Mujtaba Hussain

I honestly believe that companies, whose sole ware is based on technical competence, should have an exchange program. Even as I write it in the darkness of the night, I can hear the howl of people attempting to preserve the in house knowledge against their competitors. I assure you, that is not what I meant. Allow me to quote a local example.

In Melbourne, Australia, there are two well known companies that do not compete with each other, in any way; except for talent. I speak of realestate.com.au and Lonely Planet. What exactly is stopping these two companies exchanging developers so that the skills may be sharpened ? Exchange system administrators so that better ways of disaster recovery may be learnt? After all why not ?

I now can hear people say “Oh! But surely thats what conferences and development/sys-admin meet ups are for.” Yes they serve their purpose in spreading that information. But that information is not lived! If a developer from realestate.com.au paired with one from Lonely Planet while working at Lonely Planet, then the information that he gets there is learned and absorbed much much better. Let the exchange program be fore 6 months or a year! This will stop inter company inertia and promote a very healthy environment.

Think , O companies, of all the smart people that perhaps might not leave out of boredom of doing the same old all the time! Think of all the new tools that the people would bring back knowledge of! Think of all the new talent this would attract to you!

But do you have the guts for it ? Do you ?

Mocking is hard in Java. I don’t mean “Hey you, abstract class, GROW UP!!!”.

How do I mock out a unit in Java ? What mocking framework is there to mock it ? Maybe I could use JRuby to mock it out but then, you would hope there is one in Java itself !

I have Sub::Override in Perl, I have RSpec‘s internal mockers, but in Java, I don’t know. JUnit does not provide anything of that sort. *sigh*

So I try and run and it is a personal battle. You can run as fast as you can and be as dedicated about it, but there comes a point when your body simply goes, naah, slow down lad (for me that is after 3 minutes ).

So what is the best thing I have landed on ? It’s apparently called ‘Interval Training’. The idea being you run really fast for a set amount of time, slow down for half that time and then fast again. Repeat the cycle as long as you can. I have been doing that and it hurts .

But I would highly recommend it. It is a great way to learn to improve your stamina and learn to improve your will power.

But if you extend it past an hour, make sure no one watches you cry.

So instead of re-writing an entire web page handling system for myself, I go to my dreamhost settings and Voila! I see a way of setting up my own blog. Woohoo! And here I was thinking of setting a mail server somehow to inform me of the comments posted.

By the way, here is an interesting book I read some days ago, its called The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind. A pigeon throws a man’s life in disarray.