Inherit this

Just came across the idea of inheriting actors in a use case, it didn’t seem to make sense initially but as a concept it makes a lot of sense. I don’t like the notation though, I can describe bubbles and stick figures to a business person but inheritance not a chance.

Geek vs Jock

BRW Top 50 sports earners list
1. Greg Norman Golf 20.9
2. Harry Kewell Soccer 10.5
3. Chad Reed Motor sport 8.7
4. Mark Webber Motor sport 8.5
5. Andrew Bogut Basketball 8.2
6. Lucas Neill Soccer 7.7
7. Mark Viduka Soccer 7.1
8. Lleyton Hewitt Tennis 6.6
9. Mat Mladin Motor sport 6.5
10. Adam Scott Golf 5.8

Now read this -> Geek vs Jock

PowerPoint Tip

I attended a presentation skills training course recently and was told about an interesting feature of PowerPoint. When you are displaying the slide show pressing B will make the screen Black and pressing W will make the screen White. I am amazed that after all these years I have not come across this.

Architecture and how to mess it up

Jeff Cohan in a nice little post on Rails Architecture makes a great point about Architecture being one thing but using the architecture correctly is another. He relates it the the architecture of a house or apartment and how you destroy what the architect envisioned when he designed it by putting the wrong things or too many things into the building.

Got to love a good metaphor.

But there are no macros

I came across an interesting problem the other day where I had created a macro in a spreadsheet then decided to delete it. When I opened the spreadsheet after deleting it I still got the obligatory macro dialog when I opened the spreadsheet asked if I wanted to enable or disable macros. Well out comes Google and I found the following article on deleting macros, it turns out deleting the macro doesn’t really delete everything. I hope this helps someone somewhere and sometime.

Get with the program

I was looking around The Age web site and ended up with a list of articles by a particular journalist, my first thought was cool, I might add that list to my RSS reader. Could I find a feed for that particular page, No! When you come to expect something and it isn’t there it can really throw you out.

Is this the bottom

If you asked who would be a good person to take your lead from in the financial market, Warren Buffet would have to be that person. So given that he has just sank $5,000,000,000 into Goldman Sach, does that mean the financial markets have bottomed?

125 Days Later

Well after 125 days I have finally completed the Global Corporate Challenge and what a great experience it has been. Some of the highlights of the last 125 days have been:

1. Spending quality time with my kids, it isn’t as much fun walking alone.
2. Discovering 101 different ways to walk 5000 steps around my neighbourhood.
3. Discovering how hard it is to walk 31500 steps in one day, my best effort.
4. Having to collect lost tennis balls around the local tennis club.
5. Discovering Bob Padula’s blog and the many walks on it and meeting him on one of them.
6. Being inspired to walk Mt Feathertop this summer, have to use this new found fitness for something.

Turn a hundred dollars into a Million

Todays Dilbert cartoon left me laughing but then in the second wave realised the practical lesson that was there to learn. Yes Dogbert is correct if you invested a hundred dollars in an investment that returned 5% in 190 days, well just over 188 to be exact you would have a million dollars. Our perception of money can sometimes be warped when you consider the time cost and then add on a risk component to get the interest rate up so that you can get to you goal in a shorter period of time.
Albert Einstein correctly made the comment

“The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”

Train…ing developers to write better code

While sitting on the train the other morning coming into work, I was suprised when I looked up at the Message board and saw the following announcement.

Arriving Camberwell change for Unknown LineID [15] services

My mind started spinning as to what was the architecture that resulted in the message. Are the messages sent to the train or stored on the train? Either way you would have thought that the requirements for such a service would not have specified the displayed message but something a bit more user friendly.