In anticipation to the upcoming Cataclysm expansion to World of Warcraft, Wowhead.com has an exclusive interview with the key system designer at Blizzard, Ghostcrawler.
You can read the interview here. Ghostcrawler is always good fun and we even get the answer to the very important question ‘Where’s our moose?!’
Jun 13
Cheerio! I guess it’s about time I present all of you patient readers with a new update to this blog. It’s been quite a while since I last updated, as always, but a few things has happened to the web server, which means the appearance of the blog has changed. The major change has been that we finally managed to go from PHP 4.3 to PHP 5.2.13. This means that we’re finally able to update our plugins and themes to the newest versions.
After working for quite some time to get a suitable solution for moving the forum from phpBB3 to vBulletin. The main reason for this has been that I was getting tired of how hard it was for me to install modifications and other things in phpBB. However, I am not made of money and after playing around with vBulletin Publishing Suite 4.0.3 and ImpEx 1.96 I decided that the end result of an import, simply wasn’t good enough for me to spend around $300 for this software.
Also I had problems, or in other words: ‘no success at all’, with importing my blog posts from this WordPress blog into the CMS, I simply decided to give up. This meant that I was a bit unhappy, as I had hoped to be able to have all my sites combined into one, so I didn’t have to take care of all the different installations.
However, I’m a persistent fellow, I decided to look around for ways to integrate phpBB into WordPress and fell over the solution called WP-United, which has the exact abilities I were looking for. Getting the same layout on both blog and forum by integrating the phpBB forum into the blog.
This is one of the major reasons for this fantastic new layout on the blog. I’ve been testing around with an offline copy and found that this theme is the best for integrating the before mentioned features. The only reason it isn’t quite done yet, is that I’m currently working on perfecting a SubSilver2 theme, as that is the one my users like.
That was a short update, where I didn’t mention the ongoing World Cup at all, before here! Laters!
Now that we, somehow, have managed to revive this, let’s have some fun. Last post was one of the updates I’ve made that generated the most comments, since I called Rihanna a talentless something. Back then people felt the need to tell me that I was just ‘jealous’. Actually what this guy said was:
Nahshon aka Young bwoy – ‘r u stupid rihanna album and single is the worst u r fucking stupid her new look is sexy and she had a good year ur just mad cause u dont have the fame’
What do you answer to a comment like that? Well I decided to take the high road and simply said ‘As to fame? Why on earth would I want more fame than I already got?’. Apparently that kept ‘Nahshon aka Young bwoy away’ from commenting again… I don’t know exactly what scared him away, maybe he realised that I’m so famous (*cough*) that he could not compete with me. Maybe he just thought that my comment was useless, who knows. That said, I did like it and felt like the king of the world with my ‘witty’ comment.
I felt happy back then, some strange people actually came by and began to comment on my posts? Apparently the entry in question was caught on MSN Music and Google News. It was fun! So let’s just take a short break and all thank ‘t0mmmmmmm’ over at onehertz for making a theme for WordPress, which has brilliant SEO. Also the fact that the domain UnaX.dk is nice and easy to remember helps strange people stop by. Anyhow, let’s get back to the post.
In a comment I myself made, to my last post, I was threatening with making a pop-quiz with the names of Danish kings. However, I’m not that evil and thought we should do some rambling about something useful instead, so let me introduce you all to a nice fellow called Martin Fowler. He is an expert in design and architecture of enterprise software, which you might think sound a little boring. However, he tends to have some great ideas and since I’ve decided to have a focus on UML in my dissertation, he is slowly becoming a big inspiration as to how I’m going to do this. I could just decide to follow the teachings of Craig Larman and do the UML the hard and tedious way, but that would lead me into thoughts of hanging myself from my living room window with my mouse cord. Mainly because his book ‘Applying UML and Patterns’ is, in his own words:
‘…a standard university text in many countries as an introduction to analysis and design of software-intensive systems.’
