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• Correct definition of the term "Yak Shaving"

  - by StevenWilkins

  The wiktionary has two different definitions: Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. The actually useless activity you do that appears important when you are consciously or unconsciously procrastinating about a larger problem. This post defines it as: yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task. I personally prefer the final definition because it contains the word "fiddly" which I think perfectly describes a typical yak shaving task. What is the best definition you've come across or can provide?

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• The best programmer is N times more effective than the worst? Who Cares?

  - by StevenWilkins

  There is a latent belief in programming that the best programmer is N times more effective than the worst. Where N is usually between 10 and 100. Here are some examples: http://www.devtopics.com/programmer-productivity-the-tenfinity-factor/ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/25/understanding-productivity-differences-between-developers.aspx There is some debate as to whether or not it's been proven: http://morendil.github.com/folklore.html I'm confident in the accuracy of these statements: The best salesmen in the world are probably 10-100 times better than the worst The best drivers in the world are probably 10-100 times better than the worst The best soccer players in the world are probably 10-100 times better than the worst The best CEOs in the world are probably 10-100 times better than the worst In some cases, I'm sure the difference is greater. In fact, you could probably say that The best [insert any skilled profession here] in the world are probably 10-100 times better than the worst We don't know what N is for the rest of these professions, so why concern ourselves with what the actual number is for programming? Can we not just say that the number is large enough so that it's very important to hire the best people and move on already?

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• How can I find the jdbc connection timeout of a hibernate session

  - by StevenWilkins

  I currently have a long running thread which uses a hibernate session to perform many updates. We currently have our c3p0 connection timeout set to 20 minutes and it's timing out sometimes because of the number of updates we're performing. The solution I have is to periodically return the connection to the pool via closing the session (we have hibernate configured this way) and get a new one. Upping the timeout is not desirable because the same pool is used for the entire application. The problem is I don't know when to return the connection to the pool because I don't know what the timeout of the connection is. I know what the current setting is in our property file, but that can be changed without my knowledge at any time so it's fragile. Having a counter and returning the connection based on the number of updates I've performed is not ideal but could be my option of last resort. I have a hibernate session, how can I retrieve the connection timeout of the jdbc connection which backs the session? Using the SessionFactory and SessionFactoryImpl classes are perfectly acceptable.

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• Is there any way to prevent the display of unmatched xml tags using xslt?

  - by StevenWilkins

  Here is a contrived example of an xml document. In my real world case, the xml is fairly complex with multiple nested levels. <alphabet> <a>A</a> <b>B</b> <c>C</c> ... and so on </alphabet> Using xslt, I want to transform the document so that only the vowels are printed. In my real world case, we're using empty template match tags to block the display. But that's too verbose for my liking.

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