CBC News: Alberta’s growth ‘strongest ever’: StatsCan

Alberta is in the midst of the strongest period of economic growth ever recorded by any province in the country’s history, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

A chronic labour shortage that could see a shortfall of some 30,000 workers over the next decade is putting constraints on economic growth in Calgary and frustrating employers in need of critical human resources, says a comprehensive report obtained by the Herald.

Homeless people in Calgary are sleeping outdoors because of a bed shortage, say two area shelters. The shelters attribute the problem to people who move to the city for work, but can’t find affordable housing.

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. says the city’s vacancy rate likely hovers at about 0.6 per cent, with the average two-bedroom apartment renting for $1,010 a month.

CBC News: Calgary’s downtown office space tighter than Tokyo

CB Richard Ellis Limited reports the vacancy rate for “Class A” downtown space is just 0.2 per cent. That’s lower than Tokyo, which traditionally has the lowest vacancy rate of any major city in the world, according to the report.

Yup.  All this growth is great.  Just great.

I followed a link from Tim Bray’s blog, about Sun hiring the JRuby developers, and ended up here. Interesting charts, but I wonder if book sales are a good indicator.

O’Reilly Radar > Programming Language Trends

Programming Language market share trend in computer books

I wrote yesterday about the rise of Ruby and Javascript, driven by the move towards Web 2.0 applications. Also worthy of note in these graphs is the long, slow decline of Java and C/C++, and the continuing rise in market share of C#. You can see how Ruby’s sharp ascent follows the introduction of Rails, and that PHP’s fortunes reversed before book sales showed that web developers in search of rapid development languages moved over to RoR (and Microsoft’s ASP.Net suite of technologies.)

Maven – Guide to Moving From Maven 1.x to Maven 2.x

It is possible to establish parallel Maven builds, one using the old M1 settings, and a second using M2. The Maven 2 configuration file names and uses have been modified, so the two builds should not conflict.

A Maven 1.x build is configured with the following files:

• [project.xml] Project Object Model (POM) definition
• [maven.xml] Custom build scripts
• [project.properties] general build settings
• [build.properties] local build settings

  A Maven 2 build is configured with a different file set:

• [pom.xml] POM definition
• [settings.xml] local configuration

I was just going back over the Maven build that I put together almost one year ago. At the time, I picked the official release, so we used Maven 1.x. I knew we’d have an upgrade down the road, and since I looked into some of the Maven 1 to Maven 2 changes, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. But I see they have managed to put everything together in such a way that you can have both versions available to build without conflicting. Brilliant! I wish everyone that was putting together major new releases, with major changes, did such a good job of taking the pain out of the process.

Now I can install the new Maven 2, and upgrade pieces and parts of our build as I go, when I have the time. And when I’m done, I can just switch the continuous builder over to Maven 2 and I’ll be done. I like it.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

The way to avoid deeply nesting is to do early exit as soon as possible. The trivial example could be rewritten as:

<br />if (!foo) return;      <br />if (!bar) return;      <br />if (!anotherVariable) return;      <br />… and this is the logic<br />

I violently disagree with this solution to the unreadability of deeply nested if’s. IMO, you are just trading one problem (poor readability) for another problem (really hard to debug). If you have deeply nested if’s, then you probably need to apply the state machine design pattern to your code.

I’m almost positive I’ve seen all of these clips before. But that doesn’t stop them from being totally hilarious, even if you are a dog person ;-)

Coding Horror: Source Control: Anything But SourceSafe

The top 9 responses are reprinted here. I’m disheartened to see that Visual SourceSafe is still at the top of the list. If you are serious about the practice of software development, you should avoid SourceSafe.

I don’t know how many times this has to be said before developers start paying attention, but let’s try it one more time. Never, never, use SourceSafe.

I keep seeing this sort of stuff from new applications, or new builds of old applications. These developers are unclear on the concept of what a “universal” binary actually is. If you really have a “universal” binary, there is no need for a PowerPC binary. And if you need the “PowerPC” part, then you probably don’t have a “universal” binary, you probably have an “Intel” binary.


Attachment Scanner Plugin for Mail.app

Installing the Plugin

1. Download the plugin: PowerPC [ source ]

Am I the only person who finds that Cingular TV commercial disturbing? You know, the one with the chef who is complaining about dropped calls?

I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one. But every time I see that commercial, the only thing that really registers is … “angry man with knife”, and it makes me want to run away or change the channel or something. Probably not what Cingular had in mind…