That’s what he has to say about his book. Notice the word I decided to highlight in bold, introduction. Because that is the main problem I have with the book by Larman. Everything he writes is just too simple, he doesn’t give you any alternatives to what diagrams are actually needed in different situations, nor does he give any sceptic views on whether a model is actually useful at all. If I had to follow Craig Larmans advice, all I would be doing for my dissertation was creating and maintaining models. Again I think this would indeed make me want to hang myself. However, if you know nothing about UML, then Larmans book is a decent place to start. Yes, only ‘decent’ as I’m sure there is better alternatives out there. According to our school though this book is ‘the best of a lot of bad books’.
The thing is that we’re doing our dissertation in our own form of ‘agile Unified Process’, which means we’re not entirely within the constraints of the regular form of Unified Process. This means that we’ve decided to take some elements from XP and add them to UP. So far we haven’t found a name for it, but I can name some of the things from XP we’ve decided to work with: Pair programming and test first.
By doing this I’ve been reading a little and as some people have the idea in XP that you’re not supposed to use UML, Martin Fowler has written this great article about it, Is Design Dead?. Here he touches some of the things that makes me most happy about UML. The idea that you only should do diagrams that adds value to you, is just fantastic. The way I see this is, that you don’t have to sit and make tedious sequence diagrams or class diagrams which you have to spend hours to keep up to date, when the code changes. Actually instead of using professional software, you can simply write it on a piece of paper, a napkin or whatever you have within hands. Only do it if it adds value to you!
Combining this article with Martin Fowlers book ‘UML Distilled’, which in my eyes are a much better, and lighter, book than Larmans ‘bible’ I’ve gotten a much better and more useful sight on UML in general. On a side note, Fowlers book is not an introduction, but more a book you can use if you already know UML, hence why I said that Larmans book is a ‘decent’ way to get introduced to UML. Now I’m more positive when it comes to UML, because it doesn’t have to be all that bad.
This brings me to another point with graces the issue of UML as documentation or as a architecture defining tool. After all there are many different uses for UML, mainly the reverse engineering and model-driven architecture approaches has been in my mind. Because how important is UML as documentation? And how important is it when you want to do model-driven architecture?
I guess that is something I should try and explain in my next blog post…
Mentioned books:
Craig Larman – Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
Third edition
ISBN: 0-13-148906-2
Buy at Amazon.com
Martin Fowler – UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
Third edition
ISBN: 0-321-19368-7
Buy at Amazon.com
Now that was a very long ramble about something most people might find boring, but however something that is important, at least to me. As I know some of you have had these strange cravings of more updates to the blog, so here you go.
Just to end this post, I’ve decided to delete the UnaX.dk Beta site and the UnaX.dk Wiki. Mainly because some idiots had completely spammed the Wiki and filled the database. Also I’ve decided to move the MySQL database that this blog was running on from 4.0 to 5.1. Mainly so I could update it to 2.9.2. All this said, that’s it for me and I hope you all have a nice time, doing whatever you’re doing…
Klaus over and out!
Why, hello there! So, you’re still stopping by every now and then to see what is going on? I guess I’d better write something then…
First of all, let’s just summarise what has been going on in my life since my last post (it’s been a while you know!). The last post was about the project I had to do in C# and as you all know, if you actually read the post, I was making a client to search for items on Amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately it didn’t go as well as I planned, but I did make a client which enables you to search for books. The client however is rather slow and you can’t buy directly from it, which was the main goal. I’ll give you a few screen shots of it (as always clicking the image will start a slide show):
Currently this is all that the client is capable of doing. One of the major drawbacks with using the free version of the Amazon.co.uk web service is that you can only get 10 results in return. It works as a little mock-up client, but not as something you’d use as a strong alternative to the normal website. That could be helped by paying for use of the web service of course, but I’m just a poor student…
If you should have sick tendencies and a deep desire to try the client itself, you can get it right here! If you decide to do so, you’ll need to unpack the program with a program that support the .7z file format. I recommend 7-zip which is nice and free or you could go for WinRAR, which is free for 30 days (however you can keep using it after the 30 days, by just bypassing the warning, so I guess you could call it free too). Simply double-click the .exe file and have fun. If you get an error message saying something about ‘exception’ and ‘JIT-debugging’ just chose to continue the program.
