Chez G

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been slogging away at this book for quite some time now. Today is a big day: I finished the first draft of the narrative half of the book. The reference half is still unfinished, but this is a big deal — I can hand the book to someone and it’s got reasonable text in every chapter.

This calls for a hamster dance !!!

I wrapped up the chapter on Architecturally Evident Coding Style, an idea originated by David Garlan. He suggested that while architects have an idea of how the system is organized (the architecture), it could be implemented in source code in many ways. Some of those ways are easier to read and re-understand the big picture. This chapter elaborates the idea and provides code examples and a short catalog of patterns for making it work.

I’ll need to let the chapter sit for a few days then proofread it. In the meantime I’ll work on the last body chapter from the first half of the book.

After going to James’ wedding empty-handed since I wasn’t going to lug the SLR around and my old small camera had been STOLEN by the bastards who broke into my car during my last 45 minutes in Pittsburgh, I realized that I need to get another one. And Owen’s wedding is coming up. Here’s a brief summary of my hellish descent into cameras.

I bought a top-rated bargain compact camera for $105 instead of my ideal choices at around $400.

I got at Panasonic LS8. It “won” the dpreview budget camera shootout.

I highly recommend the movie Tell No One. My father had recommended it to me and I missed it in the theater, but I just watched it on video (Netflix). There is a little bit of violence and action but it is mostly a thriller.

I’m not sure what kind of French accents these guys had but I had more trouble than usual hearing the spoken French.

Lots of companies have jobs posted but in fact are not hiring. Strange but true. I got confirmation from an internal source at Oracle that they have a hiring freeze, yet they have several open positions in Denver/Boulder that I applied to. Ah well, it’ll work out eventually.

Here is another posting of someone with the same problem

The vulnerability seems to have been in Roundcube, a web-based email program.

Curiouser and curiouser. Even with the new wireless router I was getting terrible wifi throughput to my laptop, which is often about 12 feet away from the router. After much stumbling around, I happened to notice that putting the Thinkpad X61 laptop into it’s Max Performance power setting yields terrible wifi throughput, but putting it back into a conservative setting gave full throughput. The difference is immense — about 50KB/s vs my full DSL speed of 700KB/s.

Funny day today. Here’s what broke and was fixed:

• My Blackburn Mammoth Mountain bike pump broke over the weekend, or so I thought. Today I decided that I should recycle it, since it’s solid aluminum. As I was taking it apart, I decided to clean and lube it and, behold, it was fixed, good as new. Yay.
• The internet was flaky so I tried to find out what the problem was. What was NOT the problem was the Actiontec 701 DSL modem, of course, because I have a spare one of them preconfigured. Or so I thought, because when I tried swapping it with its twin, the twin wouldn’t power on.

I cordially invite you to check out the latest cow I have given birth to here: Chapter 4: Architecture Modeling. Other chapters can be found here.

With the completion of this chapter the book now hangs together pretty well.

For your reading pleasure (ha ha), you can check out my latest pound of flesh here: Chapter 5: Working with Models. Other chapters can be found here.

My book is divided into two: the front half is a narrative introduction useful for folks learning software architecture, the back half is a reference section which should be helpful once they know it. I had written the previous chapter but then decided that it would make better reference material, so I moved it to the back.