Ted Neward

Closures are back again!

Ted Neward — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:10:11 -0500

Those of you who've seen me speak on Java 7 at various conferences have heard me lament
(in a small way) the fact that Sun decided last year (Dec 2008) to forgo the idea
of including closures in the Java language. Imagine my surprise, then, to check my
Twitter feed and discover that, to everyone's surprise, closures are
back in as a consideration for the Java7 release.

Several thoughts come to mind:

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Haacked, but not content; agile still treats the disease

Ted Neward — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:42:22 -0400

Phil Haack wrote a
thoughtful, insightful and absolutely correct response to my
earlier blog post. But he's still missing the point.

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"Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease"

Ted Neward — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:51:39 -0400

The above quote was tossed off by Billy Hollis at the patterns&practices Summit
this week in Redmond. I passed the quote out to the Twitter masses, along with my
+1, and predictably, the comments started coming in shortly thereafter. Rather than
limit the thoughts to the 120 or so characters that Twitter limits us to, I thought
this subject deserved some greater expansion.

But before I do, let me try (badly) to paraphrase the lightning talk that Billy gave
here, which sets context for the discussion:

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Are you a language wonk? Do you want to be?

Ted Neward — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:44:30 -0400

Recently I've had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Walter
Bright, one of the heavyweights of compiler construction, and the creator of the
D language (among other things), and he's been great in giving me some hand-holding
on some compiler-related topics and ideas.

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More on journalistic integrity: Sys-Con, Ulitzer, theft and libel

Ted Neward — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:58:00 -0400

Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable
practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been
listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them,
and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles,
"Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

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Thoughts on the Chrome OS announcement

Ted Neward — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:37:01 -0400

Google made the announcement on
Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially
be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

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Review: "Programming Clojure", by Stu Halloway

Ted Neward — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:34:56 -0400

(Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, Stu is a friend,
fellow NFJS speaker, and former co-worker of mine from DevelopMentor.)

I present this review to you in two parts.

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Interview with Scott Bellware and Scott Hanselman on the Death of the Professional Speaker

Ted Neward — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:40:28 -0400

Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend
at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues
to its logical conclusion. Have
a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

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The "controversy" continues

Ted Neward — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:17:44 -0400

Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of
"edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch,
this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB
presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from
an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip
the next block paragraph.

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A eulogy: DevelopMentor, RIP

Ted Neward — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:32:07 -0400

Update: See below, but I wanted to include the text Mike Abercrombie
(DM's owner) posted as a comment to this post, in the body of the blog post itself. "Ted
- All of us at DevelopMentor greatly appreciate your admiration. We're also grateful
for your contributions to DevelopMentor when you were part of our staff. However,
all of us that work here, especially our technical staff that write and delivery our
courses today, would appreciate it if you would check your sources before writing
our eulogy.

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Of Tomcat 6, native services, Windows 2008R2, and pain...

Ted Neward — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:37:23 -0400

So I'm putting together a Windows 2008 R2 x64 RC Java image for a client (more on
that later), and everything's breezing along fine. Install the OS, check. Install
JDK 1.6 (u13) into the machine, check. Install Tomcat 6 into the machine, running
as a native Windows service, check. Open localhost on port 8080, and... not check.
Times out, no response, not good.

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"From each, according to its abilities...."

Ted Neward — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:56:20 -0400

Recently, NFJS alum and buddy Dion Almaer questioned the
widespread, almost default, usage of a relational database for all things storage
related:

Ian Hickson: “I expect I’ll be reverse-engineering SQLite and speccing that, if nothing
better is picked first. As it is, people are starting to use the database feature
in actual Web apps (e.g. mobile GMail, iirc).”

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"Multi-core Mania": A Rebuttal

Ted Neward — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:44:35 -0400

The Simple-Talk newsletter is
a monthly e-zine that the folks over at Red Gate Software (makers of some pretty cool
toys, including their ANTS Profiler, and recent inheritors of the Reflector utility
legacy) produce, usually to good effect.

But this month carried
with it an interesting editorial piece, which I reproduce in its entirety here:

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Laziness in Scala

Ted Neward — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:18:12 -0400

While playing around with a recent research-oriented project for myself (more on that
later), I discovered something that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere in the Scala
universe before. (OK, not really--as you'll see towards the end of this piece, it
really is documented, but allow me my brief delusions of grandeur as I write this.
They'll get deflated quickly enough.)

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A new stack: JOSH

Ted Neward — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:25:43 -0400

An interesting
blog post was forwarded to me by another of my fellow ThoughtWorkers, which suggests
a new software stack for building an enterprise system, acronymized as “JOSH”:

The Book Of JOSH

Through a marvelous, even devious, set of circumstances, I'm presented with the opportunity
to address my little problem without proscribed constraints, a true green field opportunity.

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