Pick something in your world and start measuring it.  Your measurements will surely change a little from day to day. Track those changes over a few months, and you might have a chart something like this. Now that you've got some data assembled, you can start analyzing it. The average over this sample is 59.5. It's got a variance of 17, which is about 28% of the mean. You can look for trends.

I made a LibraryThing list of books relevant to the stuff that’s banging around in my head now. These are in no particular order or organization. In fact, this is a live widget, so it might change as I think of other things that should be on the list. The key themes here are time, complexity, uncertainty, and constraints. If you’ve got recommendations along these lines, please send them my way.

Last night, I did something pretty drastic.  It wasn't on impulse... I had been thinking about this for quite a while. Finally, I decided to take the band-aid approach and just do it all at once. I deleted all my games. New and old alike, they all went.  Bioshock, System Shock, System Shock II.  GTA IV. GTA: Vice City. (I skipped San Adreas.) Venerable Diablo I and II, not to mention their leering cousin Overlord.

Alex Miller has a really interesting blog post up today. In LBQ + GC = slow, he shows how LinkedBlockingQueue can leave a chain of references from tenured dead objects to live young objects.  That sounds really dirty, but it actually means something to Java programmers. Something bad. The effect here is a subtle interaction between the code and the mostly hidden, yet omnipresent, garbage collector. This interaction just happens to hit a known sore spot for the generational garbage collector.

Like a geocache, this is another post meant to help somebody who stumbles across it in a future Google search. (Or as an external reminder for me, when I forget how I did this six months from now.) I've liked here-documents since the days of shell programming. Ruby has good support for here docs with variable interpolation. For example, if I want to construct a SQL query, I can do this:

O'Reilly has released "Beautiful Architecture," a compilation of essays by software and system architects. I'm happy to announce that I have a chapter in this book. The finished book is shipping now, and available through Safari. I think the whole thing has turned out amazingly well, both instructive and interesting. One of the editors, Diomidas Spinellis, has posted an excellent description and summary.

There are about a jillion forum posts and official pages on the web that talk about ORA-12541, the infamous "TNS:No Listener" error. Somewhere around 70% of them appear to be link-farmers who just scrape all the Oracle forums and mailing lists.  Virtually all of the pages just refer back to the official definition from Oracle, which says "there's no listener running on the server" and tells you to log in to the server as admin and start up the listener.

This is off the beaten path today, maybe even off the whole reservation. Still, I searched for some code to do this, and couldn't find it. Maybe this will help somebody else trying to do the same thing. I'm currently prototyping a desktop utility using Ruby and wxRuby. The combination actually makes Windows desktop programming palatable, which is a very pleasant surprise. Part of what I'm doing involves showing messages with Snarl.

This evening, I'm speaking at OTUG. The topic is "Clouds, Grids, and Fog". There's no denying that "cloud" has become a huge buzzword. It's a crossover trend, too. It's not just the CIO who is interested in cloud computing. It's the CFO and the CMO, too. (Not to mention the CSO, if there is one.)  Underneath the buzz, though, there is something real and valuable. I will talk about the driving trends that are leading us toward cloud computing and how it differs from grids and software-as-a-service.

"Good marketing can kill your site at any time." --Paul Lord, 2006 I just learned of another attack of self-denial from this past week. Many retailers are suffering this year, particularly in the brick-and-mortar space. I have heard from several, though, who say that their online performance is not suffering as much as the physical stores are. In some cases, where the brand is strong and the products are not fungible, the online channel is showing year-over-year growth.