You are not special

You are not special. I don't care how awesome you think your "framework" is, it ought to follow the standard Java package naming convention. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
— June 18, 2004

Confluence Wiki

The other day, I described a bit of what my ideal writing tool would be like (I have pages and pages of further description in my notebooks, which I won't bore you with). Atlassian has come pretty close with their Confluence wiki. It has all the standard wiki features, then: "On top of that, we added professional features, such as the partitioning of content into separately managed spaces, user- and group-based access control, automated refactoring, PDF exporting, searchable attachments, a comprehensive remote API, easy installation and a professional and easy-to-use presentation..."

It looks highly sweet. They only thing they're really lacking from my vision is automated documentation insertion/extraction (which I never figured out how to get working ...it was based on ideas from the book The Pragmatic Programmer) and diagramming tools. But it has an API and they've written a thick client so theoretically that would be possible, too.

It's proprietary software: $1200/25 users or $4000 for a site license. Well, it's cheaper than BitKeeper, anyway.

— June 18, 2004

Starting a career in "user experience"

How do you start a career in "user experience"?

Step 1: Get a pair of glasses like this guy's...

funky glasses guy

— June 18, 2004

TCJUG

Anyone know what happened to the Twin Cities Java Users Group? They seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth.
— June 18, 2004