Conduct like Gustavo Dudamel

Free iPhone app (for free): set tempo by waving, and conduct “March to the Scaffold” or “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique

MVC reading list

An ex-smalltalker* friend always tells me (forgive me if I get this wrong) that MVC is one of the most widely misunderstood programming concepts, and that it gets misapplied and the terms misused, nowhere more so than in web frameworks. Maybe that’s why you’ve got a number of people talking about MVC considered harmful, an anti-pattern. It turns out these authors are really discussing the usage described (I believe) as “Front controller” in Struts (and other web frameworks) not ‘Smalltalk MVC’.

*Hmm. “ex-smalltalker”? Once a smalltalker always a smalltalker.

Having got what little understanding of MVC through web frameworks, and about to embark with another Paul on a major piece of GUI (real desktop, crossplatform GUI stuff), I thought it was about time I (or in fact we) understood MVC properly.

So here’s our reading list to get us started:

1. Section 1.2 of the Design Patterns book (on design patterns in Smalltalk MVC)
2. A Cookbook for Using View-Controller User the Model-Interface Paradigm in Smalltalk-80 -  by Glenn E. Krasner, Stephen T. Pope
3. Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80(TM): How to use Model-View-Controller (MVC) by Steve Burbeck

We’re looking for other suggestions too…

Mail-order customer service

http://swimshop.co.uk sends me different size swimsuit to one I ordered. I ring up. They send me right size AND a prepaid envelope to return original…  Now that’s great customer service - almost better than getting it right first time, and to be frank, makes me feel really good about ordering with them another time.