Cyberpsyche

Mac Paint, the program that Knuth asked to study for his Art of Computer Programming has been released to the Computer History Museum. Highly regarded Knuth called MacPaint the "best program ever written". Bill Atkinson, the programmer, was not only a visionary but highly productive. Ahead of his time he later of programming:

In this excerpt from the British Library I like the part about Entrepreneurs who call themselves Entrepreneurs.

A few years ago I started buying property in the up-and-coming ski resort of Bansko in Bulgaria. This has turned out to be a long overdue process with little information about what is happening. Although the development still sounds promising since the banks went bust all seems very quiet. The building is real, I've been out and visited it more than once, but in common with many countries development has slowed or stopped.

I've taken a few frustrating hours trying to work out how to transfer information out of a soap response into another soap request. As it took so long I thought I'd put this in case it helps someone.

It is easy enough to use the Property Transfer step in SoapUI to transfer single values like session keys, but when it comes to a list of result is is a little more challenging. It is possible to script the transfer using Groovy, however I thought it should be possible to use XPath.

The response is something similar to:

...
<results>
  <items>
    <item>

One of the problems with starting a new project is the time to set up the project. In recent years some frameworks, like Ruby-on-Rails have created a quick ways to set up projects days are not wasted setting up the project, build system and test environment. Spring Roo provides a way of creating project infrastructure for Spring-based web applications. It was announced in 2009 and produces the basic project layout and a working application connecting through to a database.

Over the last few years I've collected quite few tracks from the internet. There is some pretty good music that is available for nothing, either album samples, given away by artists and just free. The recent case where Google shut down some music blogs illustrates that there is a lot of music out there in the blogsphere. Many think that rather than harm artists this gives artists a break. It may though create competition for the large record labels from smaller labels.

Some recent finds:

I came across this:

Moments --- Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Alastair Reid

If I were able to live my life again,
next time I would try to make more mistakes.
I would not try to be so perfect. I would be more relaxed.
I would be much more foolish than I have been. In fact,
I would take very few things seriously.
I would be much less sanitary.
I would run more risks. I would take more trips,
I would contemplate more sunsets,
I would climb more mountains,