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Monthly Archives: February 2009

Apple iPhoto 09 Flickr integration is bad, very bad

I am very, very pissed off with Apple’s iPhoto to Flickr integration. It’s seriously broken software. Here are just some of the reasons why – interface and interaction designers please take note: Uploading photos in bulk does not preserve the order (any order) in the Flickr stream. So your photostream gets whack out of order. [...]

97 things …

I just came back from a great week in Tasmania. It was really good to be away from communications infrastructure for that amount of time – there’s no mobile service in many parts of Tassie. You can see the photos on my Flickr photostream (although it might take me a couple more days to get [...]

Servers in your checkout?

Here’s a little tip to everyone who wants to put their app server into version control – don’t do it. I’ve been recently working on an application site that does this, and it’s indescribably poor configuration control. As well as giving each developer an easy way to get an app server setup on his or [...]

UNIX simplicity and agility

In the course of a series of comments around my post about Oracle’s ADF, I started to think about “vendors” and their technology stacks.  Of all the big vendors whose technology comes closest to playing nice with Agile development and (especially) agile engineering practise and discipline (e.g. test-driven design, pair programming, fearless refactoring, etc), I [...]

GUI builders, modern development practices, and vendor lock-in

The Paranoid Engineer has declared ‘Screw All Gui Builders‘, with an excellent example of the genre of code that can be produced by one such tool, contrasted against the much nicer hand-written code. Now I can certainly sympathise with his pain. The thing that really gets my goat up, and the subject of this post, [...]

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Party like it’s 1234567890!!!

Mechanical pencil lust

My Staedler Mars Micro 0.5mm is getting into a bit of a sorry state. As my University research project is ramping up, I have a need for a good quality replacement, because ancient historical research means a lot of note taking. Also being a software engineer, I just love these things anyway, and I use [...]

Money Is Money v 0.14

I’ve made a modest – very modest – library for dealing with Monetary amounts. IMHO something like this should be inside Java, to stop all those idiots using floating point logic to calculate money amounts. My library uses exactly NO EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES apart from what’s already in Java 5 and Junit 3.8.1 for tests, which [...]

Incremental test running with JUnit Max

Well looks like Joel Spolsky’s ignorant rant about Test Driven Design (TDD) resulted in some good after all. Kent Beck posted a brief response to Joel, which was pointed out in a mailing list discussion about the issue. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. Anyway it turns out that Kent is [...]

‘Disappeared’ DAO layers

Adam Bien still wants to believe that a JPA layer can directly replace a formal ‘DAO layer’. And I still disagree. I might agree that for simple enough systems, it could end up being that in fact the service layers end up with PersistenceManager logic directly in their methods. But then I might say a [...]