Recent Blog Posts
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JarAnalyzer in Google Code
By Kirk Knoernschild - Thursday Nov, 20JarAnalyzer now has it’s own Google Code location. You can browse the source code online, check the source code out, and do all of the other exciting things that you can do with a subversion rep... more »
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How Long-Term is Your Strategy?
By Johanna Rothman - Thursday Nov, 20I was thinking about the automakers, and how they want many billions of $ from Washington (please, noooo). I don’t know what their strategic planning is, but it seems not to have changed from th... more »
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I?m on Twitter
By Kirk Knoernschild - Wednesday Nov, 19I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Possibly a little slow, but better late than never. I’ve started following a few people, and so far I find it fun and interesting. I intend to post mo... more »
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Fast Sphinx indexing with foxy fixtures
By Matthew Bass - Wednesday Nov, 19Can Sphinx and foxy fixtures place nicely together? Due to the way Sphinx indexing works, foxy fixtures will often slow down the indexing process drastically. This article explains how to overcome thi... more »
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Printing an array in multiple table columns
By Matthew Bass - Wednesday Nov, 19<% @categories.in_groups_of(2).each do |group| %> <tr> <% group.each do |category| %> <td><%=h category.name %></td>... more »
Blogs
Posted by:
Kirk Knoernschild
on 11/20/2008
JarAnalyzer now has it’s own Google Code location. You can browse the source code online, check the source code out, and do all of the other exciting things that you can do with a subversion repository. The source in the google code repository is the same as can be found at the JarAnalyzer homepage (which is also where the binary is still found), except that the Google Code location also contains the JarAnalyzer XSLT.
Eventually, I hope to move the documentation over to the Google... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 11/20/2008
I was thinking about the automakers, and how they want many billions of $ from Washington (please, noooo). I don’t know what their strategic planning is, but it seems not to have changed from the 1960’s. Certainly, when I started buying cars in the 1970’s, I could not afford the low quality/high price/low gas mileage. When we bought our minivan 11.5 years ago (yes, I’m still driving it), we did buy a Dodge Caravan, because at the time it was the best value for our... more »
Posted by:
Kirk Knoernschild
on 11/19/2008
I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Possibly a little slow, but better late than never. I’ve started following a few people, and so far I find it fun and interesting. I intend to post mostly on tech stuff. I’ve also included my tweet feed on the right sidebar of this blog. Or you can subscribe to my tweet feed separately. Or you can start following me now! You decide.
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Posted by:
Matthew Bass
on 11/19/2008
Can Sphinx and foxy fixtures place nicely together? Due to the way Sphinx indexing works, foxy fixtures will often slow down the indexing process drastically. This article explains how to overcome this limitation.
more »
Posted by:
Matthew Bass
on 11/19/2008
<% @categories.in_groups_of(2).each do |group| %>
<tr>
<% group.each do |category| %>
<td><%=h category.name %></td>
<% end %>
</tr>
<% end %>
What are you staring at? Move along, move along.
more »
Posted by:
Kirk Knoernschild
on 11/19/2008
An image I swiped from MarkMail showing the increase in OSGi related posts on various mailing lists. No surprise that the most popular lists are Felix Dev and Spring-OSGi. The traffic shows the rise in interest in OSGi the past couple of years. Again, no surprise. It does appear, however, that most of the posts are closely tied to development of OSGi products (like Felix and Spring dm) and not from developers leveraging OSGi within their applications. OSGi hasn’t achieved deep... more »
Posted by:
Bob Payne
on 11/19/2008
I spoke with Emily and Geoff at the end of the conference and we were all a bit tired. Emily performed in the Coding With The Stars stage at Agile 2008 and gave a great run for the gold. One especially interesting segment was the customer story testing segment. For this segment Geoff played the customer and wrote a story test in TextTest and then Emily and Michael Feathers made it pass. This appearance of the customer was well received by the audience and... more »
Posted by:
Kirk Knoernschild
on 11/18/2008
The OLPC has instituted their “Give a laptop. Get a laptop.” program again this year. If you’re not familar with the XO laptop, it’s a cool little deviced in a pretty small package. The picture at left shows the XO sitting next to a Dell XPS with a 15″ display (click to enlarge).
