Return to sender

Looks like the ClearCase Ant task I submitted to Apache a while ago has been scheduled for inclusion in Ant 1.8. Now that I don't use any of these tools anymore!

Regrettable Spring

Thanks to the otherwise well-intentioned and very talented folk at Spring Source (aka interface21), the software world has been blessed with yet another pointless certificate.

In the Middle Ages you could buy all sorts of permits from the catholic church that would "certify" you were apt and allowed to perform some activity. For example, you could buy a permit that allowed you to eat meat on fast days (rather than the otherwise ubiquitous salted fish). "Certified Friday Meat Muncher". Needless to say, it was quite a profitable business for the church.

My company is hiring. We don't believe in certificates. We believe in people with brains and the right attitude.

Zeitgeist

Hmm, the Ruby fad did not last very long.

It seems that not even JRuby can save it.

I wonder how long it will take till we get "Scala on Sails"? Oh wait, Google tells me it's already there!

Blog's Best Friend

While I enjoy reading Steve Yegge's blog, I suspect that sometimes he likes to take the piss out of his readers.

Nothing wrong with that, mind you. This kind of postings is what makes the blogsphere so entertaining, that's why we enjoy the bile blog too.

But of course, the argument that you can solve the software maintenance problem by picking a new language that reduces the number of LOC is utter nonsense. Whoever tells you that with a straight face is trying to sell you something (himself?).

Imagine mankind invented a new language that allowed to write all of Shakespeare's books in one page. Would that make it easier to read/understand/appreciate them?

Product development job in Sydney CDB anyone?

My company is hiring.

We are a fairly small, friendly and highly focussed product development company. We write connectivity solutions for stock exchanges, brokers and other financial market participants. Our main technology is Java, with some C/C++ thrown in (via JNI). The role is very technical and we are looking for high caliber candidates.

Have a read through the position description below and have a look at our web sites. If you are interested please send your CV etc. to fabio.gavilondo@orcsoftware.com

(PS. We have customers all over the world. Some travel may be required from time to time).


Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer (depending on level of experience)


Tenure: Permanent

Key tasks:

• Participate in the design and implementation of CameronFIX products and their features (about 70%)
• Provide technical support and incident resolution for CameronFIX products and their features (about 25%)
• Provide technical pre-sales support (about 5%)

Key skills and experience:

• Significant experience in Java based product development
• Broad capability across related technologies (e.g. JMX, JMS, JDBC, RDBMS, Spring)
• Excellent knowledge of OO programming
• Experience in network level programming
• Experience in multi-threaded programming
• Ability to troubleshoot and resolve problems under time pressure
• Ability to take tasks to completion.

Other desirable skills and experience:

• Exposure to Test Driven Development
• Exposure to the FIX protocol and/or FIX engines
• Financial markets knowledge
• Exposure to (near) real time systems development.

Key personal strengths:

• Strong customer focus
• Self organizing
• Self motivated
• Enjoys working and contributing in a team environment
• Excellent communication skills both in technical and business level contexts.

ClearCase merge support for Ant

I you use Ant, ClearCase and continuous integration this one is for you.

There are situations where you need to ensure that a ClearCase view/branch is up-to-date with another view/branch (e.g. the mainline) before the build can proceed. Of course you also want to automate this step, and maybe even make it part or you continuous integration checks (e.g. build fails if the 2 branches are not in sync).

Unfortunately, Ant's ClearCase optional tasks don't offer support for merge operations.

I have written a 'CCFindmerge' Ant task and submitted it to Apache to remedy that situation. It will probably be included in some future Ant version, but if this feature is important to you I suggest you vote for it to speed up the process.

This little Mac utility is too cool not to share. Taking screenshots has never been that easy.