This is why company funded pensions are a bad idea…

Sigh… how could anyone make a living by killing pension plans? I mean, really.

Third time’s the charm?

Well, that makes it official: Wotif is the third company I’ve worked in that’s decided to go public. Hope it goes better than the last two… the first misread the market badly and went into a several year downturn, while the other managed to burn through nearly all their VC finance, nearly went bankrupt, and got bought out by one of their venture partners.
Continue reading “Third time’s the charm?”

More on income diversity

An off-hand statement in the editorial of The Australian today went like this:

Even after the threshold changes in the May budget, the top 5 per cent of taxpayers are going to be paying a quarter of Australia’s net income tax

(Look in the section about Peter Costello)
Continue reading “More on income diversity”

Who needs a structured message format?

Grr… Somewhere in the universe there is a special place put aside for people who think it’s sensible to pass XML data around in a Web Service as an unstructured string.

Income diversity

To quote the New York Times

This week’s census report showed that income inequality was near all-time highs in 2004, with 50.1 percent of income going to the top 20 percent of households. And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling.

Continue reading “Income diversity”

I’m sorry, I can’t believe this one…

Saw this as a comment on Russel Beattie’s blog: dozens of buses flooded out in New Orleans.

This is just bloody ridiculous. There’s probably close to a hundred buses there. Why weren’t they used in the pre-hurricane evacuation? Why weren’t they moved to higher ground if they weren’t used in the evacuation? Those buses represent 10,000 people per round trip who could have been taken out.

Frankly, the US government (both state and federal) obviously have no ability to cope with disaster planning.

JBR’s Postulate 1

From the JUnit mailing list, courtesy of J.B "JUnit Recipies" Rainsberger

JBR’s postulate 1. For every testable design that requires exposing elements “just for testing”, there exists an equivalent testable design that does not require exposing elements “just for testing”.

XML, java.io, and the Composite Pattern

Tony Obermeit posted a question to the AJUG-QLD mailing list asking for help with a problem reading XML snippets. So, I thought I’d help him out, and this is the answer I gave.

*Update*: As pointed out by Pepijn Schmitz, Sun already provided the same solution: java.io.SequenceInputStream

*Another update*: I raised an RFE with Sun for the vararg support Vote early, vote often!

Continue reading “XML, java.io, and the Composite Pattern”

The code is the design…

A very interesting article, originally published in 1992, on Code as Design Yet more proof that there isn’t anything new about Agile (and that’s it’s best part! 😉