Ivan Moore blogs about the recent Hot Topic of which GoF patterns should be removed from the hypothetical 2nd edition of the book. Without commenting on Ivan's opinions on the patterns themselves (which I mostly agree with), he can't possibly be serious about the two volumes of the book -- one with just the "safe" patterns and the other with all of them.

Remembering that most all software developers believe they're above average, how many copies of the "beginner" volume would ever leave the shelves? Maybe some, if the price would reflect the physical volume, but I strongly doubt that the numbers would be even close to the sales of the "advanced" volume...

I wonder why the University of Maine seems to think that most people have software installed that supports the RTSP protocol?

Ok. It's time to wrap up last week's events.

First of all, there was a lot of busyness at work since this week was the week between an initial user acceptance test and the follow-up where all of the issues found during the user acceptance test should be corrected. There are people all around the globe testing the system right now. I'll know on Tuesday whether they're satisfied with it. There are at least some cosmetic defects left. Add to that, we still need to add in a couple of maintenance/debugging tools for ourselves before going live with this release.

On Wednesday evening, I ran a 2 1/2-hour session at the office on the topic of refactoring. It was actually supposed to be just 2 hours but the hands-on demo (me typing away on the projector based on what the audience wanted to do) took way longer than I had originally thought it would. Which was great. A lot of opinions were voiced and I'm quite certain that the session raised a lot of thoughts for all of us present, even though not all communicated their opinions out loud. I'm so pleased with the outcome that I'm probably going to use the material almost as-is in the XP training class I'm going to run in Riga in January.

Last night, I hurried from work to a bar downtown to say my farewells to a colleague that's jumping ship to a nearby "smaller" IT shop. Not the first one to go, and most definitely not the last one. Very interesting discussions about topics only that particular group of people can discuss. Tolkien's women, the French-speaking village in the middle of Albania, etc. A great bunch and much fun, as always.

Oh, and I'm having a three-day weekend since Monday is the independence day here in Finland :)