The OLPC offered the same deal around the same time last year when I ordered mine, and their was quite a backlog. It took almost six months for them to ship, so if you’re... more »
Posted by:
Ryan Shriver
on 11/17/2008
I?ve returned from the Agile Development Practices conference in Orlando, FL and have uploaded my Agile Engineering for Architects slide deck and also the Impact Estimation tool used in the presentation. Thanks to all those that attended, I thought for the first time out this new presentation came off pretty well. We?ll see what the reviews say.Some questions I was asked and conversations I had afterwards pertained to the question ?What?s the role of Architects and Architecture in Agile??... more »
Posted by:
Matthew Bass
on 11/17/2008
Many Rails plugins require that certain files like images, CSS, and JavaScript get copied to the public folder during installation. The typical way to do this is add code to install.rb, which then gets executed when you first install the plugin in your Rails project. What happens when the assets in a plugin you?re using change, though? You end up having to manually copy files around anytime the plugin gets updated, which is an extremely error-prone process.
I extracted asset_copier from... more »
Posted by:
Neal Ford
on 11/17/2008
One of the techniques I describe in The Productive Programmer is focus, distancing yourself from the all too common distractions in modern office environments. I suggest that you can wear headphones (or earbuds) while coding as an indicator that others shouldn't bother you. Some developers can code to music (in fact, some developers have a hard time not coding to music), but others fine it distracting. If you are in either group, you should try ambient music. The goal of ambient music is to... more »
Posted by:
Michael Nygard
on 11/16/2008
Patrick Muellr has an interesting post about being brainwashed into believing that the outrageous is normal. It's a good read. (Hat tip to Reddit, whence many good things.) As often happens, I wrote such a long comment to his post that I felt it worthwhile to repost here.My comment revolves around this chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last eighty years. (For the record, I'm not disputing anything about the rest of Patrick's post. In fact, I agree with most of what he says.... more »
Posted by:
Kirk Knoernschild
on 11/12/2008
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Since I joined Burton Group, I’ve spent most of my time over on the APS Blog. I hope to spend a bit more time here going forward. We’ll see if I can pull it off.
InfoQ recently posted a great snippet on the progress of OSGi in the Enterprise. The article mentions SpringSource, who is clearly paving the trail for OSGi in the Enterprise. While other app server vendors are using OSGi to modularize their platforms, they... more »
Posted by:
Matthew Bass
on 11/10/2008
I’m in the middle of developing a Radiant extension for Terralien. Radius is the tagging language for Radiant, and today I figured out how to use a route from inside a custom tag class.
A typical Radius tag class might look like this:
module AwesomeTags
include Radiant::Taggable
tag "session:logout" do |tag|
"<a... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 11/09/2008
I’m a big fan of writing as little code as possible and borrowing everything else. I’m also a big fan of Groovy. I recently had the pleasure of reading Chris Judd, Joseph Nusairat, and James Shingler’s hip “Beginning Groovy and Grails” and in short, I loved it! This book is all about borrowing a slick web framework (and a lot of plug-ins) and leveraging the power and simplicity of Groovy to build web applications quickly.
I used this book extensively to... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 11/07/2008
There are various statistics related to the average defect density (i.e. how many defects one can expect to find in a code base); suffice to say, the numbers point to unhip ranges like
20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code
and even
100?250 defects per thousand lines of code
Given this amazingly horrible data, what is one to do about it? There are a few possible answers, including:
Write a lot of tests
Write better code
Write less code
The first choice is rather... more »
Posted by:
Ryan Shriver
on 11/07/2008
One of the things I enjoy doing most is performance testing and tuning web systems, especially high-performance transactional systems. I?m interested in all aspects of making these systems go fast and scale high. J2EE, .NET, Rails - I don?t care. From performance specification and capacity planning to design, development, testing and the inevitable iterative system tuning and benchmarking process. I think it?s all a kick in the pants.I learned much of my knowledge when I was the architect... more »
Posted by:
Neal Ford
on 11/07/2008
I am sometimes asked about my position on code comments, and, like most things, I have strong opinions about it. Two kinds of comments exist:JavaDoc-style comments (which encompasses JavaDoc, XMLDoc, RDoc, etc), which are designed to produce developer documentation at a high level (class and method names and what they do)In-line comments, generally scattered around the code to indicate a note from developer to developerBoth kinds of comments represent different smells, each with different... more »
Posted by:
Bob Payne
on 11/06/2008
What can I say about this secular messianic figure that is constantly challenging and stretching agile methods to suit his will. Must be the portland air.
We talked about Naked Planning for quite a while. He has essentially taken many of the techniques from Lean Software Development and warped them to suit his particular organization. He has a penchant for experimenting with his team and with his mind and he shares the results of those experiments in this... more »
Posted by:
Bob Payne
on 11/06/2008
I met Jon at my most recent client. He is a dynamic person and is highly committed to Agile Delivery. Jon has taken the enjoyable workplace and run with it. We talk about that topic and others in this interview.
Expect to hear more from Jon in the Agile Community in the future.
Enjoy.
-bob payne
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