Saw a horrifying design document recently. One that was at the "gouge out my eyes" level of badness. That's one step below "drink until I forget what I saw", but one level above "beat the author with a tire iron."

They were -- I'm guessing here -- trying to develop their own …

The old code was 5700 lines of bad VB. The new code is Velocity, Flying Saucer, iText and 120 lines of glue. The old code will be replaced with perhaps 500 lines of XHTML-producing Velocity templates.

[The Flying Saucer site -- with the main menu on the right -- was confusing at …

Context: We're reverse engineering some bad VB application code.

What I saw. "This problem report pushed this module over the 64k limit for modules. Therefore all code used for XYZ has been removed from this module and placed in the new bas module XYZ."

What I learned. Good design -- irrelevant …

I've done a fair amount of reverse engineering over the years.

In the early days, you went from code to specification to new code. It took forever and the problems you uncovered -- well -- they often derailed the project.

Recently, I used a TDD-like approach. Each piece of legacy code was …

Apple's Time Capsule rocks.

For a while the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) -- with a disk added -- would do the same thing. You got Time Capsule backups seamlessly and continuously.

No more. Version 7.4.2. fixed the "bug". Now the AEBS no longer backs up to a disk.

They've …

I have very mixed feelings about XML's usability.

An avowed goal of the inventors of XML was "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear." While I like to think that "legible" means usable, I'm feeling that legibility is really a minimal standard; I think it's a polite way of …

I've cataloged a third specific case of fundamental failures to understand polymorphism. The first two I've seen a fair number of times. The third seems to be more rare.

1. "How do I determine which subclass an object has?" The Identification problem.

2. "How do I morph an object to …

Two months ago, we looked at some Data Warehouse design information.

It looked like 8 months of work. It might be finished by year-end. Fatal mistake: we gave a "number". Year-end.

We did due diligence, investigating source applications, data marts, subject areas, etc. And, the client delayed their decision-making process …

It's easy to prevent successful use case analysis: make it into an exercise of defining lots of "processes" in excruciating detail.

First, ignore all "objects" definition. All business domain entities -- and actors -- must be treating as second class artifacts.

Second, define everything as a process. A domain entity is just …

I've run in to some Agility questions recently. Questions that indicate that some people just don't like the Inversion of Control aspect of Agile methods.

We used to call IoC "Emergent Behavior". The system isn't designed from top-down to fill specific use cases. Instead, the system is designed so that …