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Home Schooling

Posted by daniel on January 7, 2005 at 1:54 PM EST

Doing Homework

A friend sent me a link to this classic article on The Age of Homework. It served as a reminder of a couple of things. First, email, web pages, blogs, and other online technologies continue this push to keep our attention on things that are immediate and we sometimes lose track of what's important. This Tom Peters article was written eleven years ago. It's not that it's earth shattering, but it's as current as and more relevant than most of what I read yesterday. This echoes the Esther Dyson quote from yesterday that " Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter."

Eleven years ago Peters wrote "Tomorrow's (today's!) economy is about brains. These days, the mind that's standing still is, in fact, slipping backwards down the competitive ladder. Fast." He follows with concrete suggestions that include the following:

  1. Prepare your resume.
  2. Set explicit learning goals for [this year].
  3. Take it a day at a time. ( The need is urgent.)
  4. A support group helps.

This weekend I'm going to put three articles we ran in 2004 back up in the right column of our front page. Maybe you'll see one that you may have missed this year.

Also featured in Also in Java Today , is a look back from ONJava. To close out the 2004, ONJava is presenting two yearenders: the first, ONJava 2004 in Review: Popular Articles, looks back at some of the most popular articles to be posted on the site this year. If you missed them the first time, you'll want to be sure you catch these articles on Hibernate, Tomcat, web applications, Quartz and Eclipse.

In today's Weblogs David Walend asks Did I Miss Generic Array Creation? While working on some code he found a gap and asks you for your input on whether or not "there a good reason not to create arrays of generics? Or should I report a RFE to Sun asking them to add generic parameters to Array.newInstance()?"

William Wake looks back to Harold and Purple Crayon Navigation. He talks about the programming technique that feels like that illustrated in the "book where Harold uses his crayon to draw whatever he needs, and then it's real enough to use."

I think I'm one of the folks that John Reynolds is talking about when he says that there are many folks that just don't get SOA yet. In The SOA Elevator Speech John writes that "SOA is an architectural style that encourages the creation of loosely coupled business services. Loosely coupled services that are interoperable and technology-agnostic enable business flexibility. An SOA solution consists of a composite set of business services that realize an end-to-end business process. Each service provides an interface-based service description to support flexible and dynamically re-configurable processes"

In today's Forums, we again feature Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's welcome to the new Binary Web Services and XML forum.

In Projects and Communities, Martin Fowler blogs about Spreading Incrementalism saying " to make incremental design work you need something that makes the design converge into order."

The Java Enterprise community has graduated the AppserverUnit project that helps you "create and execute JUnit-style tests for components that are deployed on a J2EE server."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

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Doing Homework
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