Book: “Dynamics of Software Development”

“Dynamics of Software Development” by Jim McCarthy Although this book published almost 20 years ago, it has some timeless rules that are still applicable today. Here are a few lines from the book: “If the leader can then resonate with the team’s complex emotional state–identify with it, articulate it, and give the whole constellation of […]

Book: “Notes to a Software Team Leader”

“Notes to a Software Team Leader” by Roy Osherove is a refreshing read. I like his way of explaining concepts, making them easy to understand. His perspective that “a team leader grows the people in their team” is inspirational. Here are a few lines from the book: “To get out of survival mode, you have […]

Notes about PersistJS

After I tried to use PersistJS, I am impressed. Then people are asking me to write-up my findings. So, here are my notes about PersistJS: The first recommended reading is Why This is Awesome section. It makes a good case why you should use PersistJS. One interesting aspect of PersistJS is explained in its README: […]

A quick scan of “The Future of Programming Environments” article

Andreas Zeller‘s “The Future of Programming Environments”, provides an high level overview on the current trends of development tools. In this article, Zeller stated that development tools are evolving from extensible frameworks that supports integrated tools and their automation to “automated assistance in all development decisions”. Zeller further pointed out many known techniques that collects […]

NetBeans 6 beta 1 is more JavaScript friendly than earlier releases

I’ve been using NetBeans 6 beta 1 for a while now. Today I just found out that if I am working on a static file such as a JavaScript file, all I need to do is to redeploy the project to the local server instance to see the changes. No need to rebuild or recompile. […]

First impression on package mangement on Mac OS X

Ok. I’ve only used a Mac for a couple days, they were certainly long days with many steep learning experiences. Here are some of my comments: On Mac OS X, you have several options to install an application. You can use pre-packaged binaries such as Universal Binary or a platform specific installable binary for your […]

webtest and jWebUnit: first impression

I spent a little bit of time check out both webtest and jWebUnit. Here are my first impression: webtest is declarative and XML configuration file driven. If you like configuration management more than programming, you might like this format. All you need is edit the test definition and hit the run command, no compilation necessary. […]

Comments and notes on Wikinomics (part 1)

A person I know urged me to read Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. So, I started reading. So far I read chapter 1, 4, and 5. I agree with less cheerful reviewers of this book (here and here) that this book probably doesn’t worth my time spent reading it. I actually agree […]

First impression about ColumNav 1.0

Special thanks again to David Lindquist for adding a new feature in the most recent release of ColumNav 1.0, which is the ability for ColumNav widget to load arbitrary HTML in one of its columns. This feature can really enrich the widget to go beyond a tree listing of menu items. Yes. You can certainly […]

Not so dynamic “Animated Collapsible DIV”

I had a lot of fun playing with Animated Collapsible DIV. However, when I wanted to dynamically insert the content of the collapsible DIV, it would not work. I realized that it would only work for static content that doesn’t change on fly. The Collapsible DIV is initialized at page load and doesn’t dynamically change […]

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