I am going to post a few articles on golfing. I decided I am at a point in my architecture carer where I need to start building social networking skills. Golfing will give more ‘out of the office’ opportunities with the executives I work with.

So, I have been playing awhile now and need to really step up the game to a level where I can play without being obsessed with the ball striking or embarrassing shots so I can start these outings.

My first step is to re-think how I putt. Some faults I have are indecision over the ball. After I line up the putt I tend to see the alignment marks on the ball I just set up and second guess them. This leads to some loss of control of the putter head, inconsistent distance control, etc. when I was watching the pros in the Players Championship this weekend, I noticed they miss a lot of putts but leave themselves inches from the hole. I tend to leave myself within a few feet but if don’t over think I can drop the ball inches away too.

I decided to alter my pre-putt routine to focus less on alignment and more on sensing distance. If you can get a basic read on the line, it should be easy to put the ball inches from the hole. Focusing on the hole from more than 6 feet away kills the confidence and confidence is pretty universally accepted as the most critical influence in good putting.

The new routine:

1. While walking upto the ball, look for the obvious break and grain direction.
2. Stand a few feet behind the ball to see the line and pick an inflection point to aim.
3. If the putt is over 6 feet, walk the line to the hole and check the read from behind the hole to verify the selected inflection point.
4. Address the ball and look at the hole for 5 seconds to verify the distance feel.
5. Now trace the line back to the ball.
6. Glance at the aim point and pull the trigger.

This routine should take only about 1-2 minutes. On the subsequent short putt, the routine is just steps 4-6.

The next big step, of course, is to start chipping and pitching to within 3 feet of the pin, so those lag putts are less frequent. Between the improved lag putting and the better chipping/pitching I can expect to take a large number of strokes off the game and get more up and downs.

My new practice routine would be to once or twice a wek spend 29 minutes at the practice green. I have heard its better to practice more frequently for short periods than to try and do occasional long sessions.

I will simple throw 20 balls around the green and practice all the way up and down so I chip and putt to the hole from different places around the green. I expect to see a decrease in the length of the putts I need to make and drop from 50 strokes in practice to no just under 40 since I expect to hole some of the chips. This will reduce my score by 10 strokes in real games.

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Now choose in Mylyn to create a new task and your Google repository option will be there. Put in your project URL and Google credentials. Now when you add a task, it will offer the Google issue tracker as a repository.

The connector home page is here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecode-mylyn-connector/

UPDATE:

After messing around with this enough I realized the connector is not working.  First the login validation passed and when I tried to submit I got authorization errors.  I checked an had a typo in my credentials, yet the validation had told me the connection was working.  After I fixed the credentials, I got a new error “Submit Failed: system error retrieving feed” and so I have just figured out that I only see this when I have an empty description. Adding anything to the description makes the issue go away

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1. Install SubClipse by selecting Help…Eclipse Marketplace.  Search on Subclipse and hit the install button.  After a bit you will have Subclipse ready to go.
2. Go to https://code.google.com/hosting and you will find your project hosting password.  You’ll access your code using your Google account, but the password is generated and not the same as your normal Google account password.
3. Open the Package Explorer and right click for a context menu. Select New … Other.  In the next dialog called “Select a Wizard” expand the SVN folder and select “Checkout Projects from SVN”.  Choose “Create a new repository location” and provide your Google SVN which is your project name and .googlecode.com/svn such as htttps://pmenuplanner.googlecode.com/svn.  Note that you will use HTTPS else with just HTTP your going get read only access.
4. Ok, select a folder such as Trunk and in the next dialog choose “Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard”.  Select Finish and SVN will open the normal new project dialogue where you can select a project type i.e. java
5. Once you complete the normal new project dialogues, SVN will create your project with a indication its under source control.  It probably created some starter folders and classes.
6. Now you can commit the new files as a test of the solution.  Right click on the new project root and select Team … Commit.  SVN will now check in and commit all the files that were created by the new project wizard.
7. From here your project is under source control.  If you create new files they will not automatically go under source control and will have an indication or the icon to let you know.  Right mouse click and select Team .. Add to version Control and the icon will change to show you its changed and not committed.
8. Next time you select Team .. Commit, you changes will be uploaded to Google’s SVN repository.

