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The first law of thermodynamics states something like this: the total energy of the system plus the surroundings is constant. Or basically energy is conserved; it cannot be created or destroyed, just moved around. This first law is an important realization for chemists/physicists, and underpins the way they look at problems. I think there is a similar realization that can be made regarding the complexity of software systems, and that it can change the way you look at and design software....

(Greets: Conor, OJB, Malcolm and BPH.) UPDATED (2003-07-09T06:54:05+0000) Brendan has implemented this as an IDEA plugin Your innovation got me thinking - of a lateral solution - no hardware mods required. see attached :-)

BMC has posted some of his thoughts on meetings. I used to work with BMC, and meetings never did seem to get in our way. BMC’s four rules for meeting attendence: If someone hasn’t spoken in the last 10 minutes at a meeting, then they shouldn’t be there. If one person speaks more than 80% of the time, then it is a presentation rather than a meeting. Use email or voice mail to distribute the information....

This idiom is a cool little trick, but I’ve seen coders scratching their head trying to work out what it does; so a detailed explanation is in order. The ^ bitwise exclusive-or operator (or “XOR”) is standard computer science fare. An XOR is often used to flip bits in a byte/word. In Java, the ^ bitwise operator works on all the integer types (int, byte, short, char, and long) and performs an XOR between each corresponding bit in the arguments....

The other day, I recalled first program I ever wrote. Actually, I remember it distinctly. I was in Year 8 (aged 13 or 14) of high school. It was a bright warm summers day but cool and dark in the computer lab (the curtains were always closed on such days). Some mates and I had spent the last couple of weeks typing programs from books into the Apple IIe computers in the lab....

I use the following code idiom all the time. I know it seems simple, and I know there are other ways of doing it, but when I first saw it a penny dropped. Writer out = ...; List l = ...; String sep = ""; for (Iterator i = l.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) { String s = (String) i.next(); out.write(sep); out.write(s); sep = ","; } You can see how this works:...

Just a test post.