Software Development

Did you see Maicon's Goal?

2010-04-16T18:57:00.003-04:00

Who is better? Alves or Maicon? What a great goal.

Real Madrid played well but lost to Lyon

2010-02-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

Zipf's Law and Software Engineering

2010-01-31T21:25:00.012-05:00

All well designed software applications are alike; each badly designed software application is badly designed in its own way.For some time now I've been looking at Zipf's Law and wondering if it applies to computer programs written in any modern computer language. In other words, is Zipf's Law relevant when analyzing computer code? And if it is relevant, what does it say about the structure and

Ronaldinho is back...

2010-01-28T23:02:00.002-05:00

Yes, he's back. I didn't think he could recover his fitter form, but playing in the World Cup is probably enough incentive for anybody. Look at him go. Great moves and great goals.

Java vs. AS3 coding styles

2010-01-01T20:52:00.015-05:00

Coding styles evolve with the times and are as different as there are developers and programming languages. Where do coding styles come from?We all have our ingrained way of writing and formatting code. The coding styles I've followed throughout these years come from my time in university while an undergrad student (University of Waterloo). Our programming assignments had specific requirements to

AS3 and anonymous event handlers

2009-12-29T23:47:00.011-05:00

Event listener models are not new; however, AS3 event listeners are new to me.I've developed a couple of application in Java Swing and Eclipse RCP, and both frameworks rely heavily on the event dispatch/listener model. AS3 being a full fledged Object Oriented programming language also uses it.This week I continue fixing a few bugs for one the Flash projects I'm working on. Our application

RESTful Flex/Flash client

2009-12-26T11:31:00.020-05:00

This week I had to program in AS3. I didn't code from scratch the application I worked on; however, I designed the architecture, so I was familiar with the source and felt confident to jump in to do updates. In the process, I was introduced to the default Flash development environment--CS4. Coming from a world of Vim, Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Studio, I found the IDE lacking in functionality.

Barcelona 2, Estudiantes 1.

2009-12-19T13:35:00.003-05:00

You heard it here first: Barcelona wins one more trophy in an incredible year. And who do you think scored the winning goal? Messi, of course.

France is in

2009-11-18T22:41:00.004-05:00

France is in the World Cup; Ireland is not; and Thierry Henry plays basket-foot-ball. Incredible as it is, the goal counts because not one of the 3 referees on the field saw the hand ball.Was stopping the ball with his hand legal? Well, no...but because he didn't get caught then it was. Viva la France!

UI bugs...

2009-11-10T22:06:00.004-05:00

Do large corporations care when there are bugs in their sites? Chapters is not a small company, so it must have a QA department somewhere. I'm always surprised when obvious errors just show up on its home page.

Real Madrid out of the King's cup already

2009-11-10T16:31:00.005-05:00

A team from the Spanish third division knocked out of the King's Cup the mighty team of Real Madrid. If there's one thing we can say about football (soccer) is that it's unpredictable.The Spanish press is having a ball pointing out that Real Madrid spent 250-million Euros to bring top players to their squad and was eliminated by Alarcon, a team for which the total budget for their whole season is

Basics rules for building a software platform

2009-11-06T07:14:00.001-05:00

Offer value. Open your platform with an API (RESTful or SOAP). Repeat.

The stock picker

2009-10-26T07:41:00.003-04:00

One of the main factors in stock market performance is determined by interest rates, or so it has been observed. The dependency of our economy on interest rates is based on the fact that everything we do requires money. To create value out of nothing, we treat the concept of money as something tangible and assign a cost to borrowing capital, a cost that we call interest.Empirical data (read any

A beautiful thing to watch: Barcelona FC

2009-10-25T21:52:00.005-04:00

Barcelona has some of the best soccer players in the world--Messi, Iniesta, Xavi. Having great players doesn't guarantee success, though. Barcelona is a club with an identity and a team with a clear idea of how to play together. It can be argued that Barcelona is a successful team. On the other hand, Real Madrid has the rest of the top players in the world--Kaka, Benzema, Casillas--but it's an

