Push Button Paradise

Switched.

PowerBook. 15.2 inches. 40 gigs. 512 megs. AirPort. Bliss -m

The final edition of Brian Livingston's E-Business Secrets newsletter, inexplicably, has a link to a crazy cat movie.

Hixie, this one's for you. -m

More Chandler goodness

I put together a Quick Tutorial on the data model embodied in the 0.1 release of Chandler. Comments welcome. -m

Writing a parcel in Chandler 0.1:

I've put together a basic parcel for Chandler 0.1. It writes the entire repository to XML (on stdout) as a way to help visualize and discuss the data structures.

For a slightly bigger project, I'd like to start off with a 'noteliner' parcel, similar in scope to the basic notepad applications found on PIMs and associated syncing applications. Eventually, formats more advanced than plain text (including outlines) could be stored. Much more eventually, arbitrary XML, edited with XForms, could be stored.

But first things first. :-) -m

The Freshmaker is strong in this one. Anita, age 2 ("and a half!")

-m

Cringely on refactoring

Basically, he says that refactoring isn't automatically a good thing, and should only be done when justifiable (for example, when the one hour you spend refactoring your code will save you one or more hours in the not-too-distant future).

I always enjoy fad-deflating, and so appreciate his point of view.

My view is that refactoring is an absolute essential for any active, large code base. But it shouldn't be done gratuitously. (So we basically agree)

A good rule of thumb for refactoring is to do it only when you 1) are adding a new feature, and the existing code is too convoluted to figure out what's going on, or 2) you are adding new code that is non-trivial and highly similar to existing code already in the system.

Note that both of these happen when new code is added, not during maintenance. This is because when debugging, you need to deeply understand the system as it is, which isn't possible if you're semi-mechanically chaning stuff around. -m

Steven Pemberton puts forth a well-written response to questions on the complexity of W3C standards, specifically XForms.

Recommended reading.
-m

Back on xml-dev

Not sure if it was a blessing or a curse, but last month I joined the elite ranks of those who have been mysteriously booted off of xml-dev.

I sent a message to the human owners of the list, and a few days later the messages started flowing again, along with an even more mysterious message titled "ezmlm warning".

Essentially, the bounce was:
sender was rejected (550) ...Relaying denied.

I don't understand it, but maybe somebody else will.

-m