I am planning to see if I can do some more work on test automation. I have discovered that I am pretty good at going into existing code bases and adding tests now. In order to practice, and to have something to demonstrate, I would like to find a deserving open source project that I could add some u...

My newest computer is a Dell XPS thing. It’s a huge monster of a laptop (really a gaming laptop, good for the performance). It comes with external LED lights on the top, sides and bottom. These lights are normally only configurable though a custom program. Since I got the PC, I have been dying to fi...

Writing my previous post got be thinking about code comments. I have seen a lot of bad comments in my years, and I’d like it to stop! Here are a few examples from the horror cabinet of the world of code comments. Stating the bloody obvious Never, ever, say in comments what the code already says. Eve...

Recently, there has been a discussion about code comments on the pragmatic programmer mailing list: “Should you comment or not? What should be commented?” The one point I haven’t seen expressed succinctly is the following: Given a finite amount of time and a codebase with some … issues (which codeba...

In the book Software for Your Head, Jim McCarthy introduces The Core Protocols (pdf). Even though the book occasionally give off a new-agey feeling with ritualistic interaction, I think the Protocols have a lot of merit. I especially like “the decider protocol” As I see it, the Decider protocol is a...

David Heinemeier Hansen’¨s talk at OSCon is available at IT Conversations. For those who don’t know, DHH is the man behind the big rising star of 2005: Ruby on Rails. Favorite quote: “Too many technologies are chasing flexibility as thus it was free. It is not. Your exchanging flexibility for veloc...

One of the most profound ideas in lambda calculus, is the Y-operator. I’ve learned the Y-operator at least three times, and every time, I found it extremely hard to understand. This blog is therefore an example of a quixotic undertaking: I want to see whether it is possible for me to explain the Y-o...

I have been working as a Software Architect for several years now, but I still find myself unable to answer the question “what is software architecture?” However, I think I can point to some of the factors that can make the architectural work successful. First: Architecture is about vision, communic...

C# 3.0 is Right Around the Corner (in the Microsoft sense of the word…), and it brings to bear a lot of interesting features. Most of them come together in the technology called LINQ (Language INtegrated Queries). Even though I doubt I will use C#, I think there is a lot that can be learned from thi...

For the most part I think Ruby on Rails is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, like everything else, there are some issues I’m uncomfortable with. Mostly, it has to do with deployment, and especially security during deployment. SwitchTower deploy.rb configuration file contains ...

Everyone is talking about SwitchTower these days, so I just had to check it out. When I got it to work, I was quite pleased with how it works, but there were quite a few issues along the road. First of: What is SwitchTower? Basically, it is a tool for automating deployment of applications, focused a...

Jason Zhicheng Li has written a blog article about Spring configuration. It is called the 12 Best Practices for Spring configuration. Best practice #1 was “don’t use autowiring*. That got me thinking: I feel very ambivalent about autowiring. Initially, I thought it sounded like a great idea because ...

Joel Spolsky had a blog entry seems eerily familiar: The Architecture Astronauts (in outer space) I’m starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite. I’ve seen the type, and I’m glad to say that we...

I just got published last week: My article Unit Testing Hibernate Mapping Configurations was last week’s featured article in java.net. This is the first time I’ve really been published (at least been paid for it!). I found the experience interesting and (mostly) fun. Many thanks to the editor, Chris...

Any reader of my blog should not be surprised by the fact that I think software patents are pretty bogus. So y’all will forgive a little rant brought on by the examining the (pretty bogus) eolas patent. Here is the introduction to the patent, taken from eolas “technology” page: The Web Application P...

The bad news is that I am taking down the articles about Hibernate-testing from my blog. This is because I am going to publish the text as an article in java.net. (which is the good news). Stay tuned for more information. Comments: [Ash] - Sep 15, 2005 I have read some of your post on testing DAO(s)...

I read an extremely intesting book last week. Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” is a true story about how the author was tracking a hacker in the mid-eighties. It reads like a spy novel, but is appearently all true. I picked the book up at 11 at night, and was unable to put it down until I had comple...

Updated for republication in MrBool. As readers of my blog must have noticed by now, I am somewhat of an advocate of Extreme Programming (XP). However, for the last nine months or so, my title has been “Lead Software Architect”, and I am the (proud?) author of what Martin Fowler calls “the almighty ...

The most recent issue of the Norwegian ComputerWorld contains several articles of interest from an open-source point of view. In addition, the subject has come up for discussion at work recently. Who benefits from open-source? Primarily, it is the consumers of software. Yet the consumers of open-sou...

I like metadata for some tasks. Luckily for all of us, Commons-Attributes implements metadata for pre-Tiger JDKs. Unluckily, it requires an extra compilation step (with Ant, no less). But no more. I’ve created an extension that does it all in memory. The class uses both xjavadoc and commons-attribut...

How should development teams be organized? Reduce chatty interfaces. In Lean Software Development Mary Poppendieck describes the seven wastes of production and their analogy in software development. Three of these are: Motion (software analogy: Finding information), Waiting (Waiting), and Transporta...

I would like to start by apologizing from having a political entry in my blog. I believe that politics is intertwined with other intellectual endeavour. As scientist and engineers, we have a duty of social awareness, to see that our creations are being used for the benefit of humanity. I was saddene...

When I have been using easyMock Mock Objects for testing I often find it helpful to intersperse expectations and test code, for example: mock.start(); control.replay(); server.handleCommand("START"); control.validate(); control.reset(); mock.shutdown(); control.replay(); server.handleCommand("STOP")...

Spring has shown us how to effectively separate the business logic from data access logic. This allows for easy testing of business logic without having to deal with the database, but it does not provide any easy way to test the DAO code. A new feature in the Hypersonic database might just be what t...

For a long time, I have been plagued by comment spam on my blog. To battle this problem, I have now installed a Movable Type plug-in that verifies that posters are not robots. This will hopefully improve the situation. The plug-in is called scode. It displays a number in an image that the user needs...

On JavaZone (which was an huge success, IMHO), Richard Stallman was the guest of honor. He talked about the four freedoms which free software gives you, how the Sun Java implementation is not free, and why that might concern us. Then, he talked about something that should concern all of us, even if ...

I am currently reading Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. It contains many brilliant essays, but it also has a few not so brilliant ones. In “Mind the Gap”, Graham proposes the idea “in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health”. The rationale for this is that some people ...

When I look back at the lessons from User Stories Applied, I realise that many approaches to requirements muddles different purposes of requirements together. There are three things requirements need to address in one form or another: First, the development team needs an understanding the needs (req...

I bought User Stories Applied to get help with practical problems with writing good user stories and requirements in general, but it ended up changing the way I think about requirements and tracking them. The book first fullfills one very important mission. It answers “what is a good user story” wit...

Today I attended a meeting where IBM/Rational got to extol their glorious Unified Process (RUP). RUP has a lot of good sides, and I think a lot of the high-level ideas are very good. Phases, workflows, artifacts, and roles all make sense. The concepts can be used to understand any process, even “non...