To get up to more recent times, as all this was back in late December and early January, let me tell a little about what is happening right now. Currently I’m working on my dissertation, together with 3 other guys from my class. We’re working on creating a support system for BluePosition, who you can read a little more about by following the link. I can’t really tell much about the details of the application we’re creating, but I can tell you that once again we’re working in C#… I can also tell that I myself are working on becoming a little better within the horrendous world of UML, no something I would advise people to work hard with. The project will end on the 16th of April and by then we should hopefully have implemented a few use-cases and made some good reports to hand in for the school, so we can defend the dissertation in style…
So now you might think a little. Yes I know it may sound strange, but you might. To be a little more specific I’m talking, once again, about the title of this blog post. Well, I’ve been looking a little at the Danish royal line, because I was bored. So I thought I’d recite it to you, just because I can and you’re already reading this. I’m going to bore you!
These first ones are not 100% proven, so I’ll keep the years they were reigning out of this part:
Right that was the 8th-10th century kings of our wonderful country. Ready for more?!
Bored yet?! There is more, now we start to get into some of the ‘better known’ kings. At least for us Danes:
Tada, here you go, the line of Danish monarchs! Enjoy 
With around 40 minutes to spare before I have to leave for a ‘day’ in school, talking about project management with my project group and a nice little game of Christmas bingo (according to the announcement on the Schools Intranet, the main price last year was a nice PlayStation Wii(?)), I thought it was about time to come with a little update to this and that. Yet again I might warn people who have no interest into computer science to skip the major parts of the article.
As some of you might remember my last update was about our upcoming C#/.NET project, so lets start out with just commenting on how it’s coming along so far. I guess it could be summarised with one simple word: Disaster! I guess if I had to explain in more depth I would make the earlier summary redundant, so I won’t. Let’s just conclude that I need to get my head into it and actually get cracking and try and feel more secure with my abilities within C#/.NET.
My major concern in the past week or so has been creating a Java-based e-mail client, which is going to be part of the solution our company is making for a customer. I’ve had a few problems getting the JavaMail API to do what I want it to, so also within this, I’ve felt like I’ve gotten absolutely nowhere. However, there is nothing to do but just get it done, as we have a deadline the 1st of December. I can’t help to think that with the stress of school, we might have bitten over more than we can actually chew. All I’ve really been able to conclude is that I’ve let my skills get way too rusty for my own liking. When I really had to do some programming I felt like it was the first time I ever looked at a piece of Java code. To be honest it made me feel quite bad. What the hell have I been doing with my time over the past 4-6 months? Surely not programming it feels.
This brings us to the title, ‘The continuous adventure of disappointment’, which I wanted to use to explain how I feel about myself at the moment. How the hell can I let myself slip like this? I’m sure of what my holiday is going to consist of: Programming. This means that I might have to skip all the holly jolly Christmas arrangements and even skip the eventual New Years parties, but I need to get back on track before we start our main task for the entire education. The big fat 5th semester project, which will make out the entire evaluation of these past 2½ years.
To conclude, as I sit here with a cup of coffee and think of something clever to write, I feel like I’ve let myself down code-wise. As mentioned before, there is only one way back in the saddle and that is practice!
On a little side note, why is it that I feel so insecure when I have to explain things in Danish? It’s my main language and I should have no problems in expressing myself. I guess it’s one of the dangers when you do most of your communication and studies in English, you end up feeling more secure in your 2nd language. I guess that will be of use if I really end up going abroad to work.
Ah well, nonsense and useless rants has always been one of my trademarks, so I’ll step back and spare you for more this time around. Enjoy the rain…
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