Alphora Dataphor is OpenSource!

Now that AlphoraDataphor is opensource, I believe a relational reborn could come in the near future... I have been reading the manuals and, while I am an object weenie let me tell you all that I think Dataphor is a very exciting technology I hope it finds the way to make True relational database a buzz word like Ruby and that finally forces big companies like Oracle to make databases truly relational.

Short projects, not short team lifespan

Today, I had an epiphany, I realized that while project must be short, teams should last a lot of time.

It is infinitesimal, and Done is the Limit

Today, I was reading some articles in InfoQ,,, one of them called my attention:

InfoQ: Does "Done" Mean "Shippable"?

It made remember a blog post a wrote months ago titled "When will that feature in your system be finished"
and here I am wondering... why if this kind of problem is so common... why if it seems to be happening to everyone...
why we don't have some kind of manual to help ourselves to explain others that saying something "is done" has a very
different meaning for different people... for different situations,,,, and, maybe the right answer is that it is never done...

A good system should be able to evolve.... to get new features, to make the current ones more robust...to improve...
I should never be "done" in an static way... it should be able to grow organically... it comes closer and closer to being "done" but it never gets really done... (we could even argue a "done" system is an almost dead system, because it would be a system that can not improve anymore)

Maybe the problem is that reaching the "done" state in software development is like trying to reach a limit in math, we get close, and closer, but if we do things right, we never reach the done state, because we always have things to add, or things to improve.

How to find files containing a string in Unix

For that, you can write:

find {directory} -type f | xargs grep -l "{stringToFind}"

This is really useful... specially to find out how certain things work (configuration files, like for example
those used inside eclipse are really harder to find without this command)

JBoss Archive Browsing

Today I learned that jboss-archive-browsing.jar is in fact an "slice" of the much bigger jboss-common.jar
and that, if I want to download the code from that project, I have to go here.
(It is important to remember the code in jboss-archive-browsing has an ugly bug that makes it impossible to
use Hibernate if you entities are inside a .jar)

Complication & Complexity: Not the same thing

Today I learned that Complication & Complexity are not the same thing:

• Complexity: A problem is complex when you do not know how to solve it, the solution might be simple, or complicated.
• Complicated: A problem is complicated when you know the exact algorithm that solves it, but the algorithm has lots steps and/or you need to follow lot of well known rules.

Self learning: Knowledge is power

Here I am reading about Decision Making, Software Engineering and Network Security. That is what I love to do... reading... learning... but lately I have not felt inspired... I felt like... like there was nothing worth learning anymore... I guess I was just overwhelmed with work and the stress of life, because I am regaining my will to learn more... always learn more...

I think that maybe what re-started my desire for knowledge was a conversation I had today with my girlfriend... we were talking about how was it possible that most people didn't do problem analysis before trying to solve problems with their work processes... I think it is because they know anything about the real meaning of Six Sigma and how to measure quality in a process, we think it is logical to start analyzing the current situation because we learned that from our university courses on software engineering but... why should anyone else know about it? Most people are pressured at work to "just do something" to solve problem without stopping to determine first what are the root causes for the problem they need to solve, and they end up treating the symptoms instead of the disease, and transform a problem that could have been solved with a single action in to a chronic problem that needs to be handled again, and again and again.

The sad part is that a lot of time the solution for the problem has been known by some people for quite a long time, but the person that is assigned to solve the problem ASAP in a particular place doesn't know that the problem he is dealing with was solved a long time a go, and he/she end up spending an excessive amount of time and energy to discover a partial solution to a problem that would have been easy to solve if he/she had the right information.

My favorite example of this are source code versioning systems... the first one (Source Code Control System (SCCS)) was invented in 1972, but today, 36 years later I still arrive at software departments or even software enterprises that do not use any software for version control... how is that possible if really good versioning systems like SubVersion are opensource and free? and have excellent integration with Windows (TortoiseSVN), I believe it is because of "lack of knowledge", people just doesn't know that there are free and easy software to deal versioning and they end up designing complex proceedings to manually handle the versioning of files... they do it that way because they plain do not know there are better ways...