TiddlyWiki to MindMap converter

Knowledge is my stock in trade, and I use TiddlyWiki and Mind Mapping a lot.

Like all Wikis, TiddlyWiki is a great tool for capturing ideas and facts in text and linking them to other relevant topics. It's not so good at showing you the big picture.

Mind Maps (tm) are a great way of presenting the big picture, but programs like FreeMind and MindManager (tm) only show the notes for a single branch at a time.

What if you think of each tool as giving a different view on the same data? Then you could get the best of both worlds.

There's already a hypergraph extension for TiddlyWiki which allows you to see a visual representation of wiki contents but I prefer a more conventional Mind Map that I can edit.

I'm currently experimenting with a simple Python script which converts a TiddlyWiki into a FreeMind Mind Map. The converter works well for small wikis and I'm currently researching how best to structure larger maps.

The converter isn't ready for prime time yet, and documentation is minimal, but it's evolving fast. If you're interested please drop me a note ( at romilly dot cocking at gmail dot com) and I'll send you a copy.

History meme

Mom, Tim made me do it...

romilly@samba:~$ history | awk
'{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'
| sort -rn | head
106 ls
96 sudo
52 cd
22 nano
16 man
16 find
16 exit
13 chmod
12 cat
10 scp

and, on the Virtual server that hosts samba,

romilly@pc031:~$  history | awk
'{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'
 | sort -rn | head
111 ls
78 cd
76 sudo
32 exit
23 top
21 ping
18 df
13 du
11 scp
11 man

Layers considered harmful: design to interfaces

Mark Dalgarno recently published an excellent summary of a session presented by Steve Love at ACCU.

The talk offers a critique of the traditional doctrine that architectures should be layered. Instead, Love proposes a style based on designing to interfaces. That's music to my ears: it's exactly the approach we take in our new TDD with jMock2 course.

Love's presentation is available as a pdf. The first half consists of visuals alone; the second half combines the same visuals with notes.

Testing Hibernate-based Persistent objects without Spring

Nat Pryce just pointed me at an excellent article on Testing Persistent Objects Without Spring by James Richardson.

It shows both the integration test and the code under test.

Lots of good ideas/good practice.