Have a nice day !

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http://code.google.com/p/pmenuplanner/

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The iPad has an amazing battery life after using notebooks with 2-5 hours and the usual drain over time. I get an easy day’s use of the pad even with all the push notifications running.

The iPad is always on and some of the applications can push alerts to you when it’s sleeping. CNBC for example will push breaking news alerts even when the app is not in the foreground. Emails, news, RSS feeds, etc have push notification capabilities. When an application is installed the pad will ask if you want to allow both push notifications and location detection from the built in GPS. These decisions can be centrally managed later in the settings app.

Last I checked there were 450,000 applications in the app store, so it’s not so much a question of finding an app to do what you need, rather it’s a question of finding the best apps to met you need. Apps can be free or paid and almost everything I need has a free version but the paid applications are typically more mature, better supported, and leverage the capabilities of the iPad best. There are two apps I recommend first for any user. AppStart and AppAdvice. AppStart will walk you through how to do the basic things you need to do with the iPad and also provide application reviews for most of the common needs you’ll have to get started. AppAdvice is a continuously updated similar functioned app from the same developers.

A few other applications stand out that are good starts both for their functionality as well as the awesome implementation of iPads capabilities. FlipBoard is a news reader with feeds from many major publications in a diverse set of disciplines. To the mainstream publications, you can add blogs and RSS feeds, twitter, face book, Linked In, etc. Pulse is a similar app and offers a significantly different interface also leveraging the iPad’s power. While FlipBoard integrates the articles into a single magazine, Pulse provides each source as a unique stream and rather than text, it focuses on the images to present an overview of the contents.

I was uncertain if I could get used to the onscreen keyboard but it’s very elegant. In horizontal mode I can type on it as fast as I could with a full size hardware keyboard (hardware accessory keyboards are available). There are the usual features well executed with a spellcheck function and an autocomplete. Maybe my typing just feels fast due to the autocorrect kicking in. Double taping the space bar auto inserts a period. The key layout adjusts to the need of the application so, as example, in a browser the comma area will replace with .com button, email entries get an @ symbol added to the main keyboard etc. You can toggle between alpha, number pad and symbol sets with one keystroke.

The hardest part to get used to is the lack of a filesystem that would be navigated as in Windows or Linux. However, when you get the concept it’s not a big deal. You can get the needed capability leveraging cloud providers like dropbox or box.net. We’ll have to post more on the exploding personal cloud market in future posts.

Next up I will focus on the key needs and solutions as I discover them.

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Its still confusing though, especially when we consider the different scales of architecture.  A big company can have Global Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Systems Architecture, Application Architecture, and Frameworks.  Scope is addressed as part of the definition in a meaningful way by Eden & Kazman in their paper “Architecture Design Implementation.”  Eden & Kazman provide us the Intension/Locality  Hypothesis which defines a differentiating factor between the architecture of a solution, the design of the solution, and the implementation of the solution.  Intension separates implementation from architecture and design and is fairly easy to understand.  Both in the architecture and design processes the product or artifact of the process is a specification with enough abstraction that an infinite number of implementations could be created.  So if we think of architectural patterns and design patterns, they provide a solution that is abstract enough to be implemented in many ways with different technology stacks.  However, once a developer takes the design pattern and writes code, its implemented and there is no other way to interpret it.  Its an instance of the design.

To separate architecture from design, Eden & Katzman give us the Locality Criterion.  “What distinguishes architectural from design specifications is that architectural specifications must be met by every extension of the program.” In their work they defined a few patterns we commonly use and tested them for locality.  Pipes and Filters was demonstrated as architectural because every component in the solution had to address the pipe and filter architecture.  Factory Method by comparison was demonstrated to be local and not every extension of the solution had to address it.

