Two of my favourite books about computer programmers are 'The Psychology of Computer Programming' and 'Understanding the Professional Programmer' by Gerald Weinberg. So I was interested to read this short interview with him.

I recently had this email exchange with my friend Geoff. I don't need to add any further commentary, but I've personally bet the farm on custom application development. Hmm.. He's what we said anyway:

Hows things?  I'm in Luxembourg with Finn doing banking b****x for big bucks.
Bit dull here.

I replied:
I went to the KDE developers conference in Ludwigsburg the other week and that
was really good - I wouldn't mind working in Germany. But it seems that KDE
custom development is always about 6 months away from taking off, I didn't
sense there's much in the way of contract work yet.

At least you're earning big bucks - I'm totally broke. But I'm finishing off
the ruby project, and it's certainly the most awsome RAD environment that's
ever existed. Not that anyone much knows about it..

After reading this blog http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000292.html
I thought I'd try out Instiki - it's a simple to set up wiki which can also export to an html website. Recently I've been using KJots to handle 'random notes' and todo lists, but what I really like to have is an outliner like 'Acta' that I used to use on my Mac a few years ago. Acta didn't do anything fancy - it wasn't trying to be a presentation package or a word processor that could also do outlining. But it was dead simple to use, and you could link in MacDraw figures if you needed any sophisticated diagrams.

Sunday started off early at 9:00 with Avi Alkaday's talk on
the Linux Registry project - he had some very nicely done slides and graphics,
and explained it all pretty clearly. IBM had paid for his travel expenses from
Brazil, and also lent him a nice lap top so he could hack on it while waiting
for airplanes. And thanks to Big Blue for picking up the tab on today's lunch
too..

I decided to come to aKademy about a week and a half ago, and am so pleased I did.

But travelling there was a disaster; I tried to save 10 UKP by flying with KLM
via Schipol, Amsterdam, rather than direct from Heathrow. Big mistake! The
flight to Amsterdam was two hours late, and by the time it finally got there,
my connecting flight to Stuttgart had already gone. Then I found out that it
was the last one of the day, and I would have to wait for a 9:20 am flight the
following morning, getting me into Ludwigsburg about lunchtime.

There's been some discussion on the kde-core-devel list this week about whether or not the KDE classes should be renamed for KDE 4.0. Should the class KMainWindow become MainWindow inside a KDE:: namespace for instance? Some people preferred it, and others thought it was a bad idea.

I've been learning about C# over the past month or two, and mostly I haven't found anything too much to get annoyed about. Maybe I'd prefer it if the method names started with a lower case letter. Some of the classes such as 'ContextBoundObject' have unwieldy confusing names, which makes reading about them harder than it should be. And worse, the C# books don't seem to have any jokes, and when you do something to save time it's in 'order to add business value', hmm exciting. They spell 'Marshaling' instead of 'Marshalling', which looks a bit wrong to me.

Here's how I learnt that every programmer should have their own software portfolio from one of my favourite books about professional programmers 'Peopleware' by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

From HIRING A JUGGLER, Chapter 15 of Peopleware:

After a period of obscurity, it seems the KDE kdebindings module's time has almost come. So I thought I'd start a series of Bafflin' Smoke Signal blogs about what's going on, and specifically I'd like to try to explain how Ashley Winter's SMOKE library works. In this first blog, I also include a rant about how dysfunctional HR departments in some large organisations just don't understand FOSS developers.

On http://www.nearwildheaven.com/GNOME/ this article presents the latest and greatest in Gnome GUI improvements.

Do our users love this sort of 'pissing contest' between file save/open dialogs or whatever? Do they prefer to admire the subtle differences between the dialogs in Swing/Gnome/KDE or even Windows file dialog boxes? If I personally had a choice between giving up the KDE dialogs in favour of this new Gnome style to avoid confusing users, do you think I personally give a toss? KDE and Gnome are just toolkit apis, and as soon as they get this sort of nonsense behind them the better in my opinion.