Honking Cars in Egypt, especially Cairo honk all the time. Day and night. If we woke up at 4 am in the hotel room, there would be cars honking outside. The honk to wake up pedestrians or other cars, taxis honk to attract the attention of potential customers, and often, it seems like they honk just f...

After a rather unsuccessful day, we decided to have a more aggressive program the last day in Cairo. We started out early with a subway trip to Coptic Cairo. It seems that very few tourists are using the subways, which is a pity because it is a pretty good system. If they only could have any informa...

We had a late start on Wednesday. We are going to take the train to Alexandria, and we want to make sure that we get the tickets, so we start with a trip to Ramsees railway station. I had expected the trains (which seem nice from the guidebook) to be much used by tourists, but as it turned out, all ...

In Cairo, we have noticed a recurring theme. Many places that are visited a lot by westerners are sectioned off from the rest of the city. When Egypt was a British colony, the colonialism was expressed by importing British culture into Egypt. With modern colonialism, a section of the western world i...

Abou el-Sid is located in Zamalek along the Sharia 26th of July. The doorman for the hotel hailed a cab for us (and got a bit of baksheesh for that, I don’t know if that was right), and negotiated an overpriced fee. :-) The traffic is seeming more and more what people warn that Cairo traffic will be...

Today’s trip was like taken directly out of the lonely planet guidebook. Our guide Said Azawi (todo: double check last name) picked us up at the hotel at the appointed time. Driving over Gezira, past the Cairo Opera house and into Giza we arrived at the pyramids at the Giza Plateau early. We were a ...

(The “kobyuutr” on which I am writing this has an arab/english keyboard, so I will write in english) We arrived late at night at Cairo international airport, and got a first impression of Egyptian bureaucracy that has remained. We ended up standing in lines for a long time, and when we finally were ...

The Device Patented Process Indicating Apparatus. Available soon. We hope.

I am happy to see others express positive opinions about universal DAO interfaces in Java. Per Mellqvist writes in developerWorks: “Don’t Repeat the DAO” about creating a GenericDao interface: public interface GenericDao <T, PK extends Serializable> { /** Persist the newInstance object into database...

Due to popular demand, I will post a very short version of my Lazy Loading article: Why? Because this is bad: Category category = dao.get(1); Category parent = dao.get(category.parentId); int sumChildValue = 0; for (Long childId : parent.subcategoryIds) { sumChildValue += dao.get(childId).getValue()...

Status: This article is currently pretty dry. I’d like feedback on how to make it more eloquent. In my previous blog post, I promised to write more about using databases as the main integration strategy. In the current post, I plan to cover maybe the most important question: “Why?” Imagine an applic...

Before Web Services, there was CORBA. Before CORBA, there was DCOM. Before DCOM, there was RPC. Before RPC, there was BSD sockets. Before sockets, there were databases. And as it was in the beginning, so shall it too be in the end. The only systematically successful strategy in the history of comput...

“I really wish you’d stop using that word - I don’t think it means what you think it means.” (The Princess Bride - of course) When my wife asked “are you a feminist,” I realized I don’t like words very much. To some people, “feminism” means women who dress like men, think pornography is destroying s...

Here are some of my favorite words. Signs of danger ‘Just’: bad word, as in “can’t we just develop the greatest application ever”, “can’t we just replace the database with JavaSpaces”, “can’t we just expose the functionality to the world as a web service”. ‘Should’: bad word, as in “it _should_n’t t...

Update: Rewrote several sections “Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it.” - Alan Perlis This article contains some things I have learned that has made me into a better developer than I was before I learned them. There are nine tips. These are not necess...

Updated for republication in Mr Bool In my experience, the most serious bugs in programs in production are in error handling routines. Inventive programmers often try fancy things when dealing with errors, but error situations are often omitted during testing. This article examines the fundamental q...

What happens when a customer asks for a simple new bit of functionality? Do you have to execute changes on four different systems, test each in isolation and in combination, involve a separate testing, infrastructure and operations team? If so, your architecture is probably not service oriented. In ...

After I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as my blogging software, the comment spam problem has returned from the grave. So I’ve looked for good solutions for WordPress: I ended on a verbal CAPTCHA with a math question (which may also keep stupid commenters out - not that I have any of those, ...

What is the next letter in this sequence: A E I. And this sequence: A B G D? How about this one: B C D G J? A boy and his mother are in a horrible car accident. They are rushed to the hospital, but on the way, the mother dies. When they arrive at the hospital, the nurse exclaims: “But that is my son...

My article series on Lazy Loading will be published on java.net tomorrow. In relationship to the publication, I am taking down the original articles from my blog. Please go to Java.net for to read about lazy loading. Update: The article was just posted last Tuesday. I have updated the links in this ...

Myopia: the inability to see distant objects as clearly as near objects. PreferredConsumer.com What makes a good statement? In my experience, a good statement is one that people will disagree with frequently. One of the internal quality auditors at my company has an excellent plaque in her office: “...

When I see people after they have read about SOA or attended a conference with SOA, there are a few ideas that seem to pop up repeatedly. I have even been guilty of using these ideas myself. These ideas were proven to be bad before SOA came around, and (some) SOA evangelists seem to think that SOA s...

Barcelona I just returned from The ServerSide JavaSymposium Europe. Great conference, with interesting tracks and good opportunities to get to know people. The conference was in Barcelona, which was interesting, because hardly anyone (taxi drivers and waiters included) understand English here. It’s ...

Roger Sessions has just published “A Better Path to Enterprise Architectures”. His main point is that large, centralized, big-bang enterprise architecture efforts fail. I could not agree more. Sessions gives some good arguments for why you would want to deliver incrementally. He calls this approach ...

Blessed synchronizity: From Jason Yip’s blog: Vendor’s Law: Organise people into roles corresponding to the tools that you want to sell to them. And today’s Dilbert:

In my previous post, I talked about how I feel SOA encourages rigid design. Of course, in some situations, you may not really have a choice. When creating Business-to-Business (B2B) integration, interfaces will naturally be much more rigid. There is no way around it, SOA or SOA-not. Ian Robinson rec...

On JavaZone 2005, I talked about “Why I hate SOA”. I found it hard then, and I’ve still found it hard for a while to express this sentiment concisely. I think I’ve finally got it! One of the most common inefficiencies I discover in organizations is poorly designed boundaries. I find that people suff...

This post is an analysis of the difference in philosophy between static and dynamic typed languages and the pragmatic ramifications of these philosophical differences. I will use Nil/Null/None-types as basis for the example. The Nil-value is used in OO programming languages to designated a non-assig...

One of the blogs I enjoy reading is that of Jason Yip: You’d think with all my vide game experience that I’d be more prepared for this (excellent title!). He usually writes short and sweet posts that gets a point across in just a few sentences. Here are a few of my favorites: The method where people...

Aslak Hellesøy created the …. interesting tool Guatanamo. From the documentation: “Do you have problems maintaining high test coverage? All code is guilty until tested innocent. Send the untested code to Guantanamo!” (that is, delete it) I think this is a very interesting policy, and even though it ...