So you want me to do what now?

Well it's official, I'm now Cape Clear's new Chief Architect. Which is more than a little bewildering. Well given the ever increasing number of WS-* specs mutating and combining like crazy it's more that a little bewildering.

So what does this really mean? Is there like a handbook for new Chief Architect's somewhere I should be reading. I checked Google and all I could find was a Fire Chief's Handbook, which while relevant is more what I'm looking to avoid in the future.

Editor Widget Demo

The fantastic dojo toolkit keeps getting better. This time they've released a WYSIWYG editor. It really rocks. The editor arose out of JotSpots sponsoring of the dojo project. JotSpot is a commercial wiki for people who dig wiki functionality but frankly couldn't be arsed to learn any of the myriad character escape pseudo-markup languages that they normally make you jump through. I'm beaming psychic-techno hints at blogger as I post this entry.

Monkeygrease - now Java's cool too

Saw this on ajaxian. Someone has done a greasemonkey-style using Java servlet-filters. Basically you can install an XML file that allows you to transcode the HTML being rendered by the underlying web-app. Server-side greasemonkey. Typically you'll use this to insert a glob of Javascript / CSS magic that will change the way the application looks / operates.

Laws of Development

Here's my version of this received wisdom:

1. Wait long enough and the requirement will go away.
   
2. There are few problems that cannot be solved with another layer of indirection.
3. If you can't describe it in writing, you can't build it. If it's so small it doesn't need documentation, it doesn't do anything worthwhile.
   
4. Most computing problems were solved by 1970.
5. All programs evolve until they can read email.
6. There are no silver bullets.
   
7. Adding man power to a late software project makes it later.
8. The likelihood of failure of a project increases with the square of the number of unproven techniques / products or people involved.
   
9. The most difficult or nearly impossible programming problems appear obvious or extremely simple to anyone with little or no knowledge of programming.
10. The most common reason for a distributed applications hanging is DNS.