Chris Johnston

Gnome.org has put up a sneak peek at GNOME 2.10. Some of the new features are pretty impressive and may be enough to make this KDE user switch.

Keith Ray has written an excellent introductory article on Test-Driven Development (TDD). In it, he outlines the general idea behind TDD and value that it can serve in the development process. He also outlines several different reasons why developers do not write tests of any kind for their code.

I have recently started to do TDD as much as possible in my development. I am far from an expert and often times forget to create the tests. However, when I do have tests, modifying and refactoring the code become a lot easier. I know that, once I am done with the modifications, and the all the unit tests pass, that the code that I am left with will work the same way as when I started. This is a huge help because it gives me the safety of knowing that I have not broken anything, even while doing major changes. If the test passes, the code works, plain and simple.

It is amazing how moving into a new apartment forces you to examine everything you own at a microscopic level. Everything gets shuffled, categorized, and sorted. Each item represents a memory or an intention that must prove its worth in order to be kept. To move means to mercilessly banish those items that do not measure up and hurl them out of your life forever. It is a chance to start over with only those things that are truely a part of you or a necessity for life.

This is the process that my wife and I are going through moving into our new apartment. We are examining everything and seeing what we keep and what needs to be thrown away due to space contraints or because it is no longer useful. Even though the apartment is bigger, there are still space contraints involved in moving into a new space. This means some things have got to go. It is amazing what you can save in just over a year.

The article, 26steps to 15k a Day, is a guide on how to get as many hits on your site as possible. For being an old article, written in 2002, it still has some very good tips. These include such things as:

• Importance of checking your logs
• Putting new content up on your site everyday
• Making your site as spider friendly as possible

Hopefully, due to this article, you will be seeing a lot more content going up on my site on a daily basis. Although, one suggestion the article makes is to avoid bloggy, personal content and stick more with generic articles that have a wider audience. I am not sure if I agree with this one. However, have a look at the article, there are many other excellent suggestions.

Apple has released what they are calling the Mac mini. Okay, this is probably not news to anyone since they released it two days ago, but I have to put something about it on my site. All I can really say about this beautiful little computer is that I want one. (Is there an emoticon for drooling?)

Oracle is running a series of articles under the heading Mastering J2EE Application Development. There will be 12 articles in total covering such topics as:

• Slicing and Dicing J2EE
• Design and Modeling
• Designing Better User Interfaces
• Mastering Server-Side Java

I have not read any of the articles yet, but they look like a good source of information. Of course, they will be specific to Oracle’s technology, but there should still be a fair amount of usefull information contained within each article.

Jeff Langr has put together an article discussing various topics related to pair programming. If you are exploring the idea or you just want more information on the concept then you should check out his article.

The article is a fair discussion of the various aspects of pair programming mixed with real world experiences. Jeff presents a very balanced argument in which he deals with both the positives and some of the negatives involved in this form of software development. Granted, the positives win out (he is a proponant of pair programming), but it is still a balanced discussion. He also details some ways of exploring and integrating pair programming into your team and environment.

Overall, I found the article to be an excellent exploration and explanation of pair programming.