I am still trying out the layout and styles, so don't be surprised if the look of the blog changes. On the other hand the content should be more or less the same - perhaps more frequent I hope