Introducing code review and pair programming has often an impact on relationships in the team - especially when a critique needs to be delivered. It takes great degree of experience on both sides to communicate defects in the code for both the reviewer as well as for the code author to get something useful out of it.
I found this at http://www.finetix.com/blogs/finetixblogs.html which can be helpful (page is 404-ing now, but I luckily saved it in Google Docs way back) :
Spam has always been a big problem for all blogs. Fortunately, worpress.com provides wonderfull Akismet spam filter which is works amazingly well. I do have switched on moderation for all comments, to make sure no spam gets through, but without Akismet it would be impossible to manage it because of the spam volume. Since I started this blog (August 2006), it caught over 17'000 (yes, seventeen thousands) spam posts. In other words, about 30 spam comments a day or almost 60 spam comments per published post.
Last week I attended one day event organized by Microsoft named Heroes Happens Here. It is series of introduction targeting new products: Windows Server 2008 (not out yet) SQL Server 2008 (not out yet) and Visual Studio 2008 (out and well).
I do not do much Microsoft development these days - my world is currently rather unevenly divided between Java (about 70 %), Web-ish technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, some Ruby) and OS-X (Objective C) which I am trying to squeeze in and get finally started. But Microsoft is such important platform that one must pay attention what is going on.
It happened few days ago for the first time: after opening the lid on my MacBook Pro, the machine woke up, but the screen stayed dark. Whatever I did, I just could see cursor and nothing underneath. I had to resort to unthinkable - reboot :-(
Some research showed this is known problem - which is from certain point of view good, because many people found hopefully many workarounds. The more information can be found here, here and here. Very helpfull was also this page.
Program managers want an infinite number of features in zero time, testers and service operations staff want zero features over infinite time, and developers just want to be left alone to code cool stuff.
From I. M. Wright's "Hard Code"
by Eric Brechner
There is a saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Such necessity happened last week and forced me to try out the Groovy language.
The trigger was need for creating good data set for testing changes in a full text search. I had to locate few hundred of obsolete technical documents to be used as test data, dump the metadata as well as the BLOB data to disc, create INSERT sql scripts and loader that would from Ant pre-load the database with the test set and insert the BLOB's. It is fairly simple task, the issue were boundary conditions:
With the walking season almost upon us (so far only walks by streets, for the Ottawa River Pathway one still needs a snowshoes), it is time to replenish the stock of listening material. Here are some of the about 10 new podcasts that I tried out recently and decided to keep:
1) Pragmatic Programmers podcast. That was a pleasant find (thanks Milos). The topics covered are very wide - as are topics covered by the books. Average lengths is about half hour and the podcasts appear about 1-2 per month. I really liked the interviews with Michael Nygard and Johanna Rothman. The disadvantage of these podcasts is fairly miserable audio quality - the discussions are done by phone or something is wrong with the recording. Maybe I am spoiled by great professional audio of most of the TWIT network podcasts - but after Leo and the gang, this audio is really hard on ears.
Here it comes, first occurence: one of my VM's BSOD-ed on me yesterday.
To be completely fair, I did have experienced an occurrence of something similar twice in last moths: after wake up from sleep, the screen was collection of the color pixels, completely unreadable. After reboot, everything was normal.
I found out that the issue may be related to the "safesleep" mode. For now, I disabled the mode by
I did not even notice that the visit counter left the 16 bit domain sometimes during last few days. Now it shows about 67 000 visits. Honestly, I am pleasantly surprised how many people found this blog worthy their time :-). Thanks to you all ...
Next boundary is of course 128K, 256K, 512K hits and finally a "Megahit". But that's far far away.
Akita published two part tutorial that leads you through building the famous 15 minute blog application in Rails 2.0. Read the parts one and two - or follow the screencast by the same author.
Thanks a lot, Akita - very nicely done !