I was trying out the new Firefox 1.5 beta, but decided to go back to firefox 1.0.6. I wanted my extensions back. I missed my cool tab extensions, the BugMeNot extension, the web developers toolbar, my bloglines extension and a few others. In addition, I found another cool extension that creates screen grabs of the page in your browser. Not only does it capture the part of the page that you can see, but it scrolls the page down and captures the whole thing. The only downside to this extension for some people will be the fact that it uses Java.
I am looking for some software for writing blog entries with. Although the little form editor thingy in WordPress is pretty good, it is still not great for editing longer entries. So, I am looking for a spiffy little program that will allow me to create blog entries offline and will then sync with my website and upload the new entries. And it has to run on Windows XP.
Anyone have any ideas?
For a project that I am doing at school I am creating a series of short little Wink tutorial/demos to help the other members in my team come up to speed with some of the technology that we are using. The first of these tutorials is a Quickstart JSP/Servlet Demo using NetBeans.
The video shows how to set up a web application, create a simple JSP page, a simple Servlet and run everything using the bundled tomcat server. The JSP page is used to pass some form data to the Servlet which then prints it to the browser. The whole thing is a little large at just over 9 megs, so be patient. Although it does not take all that long to download on my DSL connection.
Answers are easy. The difficult part is understanding the question. Not until you fully understand the question can you create the answer. This is true for everything from doing well on a university exam to creating software. At university, if you do not understand the question how are you ever going to get the answer right? For software, if you do not understand the question, or more precisely, the problem, how are you going to create software that will solve that problem?
This is one of those guiding principles in my life. I tend not to do anything substantial until I understand the question and can then come up with the answer. Now don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that I do not do anything. It simply means that I don’t do anything big—like solving the problem—until I understand the problem or question that needs to be solved.
Translated into software development, this means that you do not architect the entire system until you understand the problem that that system is suppose to solve. However, until that understanding is attained, there is nothing stopping you from creating prototypes, proof-of-concepts and the like in order to more fully and accurately understand the problem.
Also, by understanding the question, or problem, I mean you understand what the client wants, what the client needs, the business processes that the software is suppose to solve, etc. By the time you have created the software you should be an expert in that client’s business. This is understanding the question.
This is really starting to get annoying. I seemed to have lost all the power management capabilities on my desktop computer: the screen saver doesn’t work anymore, the monitors don’t turn off, the hard drive doesn’t power down, nothing. Everytime I get up from my computer I have to remember to switch off my monitors. I have tried playing with the controls and nothing. I have tried turning off various applications that I have running to see if one of those is interfering with the power management, nothing. I have tried Googling for a solution, nothing.
Which leaves me with nothing.
So, unless I can come up with an actual solution, the only thing left is to reinstall Windows. It has been almost a year with this install, so it may be time anyway, but with school starting to get crazy, it is not something I am looking forward to.
I have a wireless network in my home. Unfortunately, my wifi network and me do not get along. I think this is because the access point and the devices trying to access the access point do not speak the same language.
See the access point, for WEP at least, speaks in passphrases while the devices all speak HEX. So, in order to set up WEP on the AP I need to enter a passphrase. In order to have a device access that AP, I need to enter the hex equivalent of that passphrase.
The problem, this little bit of information is not written down anywhere. So I spend 2 hours trying to get an iMax and a Dell x50v PDA to talk to my SMS AP. This is definitely 2 hours of my life that I will never get back.
And to make things worse, the only reason that I am dealing with WEP and passphrase/HEX combinations is because the 802.11g router that I bought is next to useless. I had it setup using WPA and both the PDA and the iMac would routinely loose conectivity with the access point. However, with my SMS 802.11b AP, the connection is rock solid. It is just a pain in the butt trying to get the connections set up right.
So, moral of this story? I have no idea, just remember that a passphrase on one device could be HEX on another.
The Artima.com website has an article outlining A Set of Unit Testing Rules. In this article, the author, Michael Feathers, outlines the following:
A test is not a unit test if:
- It talks to the database
- It communicates across the network
- It touches the file system
- It can’t run at the same time as any of your other unit tests
- You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it.
For the most part, I completely agree with this list. I have seen, at my last job, the problems that you can run into when you try to do unit testing where the unit tests, or the code that you are trying to unit test, needs to interact with the filesystem or a database.
However, these parts of the code still need to be tested. So the question that remains is how to test code that interacts with a DB, a filesystem, or a session bean? I guess one of the easiest solutions is to use dependency injection and replace the real external systems with mock objects. This allows you to test your methods in isolation from the real database, filesystem, or app server. Unfortunately, I left my last job before I had a chance to test this idea.
The ServerSide also has a thread on this article.