Getting Things Done (GTD for short).
First things first, if you don’t know what GTD is read this book!
A little background first, this post has been in draft for almost a month now, I keep putting it off which is a little ironic, but the great thing about GTD is that you just need to renegotiate with yourself and it’s all good! The other strange thing about me blogging about GTD is that I’m probably the least organised person you’ll meet for a long time! Hopefully my post will inspire others like me to get a little bit more organised, it’s worth it!
YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE XSL
I spent most of this week writing XSL templates for transforming XML messages into other, similar, XML messages. Ah, bless.
Thanks to the practice of companies (including us!) making minor changes to standard XSDs, several of the input/output format combinations are identical apart from namespaces and a couple of tag names. Copy-pasting a template six times seemed like a bad idea – it contains some non-obvious bits, and the formats are bound to change since the requirements aren’t yet nailed down.
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Random snippets
It’s Sunday afternoon, I’m finally having that espresso I’ve been too tired to make all afternoon, so this is going to be a shorter post of some simple little tidbits (timbits, for any canadians out there).
Unchecking Exceptions
I don’t want to get into an argument about checked vs unchecked exceptions, but from time to time I’ve written the following to “convert” any checked exceptions to unchecked:
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Designed by Committee.
Watchmen is awesome. Let me get this out of the way, first of all.
And for those who didn’t enjoy it: I still think that you might be decent human beings, but by God, what’s wrong with you?
Re: What My Cat Brought In Last Night
According to the blogothon rules I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I should have commented on Justin’s post What My Cat Brought In Last Night over the weekend. Lazy me. (And I probably have Justin to thank for the fact that a well-known Rubyist originally from South Korea commented on mine. Hi Francis, I wrote the Ruby Weekly News for a couple of years in 2005-2007 before disappearing off into a different geographical and programming hemisphere.)
I found Justin’s article useful – it started out like it was going to be a bitch about how the software we write in ye “business” world is mostly boring and trivial and woe is us, but it was actually the opposite, telling the complainers they should either become knowledgeable in the business domain they’re working in or piss off and stop taking the money.
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Why a decent backup strategy is important
I wrote this a long time ago with the intention of posting it on a blog one day once the dust has settled a bit:
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On monday 21 April 2008 at round 2pm while talking on the phone I started up a Parallels VM. I looked away for a few seconds only to find the machine had gone to sleep. I did the usual wiggle of the mouse but the machine didn’t wake up. At this point I was perplexed, but never mind sometimes the machine does crash. So I restarted it and attempted to bring the VM back up again. This time I was greeted with “NTLDR not found”.
Blog about your tweets?
I don’t blog, as is evident from all my abandoned blogs out in the wild, also this blog is not very busy at all! I do tweet, not as often as the die hards but I do tweet! So this blog entry is about my tweets! Just bare with me it’s an interesting point I’m trying to make, I promise!
What My Cat Brought In Last Night
First of all, please to forgive. I have been lived under a rock for the past two years and also a little bit more, which brings my level of English further southward than the latitude of my current abode, along with the level of technical knowledge I possess. If you came here to read an intellectually stimulating discussion about cutting edge technology, methodology or synergy, I am sure to disappoint.