Its time to move on to a bigger boat so I am selling my 1982 Tanzer 7.5.  It comes with a full set of sails  (Main, Furling Genoa and Jib). The roller furling equipment is Harken. It was the 7.5 Tanzer in the 1982 Toronto Boat show which is where it was originally purchased by her first owners. Latest updates to it are a new marine head and new hoses.  She has a well maintained Johnson 9.9 long shaft with electric starter and a new mainsheet.  More photos are available here:  http://www.fishandcross.com/Tanzer7.5

Additional Gear includes:

Asking $5000.00 or Best Offer. I can’t own two boats for long so I am motivated to sell. Currently in the water at Lagoon City Marina, Brechin ON. Please contact me here on this blog via a comment or at  905 472-5675 or ed<dot>taekema<at>gmail<dot>com to view.

Additionally, there is an open source Jython book in the works called The Definitive Guide to Jython.  The book is a collaboration of multiple people close to the Jython project (Frank Wierzbicki, Jim Baker, Leo Soto, Vic Ng, and Josh Juneau) and will published via Apress.  For now you can see the book as it progresses here but it should make an appearance at www.jythonbook.com soon.

Tea Infuser / Tea Cup

Just found a gem of a tea shop in old Tacoma. Mad Hat Tea Company is a great find for tea aficionados. Managed to stock up on Rooibos tea and pick up this great travel friendly tea infuser / tea cup. Highly recommended!

Reusable software components are a pretty established development pattern and are used across the software development language landscape.  Lately, this area has experienced a boon of growth as component development became married with service oriented architecture and web services.  At the same time, components seem to be getting larger and are used more widely … think Pinax as a great Python pattern.  What I don’t think has grown at a sufficient pace is the management thinking and tools to control changes to components across a large scale of interdependent components, particularly from the point of view of the “component consumer“.

I`ve noticed a couple of related patterns.

1. Its hard for an individual consumer developer to bring a new version of a component into their application stack, test it and make whatever changes are necessary to the consuming side, and then promote their changes along with the new version of the component to the rest of their consuming side team.
2. Its hard for a technical lead or build engineer to manage the component revision level that a large consuming application team is going to use.  Often different software engineers use different versions of components resulting in code integration problems.  This gets especially tricky if the components have lots of dependencies between them, or if they are assembled in a layered architecture.

I`m looking for additional feedback.  Please let me know what you think of these problem areas and point me at any difficulties I`ve missed.

Mark suggests that we abandon titles like software engineer or software architect (these terms focus on the machine that reads the code) and switch to something like software writer (emphasizes the human reader).

I think this is really a good point.  In the comments to his post, someone suggests Software Poet.  I think that is my favourite… after all code that is beautiful is easy to understand.  Perhaps all the fights around coding standards, curly brace placements, whitespace in python, etc come from our sense of the beautiful and artistic we put into our software code.

…there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for.

Checked bags apparently are safer because of TSA security … and also lighter ….

• Folding Code
• Semantic Code Highlighting
• Renaming / refactoring
• Code Completion
• Smart Indent /Outdent
• Debugger
• Includes Jython 2.5 Beta 3, but can use any Python on your system.

There is lots more to come, including support for DJango and Turbogears style projects.

1. The brain, a complex system, is emergent … that is it is capable of remarkable insight and growth after a series of seemingly trivial and small learning exercises.  The exercises come first but then new, often astonishing intellectual abilities emerge.
2. The art of teaching is the careful and intentional guiding of a student from one success to another.  In the end, a student’s interest in a subject is almost entirely driven by how successful they feel.  And interest ultimately determines what a student learns.

Success drives interest and interest drives learning which leads to insight and intellectual growth.  The book argues pretty convincingly that aptitudes in one subject or another are related to a student’s early experience of success which led to interest.  If the author is right, it is likely the case that there aren’t students pre-disposed to success in math or art but rather that, given the remarkable plasticity of the human brain, students can be successful in both, provided they have good experiences as they are taught.  The author is a good example of this, having become an award winning playwright and mathematician himself later in life.

This kind of thinking has enormous significance for how we learn even smaller domains like software, programming, management, etc.  We need to be far more generous in assessing the ability our students have to learn new and complicated topics and far more ciritical of our own delivery, training materials and teaching.  More on this anon.