Comments on: Convention ÷ Configuration

By: dan

dan — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:40:00 +0000

…although greater-than doesn’t really capture the spirit of what we’re trying to express. I mean, it holds up ok for…

Pen > Sword

…but what about…

Rock > Scissors > Paper > Rock

By: dan

dan — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:11:34 +0000

Also, your use of the division sign (÷, or obelus) is inappropriate.

Yes, when expressing a fraction (such as three-quarters), one would often say “three over four” and write 3/4 (but not 3÷4) to represent ¾.

Even if we accept the leap from 3/4 to 3÷4, the “over” in “three over four” literally means “on top of” (e.g. one flew over the cuckoo’s nest), because when we write ¾ we put the 3 on top of the 4.

But in this instance, “over” means “in preference to” not “on top of”,
and there’s no equivalent symbolic mapping for this relationship. If anything, the closest thing is “greater than”.

So perhaps you meant “Convention > Configuration”?

By: dan

dan — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:02:06 +0000

Where are all the links? You know that links are the lifeblood of blogging, right? For example, “eclipse”, “Ubuntu” and “OpenJDK” should all point at their respective projects. But, more importantly, “I downloaded the Sun JDK” should go to the set of instructions you used to do that. Same thing for “create a simple Maven project”. How am I s’posed to learn anything from this post? All it says to me is “I’m an idiot; the Eclipse tooltip clearly told me that the project settings should point at Java 1.5, and when I did that it worked”.

Even your conclusions are unclear. Should I get the m2eclipse to give me a 1.5 project, or do I get a 1.4 project then upgrade it in eclipse?

What do the providers of maven projects do? You can download starter projects for, say, OSGI Maps, right? Do they come in different flavours of Java (OSGI 5 starter pack, OSGI 6 starter pack,…)? Or does maven/m2 pick up your current java version and download the appropriate project?