Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Can Hibernate Learn from Edge Rails?

Just finished reading about some eager-loading options for edge rails, and how they've moved away from the outer-join approach and into a multi-query approach because they believe it to be faster.

Last I saw, Hibernate used the outer-join approach in its internals for eager-fetches, so I wonder, is this an instance where Hibernate can learn from edge rails? I'd be curious to evaluate the two approaches across all the databases Hibernate supports with different data sets and see which wins out.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Multi-tasking Development Less Efficient?

The Autumn of the Multi-Taskers argues that multi-tasking doesn't really work, that by trying to do so, we're doing less, and burning ourselves out at the same time.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
Perhaps worrisome that I managed to get this read while developing and building (more the latter than the former, but ...). I find developers practice multi-tasking quite a bit, and I wonder sometimes, if it's as effective as we might like it to be.

Via Gruber / Rands.

Monday, January 7, 2008

No Google in Toronto

Someone is always taking the opportunity to talk about how nice it is to work at Google, so I'm always surprised that they don't have a Toronto office (actually, they do have one, but they don't seem to hire software developers). Although I don't have the stats to back it up, Toronto's probably got the most software developers of any Canadian city, but ... no Google. Why is that, exactly?

Hey, Google, open a Toronto office. :)

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Launchy 2.0

If you're on Windows, and I can't persuade you (or your company) to switch, then I'm going to have to strongly recommend that you at least try out my favorite launcher: Launchy. Now that there's a v2.0, this might be a good time to give it a shot.