When looking at some recent work of my own, I realize that the focus on patterns in Eden and Katzman’s work in critical.  As architects we typically mix and match patterns and styles to provide an overall solution.  I recently used a pipes and filters approach to bring static data out to a vendor but used an EIB to handle real time mashups.  Al the data captured at the vendor was brought back to our data warehouse.  I have three styles/patterns in one solution.  The Locality Criterion winds up true for each pattern, but not each pattern will impact the others.  Have I crossed the line from architecture to design if I decompose the three patterns? I say no to that question.  Each pattern requires some decomposition by the architect in the real world.  We have technology implementations in companies that need to be considered.  Don’t build a data warehouse whenever its needed, there is typically a warehouse initiative to align with.  EIB is quite expensive and not deployed in a single solution, but offered as an enterprise capability.  In the end, I agree with the wikipedia where it says “In practice, the architect is the one who draws the line between software architecture (architectural design) and detailed design (non-architectural design). There aren’t rules or guidelines that fit all cases.”

I do like the locality criterion for helping me make the judgment call and also for evaluating the appropriateness of patterns to a architectural problem. I draw the fuzzy line between architecture and design as in the image below.  The first consideration is the domain.  It may be a data architecture problem to solve, integration architecture, application architecture, etc.  Within a domain a selection of patterns can be considered.  These are the architectural patterns I will use to solve the problems in the solution for each relevant domain.  Once I have drilled this deep, its time to let the designers take over the detailed design to ‘implement the architecture’ and then the developers to ‘implement’ the design.  The developers use solution patterns, designers use design patterns, and architects use architectural patterns and styles.

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http://lifehacker.com/#!231476/alpha-geek-whip-your-mp3-library-into-shape-part-ii-+-album-art

The MP3Tagger they suggest was leaving to much for me to decide with such as large collection.  I frequently had to figure out what album my single track favorites came from.  Instead, I used MusicBrainz Picard. http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger.  Picard uses audio samples to compare with an online database and identify the music track.  Once identified, it will grab album art and fan art.

The real benefit in this process is that the artwork goes to the meta-data and not to a separate database.  This makes it available to other applications that can display it as well such as media centers, MP3 Players, etc.

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The first was to run a duplicate file checker. I used Duplicate cleaner to find the obvious ones.
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/content/duplicate-cleaner

Next I ran VisiPics which is more image intelligent and lets me see them side by side to pick the one I want to keep. Duplicate Cleaner is fast, but VisiPics can not only find true duplicate files but also files nearly identical so I can pic the best in a series of shots of the same subject and move the ones I will not permanently archive to a backup folder.
http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

Finally I ripped through the whole collection (remaining 25,000) with Adebis Photo Sorter. Adebis will copy them to a new folder structure organizing them by the EXIF date taken stamp. Now I have them organized by month and year and when I take new pictures in the future, I just pull them into an ‘incoming’ folder, and let Adebis push to my NAS drive in the month/year structure along with the rest of the collection.
http://www.adebis.com/photo_sorter/

It takes care of these final tasks for you:
• Sorting and structuring of the entire photo collection on the user’s system
• Batch renaming of photos with the help of user-defined masks
• Creation of chronologically sorted photo series from multiple source folders
• Inclusion of EXIF data into file names during batch renaming

LifeHacker did a nice write up on it here: http://lifehacker.com/#!5517190/adebis-p

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The router lets me run the G and N networks separate so I don’t get a drop to 802.11G speeds when a G device is on the network.  The business PC stays on the N and the personal PC stays on the G and both have no problems accessing the WD Live NAS Server or the network attached printer.

In addition, I can run two guest networks to allow both N and G friends to visit and use the Internet without exposing them to access my NAS or printer or even my own PCs.  The router supports QoS packet prioritization to allow the multimedia and VOIP to take precedence over other packets on the network, ensuring good media quality streams.

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