tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16736002463706591902012-01-30T08:57:57.782+01:00Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.comBlogger151100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-6998841729535016662010-02-19T08:15:00.006+01:002010-02-19T09:10:30.424+01:00

While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a gadget geek, I have amassed a not unimpressive amount of gear over the years and seen most of it fade into obsolescence.Take the Psion 5 organizer. It was gorgeous. You could actually type on it with eight fingers and it fits in your jacket pocket. Just watching it slide open is techno-rapture. If I hadn't dropped it eight years ago and cracked the

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-49641989127323492152010-02-12T07:54:00.003+01:002010-02-12T08:47:35.917+01:00

How many small open source projects have a dedicated testing team, comparable in size to the available development horsepower? How many have a dedicated usability professional, or even integrate usability standards throughout the development process?If you have limited time to spend on something you will not get paid for, you will pick the fun stuff. In the workplace fun, cool and kudos are not

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-15677174564788961572010-02-02T08:52:00.003+01:002010-02-02T09:46:47.449+01:00

I've done it. After almost ten years of fruitless hacking at ambitious architectures that didn't really do anything, I have finally uploaded a first version of a working piece of open source software: JDBC4Me. I won't expound on how it will radically alter our conception of data or how it wil effect a dramatic paradigm shift in database access. It won't.It's nothing earth-shattering. For the

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-19030805593181318582010-01-21T08:50:00.007+01:002010-01-21T09:53:34.445+01:00

The problem with Yourstreet, I reckoned, was that in essence it was a business venture backed by a website, more than just a web application. It was a typical chicken and egg/necessary critical mass quandary: nobody is going to join if not enough people are already using it. It would have taken a serious investment is sales and marketing. We didn't really want to run a software company: we just

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-38781052224501778832009-12-20T10:56:00.007+01:002009-12-20T11:21:42.015+01:00

I could be really boastful and pretend that I have 25 years' worth of programming experience, starting with the 100-line Commodore VIC-20 game Operation Crocodile when I was fifteen (no copies remain). At least in those days I did the right thing: I built little ramshackle programs entirely for my own use and enjoyment, and for as long as my adolescent attention span could muster.In May 2000,

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-35383461797803116152009-10-23T18:05:00.004+02:002009-12-01T09:57:02.675+01:00

They say that great programmers are an order of magnitude more productive than average programmers. Wikipedia would want me to specify who "they" are (Frederick Brooks and Joel Spolsky for starters), but this is not a scientific assertion. Any programmer who has worked with really smart colleagues will, perhaps grudgingly, admit that it is by and large true.It doesn't only go for programming,

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-56021084175466625782009-10-16T15:04:00.006+02:002009-10-16T15:11:03.788+02:00

Following Jeff Atwood's tip I read Dan Ariely's excellent book Predictably Irrational, which gave me all sorts of revealing insights into my own irrational psyche.Anchoring is the psychological phenomenon explaining how we human beings are reluctant to update our ingrained opinions. This relates to our sense of value (cheap or expensive) as well as our conception of the validity of doing things a

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-48787563405409985072009-10-11T11:09:00.005+02:002009-11-26T12:28:39.325+01:00

There are two kinds of programmers. There are those who get back from work, shove a frozen pizza in the microwave and scoff it down while coding their own LDAP server in a little used but cool language. Then there's the motley assortment of CS, physics, history and language graduates with a life that doesn't only involve computers. In the first category you will find Mr Fixit (I have yet to come

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-54281907989126338192009-09-28T17:30:00.008+02:002009-10-04T11:24:38.272+02:00

Last time I desperately tried to convince you to take source code documentation seriously and not treat it as a hurried afterthought, lest the technical debt management unit catches up with you and demands an explanation as to why you executed an explicit commit on that database handle, when it is running in auto-commit mode. Believe me, in a year you will have forgotten the completely valid

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-87911767696649879462009-09-18T10:31:00.004+02:002009-09-18T10:40:55.940+02:00

This week I was going to post part two of my course in source code documentation, but something far more important has come up to rant about. It's the new Dutch passport, which will hold the owner's digitally encoded fingerprints, in time amounting to a huge biometric database. The year is 1984 again.This post is not going to be about hackers logging in to the monster database with password "

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-89391432868452446182009-09-12T12:54:00.006+02:002009-09-12T15:08:30.319+02:00

Programmers have many pet hates -- hardware and software being just two of them. There is however a bewildering paradox that I would like to talk about today. It is the anguish of documenting your own code on the one hand and the torture of having to use someone else's undocumented code on the other. Actually there is one thing worse than not having documentation. That is bad or outdated

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-32077368680747114172009-09-05T10:42:00.001+02:002009-09-05T10:43:43.640+02:00

It's already a few years old, but if you ever bought a DVD in the UK you'll remember this one:You see nasty people stealing all aforementioned items, and then a teenage girl behind her computer downloading a film, thereby instilling the notion in us that downloading content illegally is tantamount to mugging old ladies in the park. I love the British tenuous sense of proportion in what is

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-16724243407416497152009-08-25T06:22:00.013+02:002009-09-07T08:56:28.134+02:00

In my previous post I showed you that the legacy of ASCII is still everywhere after more than forty years. It is not even for want of something better, since we have Unicode now. The reason why the world didn't ditch ASCII straight away is that it still does a fine job for English-only texts.At the heart of the pâté problem is not the fact that ASCII was incomplete to begin with. The problem is

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-57026793932878494432009-08-24T08:50:00.049+02:002009-08-29T09:31:58.640+02:00

If you regularly visit non-English sites or receive email from exotic places you're more than likely to have come across gems like p?t?: ? 9, where you expected pâté: € 9. If you look up pâté in the Longman online dictionary, this is what your tab looks like in Firefox3 on Windows:If you're a web professional and are clueless as to what's causing this, or (worse!) if you're responsible for things

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1673600246370659190.post-36056844620094349122009-08-17T13:44:00.010+02:002009-08-29T09:46:11.320+02:00

For the past five years I have had the dubious pleasure of using Hibernate in Oracle-backed production environments and more often than not it has made me want to crawl into a cave to sleep off the months of ensuing darkness. For the uninitiated: Hibernate is a popular open source object-relational mapping tool for Java, an interface layer between your (Java) code and a relational database which

Jasper Sprengershttps://profiles.google.com/118062618828309838094noreply@blogger.com0