Is there something wrong with my Timex?
…because all of my recent spam is about quality time piece replicas (no one will know the difference!) »
ipods
I am not impressed by the ipod nano. What gets me excited is the ipod yotta, which takes 12 stout men to work the clickwheel, and can hold enough music to last you till the heat-death of the universe. »
I Wish...
That Microsoft Word had Emacs keybindings. »
Monster Cat
I wish I could have that much fun with a paper bag. »
Real-Life Mass Transit Horror Stories
Well, just one: On the way home today, the bus arrives at a stop, and a girl begins to step down the stairs to the door at the back of the bus. The door just won’t open for her, and the bus begins to pull away from the stop. The girl is livid. “Stop the bus,” she yells, “I’m trying to get off!” The bus stops quickly, and the girl tries once again to get off the bus. »
Chocolate Martini
Recipe on CocktailDB »
Oh Ubuntu, why must your Java VM be so terrible?
Ubuntu has finally let me down. Breezy has, for some time now, had eclipse in available, using gcj (a gcc frontend that compiles java source to native code). Tonight, I figured I’d install eclipse at home, and play around with writing plugins. For added fun, I might grab a copy of Sun’s java VM, and do some benchmarking. I was certainly willing to sacrifice portability for speed in this case, but it would be interesting to see just how much speed I was getting. »
The relevant 'Joel on Software' article of the fortnight
Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers Computation of the relevancy score of this article is left as an excercise for the reader. »
Maven: buy the razor, get the blades for free
Build tools are tricky things. Make and Ant lack key features for larger projects, like dependency resolution. The GNU autotools add more power to make, at the cost of extreme complexity. Project structure (e.g. directory layout) . Do you leave all your source files in the root directory, or create sub-directories? How do you divide the files into the directories? All of these combinations require a more powerful (and therefore more complex) build tool. »
Autonomic Pilot
I’ve become the new build monster master at work. This means that I have to keep the nightly builds running, and watch for anything strange happening during the unit and functional tests. Should anything peculiar happen, I’ve got to either fix it myself, or find someone who can. I will spare you my personal opinion on the effectiveness of assigning one person to be the build master. The other night, herk and I were talking about my new role. »