Blog Yellek

Big Design Up Front (BDUF) is definitely the go at my place of employment. It seemingly gives the security of deterministic outcomes without doing anything of the sort. I was reading this article today which seemed to sum up a lot of my feelings as well as making some good point about UML, worth a read.

OK this is hard. Day 2 of the TV fast and I’m already missing it badly. I logged on to my personal TV guide to see what I was missing:

Tonight as I was leaving work and catching the bus I ran into a situation which brought home to me how frail our lives can be at times. As I approached the bus stop I noticed that there was this old guy lying near the side of the road. It didn’t look like he had just fallen over so, as I seemed to be the first person there, I wondered how many other people had just walked by thinking he was drunk or something.

As I wondered what to do a few other people came up and luckily someone knew the emergency number for mobiles (112 as it turns out) I rang for an ambulance and then waited there as the dispatcher asked me some questions about how he was (yes he had a strong pulse, yes he was breathing regularly, yes turning him on his side would be a good idea), all things I should have thought of. Of course realizing that thaty metal medi bracelet might have been important would have been a good thing to tell them too.

Eventually the ambos arrived and got to work. It turned out he was suffering from low blood sugar so they proceeded to give him glucose.

For the ambos it was probably just another day at the office but for me brushing up against how frail life really is made my own petty concerns seem unimportant. I got on my bus and left the ambos to their task. I didn’t know this man’s name and he doesn’t know mine. I wonder if I’ll see him in heaven?

Well the seminar was both more and less than I expected. There were about 150 people there which was an amazing turnout considering that they were charging $20 (including dinner). Some of the stuff I had heard before, good solid principles on how God designed relationships to happen and the value of singleness.

The thing that struck me the most was how conservative the Paradise culture is when it comes to relationships. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, I can certainly see the merit in what was being said. I figure God called me to Paradise and He knew what the score was when He called me so that is that. Even so I do admit to feeling rebellious a few times with thoughts in my head of Oh come on, that can’t matter too much can it.

It’s hard changing church cultures sometimes.

I’m just about to go to this God, Sex and Relationships seminar up at Thirty Somehing. It should be an interesting afternoon.

I’ve been working with Groovy and Ant lately with this nifty Groovy Ant Task, just the thing to tame a rather complex build problem… If it worked. As they say in the classics “Aargh. You threw off my groove! “

Where to start, first there’s a memory leak and then a classloader problem and after that it can’t parse my template anyway and gives me a weird error (I’m still writing the test case for that one).

This isn’t the first time I’ve had a go round with Groovy, last time it was a problem with nested closures and classloaders if I recall. Don’t get me wrong, Groovy is a really cool language but I wish it’d stop RUINING MY GROOVE

Lets just say you wanted to implement music creation software in Java. How would you go about it?

My first thought was that this is really a music IDE and how would you go about building an IDE? Use the Eclipse RCP of course.

OK so we are using eclipse. A basic requirement would be to host VST plugins. Most VST plugins are written in C or C++ so we are obviously talking JNI. There is a tool called jVSTwRapper which solves the opposite problem (embedding Java VST plugins in native hosts) so maybe that would be a good place to start.

We are definitely going to need a copy of the Steinberg VST SDK and probably a copy of the Eclipse CDT to work with C and C++.

OK so we need to know something about how VST works so a good VST tutorial would be useful and how about a VST debugger to help when we get it working.

VST plugins come with their own UI’s so we are going to have to figure out how to draw native UI on an SWT control somehow.

Now all we have to do is write the rest of our tool.

This is sounding more and more like a mythical Sunday project but wouldn’t it be nice if it all came together…

Found this link to a human tetris video. Quite funny. Now I want to see a whole bunch of pieces trying to fit together somewhere.

I was talking to Pastor Mark today and it struck me as I reflected on our conversation that my opinions are so much shaped by the last person that I have talked to. Whilst I am talking to a person I will be absolutely convinced that that person is telling me the way it is when what they are really doing is giving me their opinion on how it is. Over time I might chew throught things and change slowly but nothing can change my opinion faster than talking to someone else with a different slant on things. Part of the reason for this I think is that I tend to trust people easily and that I like to apply my mind to what they say and try to fit it into my worlkd view.

I guess I’m not alone in this, salespeople always want to have the las meeting with a customer when selling against their competition to leave the lasting impression. Maybe I should be more aware of this and be more discerning when listening to people?

Sometimes I forget the blessings of a good long chat with the rellies interstate. I had a great time tonight catching up tonight and hearing all the news as well as the latest antics of the Ebenezerling. Note to self, must do this more often.