Ben Christen

Maybe it's because I've mostly used VSS in the past, but SVN is just so
easy and awesome.  It was a breeze to setup and also get svnserve
running, and now by using TortoiseSVN everything is just a right-click
away from a commit, add, delete, etc.  I've just yet to find
anything that makes me unhappy about Subversion.  It rocks! 
I guess my next step is to have it running locally and version ALL my
files.  Awesome.

 . . . they just get cached.

Last weekend I read the book “Now, Discover Your Strengths” and took the online test
to discover my Strengths.  The results were very accurate and I'm
quite excited by them!  It's great to see verification of what I'd
maybe guessed to be true.  And, good news, I think my strengths
definitely align with the field that I'm in (software
engineer/internet).  What better place for forward thinking,
positive attitude, ideas and adaptability!  One of the basic ideas
of the book is that we should focus on our strengths and not our
weaknesses.

MY STRENGTHS

Futuristic:
People strong in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and
what could be.  They inspire others with their visions of the future.
Positivity:
People strong in the Positivity theme have an enthusiasm that is
contagious.  They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they
are going to do.
Adaptability: People strong in the Adaptability
theme prefer to “go with the flow.”  They tend to be “now” people who
take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.
Ideation:
People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas.  They are
able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
Maximizer:
People strong in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to
stimulate personal and group excellence.  They seek to transform
something strong into something superb.

If you're interested, I recommend buying the book and taking the test for yourself! 

Either get the book from Amazon or from their site.

I have identified what I think is a memory leak in the JWSDP 1.4, the
SOAP client implementation that I am using in an application at
work.  Doing a test of just repeatedly calling one method that
makes a simple call to the server, I am able to see with OptimizeIt
that over 100,000+ objects are being created in less than half an
hour.  The objects being created are:

com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.name.NameImpl
com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.AttributeMap
com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.soap.impl.ElementImpl$AttributeManager
com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.soap.impl.ElementImpl
com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj.soap.impl.TextImpl
javax.xml.namespace.QName

These are all classes within the java web services pack.  It could
be that I?m not using the methods correctly, although, what I'm doing is a very simple client.

The oddest thing about this — I've found nothing online about
this!  Surely if this was really an issue with JWSDP 1.4 then it
would be well documented.  Am I just not supposed to be using the
JWSDP 1.4 on production systems?  I don't think that the work I'm
doing is that cutting-edge.  If this is really a memory leak
issue, then I'm surprised that it hasn't already been discovered.

Our solution is to just switch to using Axis.

Leave a comment if you know more about this, or if you just think I'm crazy!
 

I am eagerly awaiting TivoToGo to be rolled out to my box.  I
signed up on the priority list a while back, but no updates yet! 
I even ordered a DVD burner drive for my PC!

So, something I can do in the meantime is start using the SDK! 
Hopefully the TiVo user base can generate some great uses of the SDK
and help TiVo stay dominant in the DVR realm.  One of my
resolutions has been to do some open source coding this year and
actually contribute to something.  Since I LOVE my TiVo, this
seems to be a great opportunity to make good on my resolution!

Here are the links:
Tivo Home Media Edition SDK (http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/)
Java HMO (http://javahmo.sourceforge.net/)
Tivo ToGo (http://www.tivo.com/togo)
PVR Blog HME Area (http://hme.pvrblog.com/)

Great!  You've created a new, cool application that enables your team to
do X!  Everyone loves you for about a day, but then things change. 
Now you have to support it.  Now you have to perform upgrades.  Now
you have to appease people who are complaining that X takes too long (even
though X wasn't even possible before you came along).  Now you have
“The Curse of Innovation!”

Do you stop innovating?  Never!  You must learn to deal with the curse. 
Here's how:

1. Offload and Delegate
1. If it's server based,
   you need to have it running on a reliable machine that your entire team
   (or Ops team) has access to
2. Train other people in
   the team about your new app/code/whatever — this way, they'll be able to
   help make updates and bug fixes
3. Documentation – if you
   can't train people, they can read your docs!   (I'm not saying
   that training is an alternative to documentation – both are needed)
4. If you
   offload/delegate, you can now move on to new innovations!
5. Basically, nothing can
   depend on you personally, if it does, you've just enrolled yourself in 24
   hour tech support (or doomed your app)
2. Bug Tracking
1. Effectively cataloging
   everything wrong with your app is a must, otherwise you won't know what
   to fix
2. Other users will be
   able to see known bugs and work around it (trusting that there will
   eventually be fixes)
3. Updates and New Versions
1. Update! 
   Unfortunately where I work, we have trouble making updates and rolling
   out new versions because, well, let's just say we're too busy.  This
   isn't an option — your app is just a 1.0 version (maybe 0.5), it won't truly
   be a great product until around version 5.0 — so keep at it!  Don't
   let it get forgotten and left behind.
2. If you don't have the
   passion to do this, then see #1.

It just amazes me how quickly people forget that they were
never able to do X before your cool app/code came along and instead gripe about
how crappy your app/code is  — but, such is the Curse of
Innovation.  Thankfully I've been dealing with the curse (better to have
the curse then to not innovate) and I'm slowly starting to learn to prepare for
and prevent the curse from ever happening.  Hopefully, this will serve as
a reminder to me and to you!    Beware “The Curse of Innovation!”

just starting out with blogshares, and claiming my blog

I was talking with a friend about my new found interests in blogging
and they compared blogging to the early web filled with arcane personal
web pages.  Well, I feel that there are certainly similarities
(random people posting about random things, most of which, no one cares
about), but, I do feel that blogging is better than that.  Thus,
here are some of my reasons (in a quasi-order):

1. Community
1. I feel some of the real power of blogs comes from the
   communities that are formed and the networking connections that can be
   made.  E.g., bloggers who have been laid off (if their blog proves
   their tech skills) are given job leads in their blog comments. Conversation, dialogue and debate
2. Syndication (standards)
1. Syndication allows us to not have to go to every crap site to
   get our content.  We know when something Content can now come on
   our own terms–making it all the more accessible.
3. Search
1. With Google and the other search engines, the web has become much more
   manageable.  We can now find those random corners of the web that
   interest only us and the person who created the site.  Also, sites like
   Technorati specialize in allowing us to find that specific blogger who actually linked to one of your own posts.
4. Publishing Tools
1. It's just so easy to create a blog, and a nice, well designed
   blog (if you choose the right template) that doesn't have those crappy
   blinking smiley faces
5. Continued Growth of the Web
1. As the web gets bigger, more people are involved, more money is
   involved, better tools/sites are built and it's faster and more
   available

There are plenty of other reasons, but these are some that first came
to mind.  It was an interesting thinking point to question the
validity of blogging.  Blogging is definitely catching on (I'm
doing it) and I believe there is still a ways to go.  It's sort of
like looking at old pictures and laughing about how we dressed in
previous decades — looking back at the websites we had and thinking —
ugh, did we really build that crap?  And of course we can't help
but wonder if we'll think the same thing in 5 years about the blogs of
today!  Anyway, blog on!

New features for Roller — Group blogging would be great, especially in
corporate/work environments where you might have a blog per
project.  A work around we have used, is enabling a view of posts
by all users to a certain category.  So, everyone would create a
category for that project if they wanted to post entries to that
category page (e.g. /roller/category/java).  (I guess sort of like
del.icio.us and flickr, viewing categories more as tags instead of a
singular subject).  Adding aggregate category view pages like this
might be nice.