The thing about being in the midwest is that everyone cares a *lot* about basketball. I more of a baseball or football guy myself, but since I have to hear all the time about basketball: Yay, Florida! for winning the 2006 NCAA championship last night.
Close your browser when developing Rails apps
An annoying – and silent – thing happened today. I was working on one Rails site, and switched to work on a second one. I fired up the WEBrick server, went to my site, and got…nothing but a blank page. Looking at the server logs, it was clearly having a 500 error of some sort,…
Agile and the Virtual Case File project
I stumbled across a link to Glen Alleman‘s blog from a post on the Agile Project Management list today. He has an excellent post describing the FBI’s virtual case file project, it’s spectacular failure, and rebuttals to a lot of posts over the past few days to several agile lists asking if agile processes could…
Using Symbols in Java Fitnesse Fixtures
Fitnesse has a nifty feature where you can store the output of one test table in a symbol that you can then use in a subsequent table. The documentation does a good job explaining the concepts, but seems to be missing some code behind the scenes to make it work. So I’ve put together a…
On Reuse…
Excellent advice on building frameworks and libraries from John Roth, via the XP mailing list: Reuse is an interesting issue. There’s a rule of thumb that you should write it three times, then you’re in a position to make a resuable library or framework the fourth, because you now know what you need; you’re not…
What’s the difference between OS X and Vista?
Microsoft employees are excited about OS X…, at least according to the comments (350 and growing!) on this blog entry entitlet Vista 2007 – Fire Leadership Now. This is what worries me about large companies. Microsoft used to be touted as the place to be. It doesn’t seem like that anymore – now Google might…
Clearing a TkCanvas in Ruby
Something so simple, yet so seemingly undocumented… After struggling for about 10 minutes with trying to clear a TkCanvas from Ruby, and only finding what seemed to be one message discussing it (but not answering it), I stumbled across the answer – delete(‘all’). So, if I have a canvas like this: def initialize(parent) @parent = parent ph…
James Shore on Dependency Injection
(Update: James updated his blog entry with a list of resources to good D/I articles [here and here] which discuss much better the topics below.) James Shore has a new post about Dependency Injection, which he calls a “25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept.” While his examples were indeed examples of D/I, he seems to…
The Dreyfus Model experiment
A few weeks ago, several coworkers and I went to the No Fluff Just Stuff Conference (overviews here, here, and here.) During the conference, I got to hear Dave Thomas speak about the Dreyfus Model for Skills Acquisition. A lot sounded familiar, and that was because Dave touched on a lot of the same points…
The importance of System.Environment.NewLine
So, let’s pretend you are happily coding along in C#, doing test-driven development, and you get to a method that needs to return a message that spans multiple lines. Say, an address printer that prints out like: Cory Foy12345 Developers WayColumbia, MO 12345 So what is the test you should write? How about: [Test]public void…