About books...

On a slightly related note to the previous post, I will try to post a short summary and my humble opinions about the books I finish on this blog. I will also try to post delayed for the books I have finished in the past, so stay tuned - although, don't hold your breaths! ;)

Behind Closed Doors

I just finished reading Behind Closed Doors - Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby.

Like everything else I have read from The Pragmatic Programmers it's quite excellent, and with its A5-ish size, 150 pages and brilliant authorship it makes a fun and quick read. No problem reading through this in a couple of sittings.

As the title implies, the book is about management; managing knowledge workers in general, and managing software development projects in particluar. The authors tell the story about the gifted manager Sam in an imaginary firm the first weeks on the job. In the course of these weeks, we learn how Sam manages his direct reports, how he solves problems, and how he handles upper management. Intertwined in the story are comments and suggestions by the authors about how the reader might handle similar situations in his job.

There should be something in this book for everyone, be it aspiring, acting or seasoned manager.

A recommended read.

Read more on Amazon

Ruby on Rails hosting

I have finally come to the decision that I will develop a Ruby on Rails app and get it online. A couple of months ago, I played a bit with Rails, and read most of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Web Development with Rails.

I'm pretty confident that I will manage to develop the thing... It's a typical CRUD application. But I have to make sure that I will be able to get it online. So I spent a few minutes today looking at hosting options. I'm currently using JTLnet, and I'm pretty happy with them, so I may look into making them host it. But if they will not support Rails, I'm considering A2 Hosting. They look pretty serious.

But I'll have to look more into this. I will post my final decision.

file.encoding on Linux

I haven been going crazy lately over encoding problems that occur when developing on a Windows machine and then deploying on a Linux production system. It has looked like whenever I don't explicitly use encodings in my code, I run into trouble. One should think that setting the file.encoding system property to the same values on both systems should do the trick - but nouu...

Okay, this is not a rant post, so the reason I am complaining is because I would like to express the joy of finally having found a solution. I'm happy! :)

Aparantly, setting the file.encoding on some Linux systems has no effect. The jre uses the function nl_langinfo() to discover the default encoding to use. This function is based on the LANG or LC_ALL environment variables. So, setting LANG=en_EN.utf-8 i can force my application to use UTF-8 as default encoding.

Also, it appears that Java 5 has this problem solved and uses the file.encoding system property correctly.

Atleast, now things are understandable.