tigretigre.com

I just recently read Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Very insightful and replete with wisdom derived of experience. What just struck me though was how many of the principles relate to my ongoing study and practice of the ancient Asian strategy game of Go. Maybe there's some shared Japanese philosophy behind it all that I just happened upon.

If there's a place you wanna go, I'm the one you need to know...

My boss tells me I have "an unhealthy fascination with map". That may be true, but it's only because map is a perfect example of what makes Perl Perl. Let's take a quick stroll through some of the ins and outs of this wondrous little function, shall we?

I used to like Perl. The past few months using it as my main language, I grew to really like it a lot. What had me fall head over heels in love, what inspired me to start this new blog series: hash slices. Anyone who's been around Perl at all knows hashes (i.e. associative arrays, to use the behavioral description rather than the implementation description). They are a core feature that set it apart fairly early on as a force to be reckoned with, and has been emulated numerous times due to it's simplicity and power.

Someone asked me to elaborate a bit on what would motivate participants in my SOA social-network aggregation scheme. So here's my take on it at this stage of the game.

It's about time I started getting down to brass tacks on how I will implement a proof-of-concept of my SOA-based content aggregation scheme. I guess for that, I'm going to have to build some services. I'm taking an object-oriented approach, and hopefully one that can be applied in multiple languages/platforms and can be used to implement services using a wide range of protocols.

Google tells me today that I am for the moment the world's foremost expert on SOA-based social-network aggregation, so I figured I'd better have more to say on that topic. Fortunately, I do.

First, a little further review of the existing literature:

• Wikipedia has a good summary of the standard sort of social-network aggregators you'll find out there, but as I said before, they are all going about it with the master portal approach.

In developing the filters for the datepicker widget, I came upon a situation where I wanted to get an element-wise OR of two Boolean arrays, i.e. produce an array where each element is the reslt of OR-ing the corresponding values of two other arrays.

Just updated the date-picker widget to 1.0, with customizable date-filtering. See the wiki for more information.

(Note: as I said in a previous post, the social networking aspect is merely a special case of a larger issue, but it is the hot topic of the moment so I will speak only of this concrete case for now. The priniciples are very easy to generalize.)

There have been a few DHTML scripts that I've incorporated into my projects that have since been abandoned by the original maintainer. I am now using Google Code to keep some of these up to date. See http://code.google.com/u/tigretigre/ to check out what I've been up to. So far, I have been working with Baron Schwartz's flexible-js-formatting library, and I'm also managing Mathieu Jondet's datepicker widget. (So far, I'm working mostly with Prototype/Scriptaculous projects.)