Software As She’s Developed

Updated May 16, 2005: Fixed link. James Strachan discovers Radio Lover. I use Replay Radio, another program which records internet radio and pushes it into ITunes. The big problem is handling of timezones - it doesn’t track the timezone you’re specifying program times in, so you have to keep adjusting times to account for daylight […]

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This post on Google Suggest has rocketed me into 2nd place for searches on “gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle”. And a respectable six - that’s 6 short of a dozen! - people or robots have visited softwareas on that basis (thus triggering this investigation). And guess what the number 1 hit is. Actually, don’t. You’ll cringe. Now, it all makes […]

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Seems the market for blackjack among software developers just got bigger. The spammers have unleashed a torrent of trackbacks over the past fortnight, finally provoking me into an upgrade. So I’ve moved to wordpress 1.5, and simultaneously pushed the older podcast MP3s off here to an archive location. Hopefully, your aggregator won’t get the old stuff […]

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In tests, objects can be placed in two categories: “Crock” objects - Objects populated with dummy values and enshrined with dummy behaviour for the purpose of simulating an object that might be encountered in production. “Mock” objects - Objects pre-loaded with predictions about how they will be used, and responsible for throwing an exception as soon as […]

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Since my Toshiba laptop apparently has no line in, just a microphone input, I recently picked up a little Sound Blaster MP3+, an external USB sound card. Had some major problems getting it to work with Mandrake 10, so thought I’d check out the Ubuntu live CD (5.04 - “hoary hedgehog” release), with a view […]

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Clarke Ching notes that, contrary to popular belief, IT managers have a lot of influence on the business side - profits, strategy, etc. He explains why agile processes make money for out customers. True. And as well as management, there’s architecture, which is also important for business strategy. Whenever anyone influences the architecture, they’re affecting […]

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Updated May 18, 2005 Shrunk width due to narrow WP style (it’s like coding in 30 columns per line) package assertion; import junit.framework.TestCase; import java.lang.reflect.Method; import java.lang.reflect.Array; public class ReflectionTest extends TestCase { private class Shop { public void order(String … productIds) {} } […]

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This podcast discusses AJAX, an architectural style for web applications that has become popular in recent months. This is a Podcast - a blog entry with an embedded MP3 link. On Internet Explorer, Click the left mouse button to listen, or click the right mouse buttton and “Save As…” to download. Better yet, you can subscribe […]

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I just began reading The Business of Software. The intro alludes to that old adage about a good programmer being 10-20 times as effective as a bad programmer. I’ve heard various numbers for this “Hot/Not” ratio, sometimes 100 is bandied about. I think it’s a fine way to convey a pertinent point of software […]

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OK, my final SPA posting. This time, some notes from my own workshop. In the next few days, I’ll be doing a podcast (yes, I’m still officially podcasting after much silence!) on self-documenting software which will cover all this. The slides are online at my homepage.. This was a 75-minute workshop to discuss practical techniques for achieving […]

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