Restlet 2.0 sample application with annotations

2009-10-23T23:40:00.004-04:00

The new version of Restlet, 2.0, uses Java annotations to make web service development easier than it was with version 1.1. However, these annotations are not based on the JAX-RS specification. They are similar, but they are not the same.In Chapter 6, I cover in detail the web component portion of the Restlet framework, versions 1.1 and 2.0. For this entry, however, I will just give an example of

RESTful Java Web Services available now

2009-10-14T22:01:00.005-04:00

The book that I've been writing since the beginning of the year is available for pre-ordering now.I'm polishing the last 2 chapters, but the first printed version will be available next month.If you buy it and have any questions, you can reach me via email.

Book coming up

2009-09-27T23:31:00.002-04:00

I finished writing the first draft of my first book about a month ago. I'm now editing chapters, as per recommendation of technical reviewers. The process so far is smooth going. I haven't had to rewrite entire chapters, which is a relief and a vote of confidence. As I go through each chapter now, however, I'm removing redundant paragraphs and simplifying the language.On the plus side, It's

I used to watch the NBA

2009-09-25T15:36:00.001-04:00

I don't watch the NBA anymore, but I did once upon a time when Jordan was king. He was an incredible player.Were those the golden years of professional basketball?

Augmented reality is where's at

2009-09-20T20:55:00.004-04:00

You point your phone to the sky and it names the stars for you. How cool is that?This is an application for Android phones. I wonder if the iPhone has something similar?

Argentina needs Saviola

2009-09-16T22:33:00.003-04:00

Javier Saviola has to be the most underrated player in Europe. He played for Barcelona and Real Madrid, but was never given the chance to shine. Nonetheless, most of the time he was put on the field, he would score. Now, he's with Benfica, in Portugal, and he's doing great. I think the problem is his lack of media coverage. Does he need a new PR agency? I think so.This is his last goal: it's not

Google maps may need a bit of a recalibration: a soccer stadium in the middle of the ocean?

2009-08-25T21:51:00.004-04:00

Sometimes google maps is not as accurate as it could be. Of course, the application's results are not used for mission critical application that require 100% accuracy, so we forgive it when it returns funny results.I wanted to see what was around Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu Stadium and got the map below:A bit off, don't you think?

Should Usain Bolt just run by himself?

2009-08-20T15:38:00.006-04:00

By the looks of his new world record (200m in 19.19 seconds), Bolt should just run against the clock. Not one of other competitors was even close to him: his lead was 6m. In a 200m race, that may as well be the entire 200m.Is he laughing at the end? I'm not sure Bolt builds lactic acid in his body. Have you run 200m as fast as you can? It hurts; it really hurts. And he can run even faster...Go

Using the Restlet client connector library

2009-08-20T11:26:00.005-04:00

The Restlet framework does not only offer a server stack for developing web services, it also offers a client connector library, which can be used to develop clients connecting to RESTful web services or any other web application.Let's just get to the code, because all it takes is 1 line to do the whole thing. For this example, we'll connect to Twitter's URI http://twitter.com/statuses/

Once again, Bolt jogs to the finish line...

2009-08-19T21:51:00.003-04:00

What is it with Usain Bolt? All his drugs test are coming back clean. This means that he's either clean, or his drug guy is really good. Most are hoping for the former, but the latter is still on the table. For now, just enjoy his races:

Usain Bolt is 9.58 seconds fast...

2009-08-16T20:08:00.004-04:00

I remember reading somewhere that the fastest time a man could ever run the 100m dash was 9.60 seconds. The claim was that physiology would get in the way. Apparently, Bolt didn't get the memo. Usain Bolt has to be one of the greatest athletes in history. People in the know claim that we may never see the likes of him again. I'm not sure about that, as someone's future goal will be to break his