kstruct

My last post on refactoring and internationalisation apparently managed to draw Richard Ishida’s attention. I thought I’d reply in a post rather than a long rambling comment (though making it a post will probably only increase the length and rambling-ness).

Richard’s point, which I’d agree with, is that internationalisation needs to be part of the architecture, not a feature you add to your software at some point.

It’s an interesting argument, but my understanding was always that in extreme programming the architecture was supposed to be emergent. The focus on refactoring seems designed to avoid allowing the programmers to take decisions about what might be needed in the future and to do ‘the simplest thing which might possibly work’.
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7:30 pm, Sunday the 26th of February at The Street Theatre. Hopefully the flyer will answer any other questions there might be…

Technorati Tags: canberra, theatre, impro, summer

I went to an interesting talk a week and a bit ago about internationalisation, presented by Richard Ishida from W3C.

Of a hundred interesting things I learnt, it was a simple internationalisation example, and how at odds it is with the idea or refactoring, which grabbed me.

Take, for example, the following code (stolen from an example in the W3C Internationalisation’s Re-using Strings in Scripted Content.

print "The printer is ";
if (printer.working) {
     print "on.\n";
} else {
    print "off.\n";
}

print "The stapler is ";
if (stapler.working) {
     print "on.\n";
} else {
    print "off.\n";
}

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Cookies are great and all, but I was thinking the other night that it would be nice if there was a way to store state purely in JavaScript land.

If only JavaScript needs them there really no reason to send bits of state back to the server, and you might imagine this sort of mechanism might even afford some small degree of privacy (though it wouldn’t be hard to write JavaScript to pass the info back I suppose).

Anyway, is there any such mechanism for storing state information which is preserved between pages (and browser sessions) but is only normally available to JavaScript?

Technorati Tags: javascript, ajax, web

I ran across this somewhat amusing, somewhat sad jab at waterfall development yesterday - Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development.

Funny though it may be (and there are certainly some funny parts), somehow it just doesn’t sit right. Maybe I just haven’t been privy to some sort of methodology war, but the simple truth is that there really are cases where either agile development is inappropriate, just like there are cases where waterfall is inappropriate. In either of these cases, however, at least having some methodology is vastly better than doing everything ad-hoc.

From my experience, methodology choices are very much about choosing what’s appropriate for a given project. I guess what’s bugging me is the attitude that waterfall is never appropriate, which is clearly not the case.

Anyway, I’m not going to delve into it all now (though I am trying to get back the the SE reading group stuff). If you’re willing to put the attitude aside, however, there’s some funny stuff in there.

Technorati Tags: software, waterfall, agile

So far this month, Googlebot has hit kstruct 521 times, downloading a total of 2.8 megs, where as MSNBot has 496 hits for a total of 11.32 megs.

That means that, per hit, MSNBot is loading about 23.3k of data, where as Googlebot is loading about 5.5k (and Yahoo slurp is similar with 4.5k).

My question is (being far to lazy to go and actually look at the raw logs myself), what’s MSNBot doing differently that it should be downloading over four times more data per hit?

My guesses would include MSNBot not understanding some ‘content not changed’ hint or being more interested in images and PDFs than the others, but I’ve no idea if that’s even close.

[Update: Looks like I'm not the only one to have noticed.]

Technorati Tags: search, googlebot, msnbot, web

Though I don’t have too much to say about it, I saw a (fairly badly subtitled) version of the Final Fantasy VII sequel/movie Advent Children last night.

Lots of the fight scenes seemed very matrix inspired, and the plot didn’t come close to the intricacy of the original game, but it was so cool to see all the old characters again. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a made as game instead, but in a way it’s probably for the best. At least in a movie you don’t have to come up with some bad explanation why everyone suddenly lost all their experience points and have to fight the wimpy enemies all over again.

A remake of Final Fantasy VII (a la Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) is probably about the only think that would make me bother with the next generation of consoles. Sigh, here’s hoping.

Technorati Tags: final fantasy vii, advent children, movie, game, matrix

The Aussie Icons Impro Theatre ACT show, in spite of being quite a bit smaller than our past ones, seemed to go really well.

I ended up doing a ‘couch potato’ / Norm from ‘Life. Be in it” costume with a beer bottle and a remote control as props, which didn’t involve me buying too much great or going to too much trouble, but worked quite well. It’s quite amusing to see what other improvisers do back stage when you point a remote at them and press a button.

Given that we only had eight performers, the show felt like it tuned over much faster with everyone playing every second game on average. There were lots of good ones, and a few that seemed to crash but were quickly forgotten. The highlights were probably some of the really good musical scenes, which seemed to work especially well in the smaller theatre.

All in all, it was a very nice show to be a part of. Congratulations to all the performers, and many thanks to the audience. I’m already looking forward to the next one, which should be back in the main theatre on the 26th of February.

Technorati Tags: canberra, impro, theatre, impro theatre