http://undefined.com/ia Agile & Open Source Software, Economics, Liberty and Entrepreneurship Fri, 09 May 2008 14:28:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en An excerpt:         There once was a man who went to a computer trade show.  Each day as he entered, the man told the guard at the door: "I am a great thief, renowned for my feats of shoplifting.  Be forewarned, for this trade show shall not escape unplundered." This speech disturbed the guard greatly, ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/05/09/the-tao-of-programming/ Most people, myself included, can be deluded into thinking that all the great discoveries happened long ago.   That, for the most part, we have everything figured out. I suggest you read this article about memresistors. Fact: This technology was theorized 30+ years ago, but not demonstrated until April 30th of this year. Fact: ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/05/07/a-moment-of-clarity/ I haven't seen this language before, but I'm certain as soon as we have a web framework for it, it will go mainstream. Fair warning: The name is a swear word. Next stop:   BF on Frails! http://undefined.com/ia/2008/05/01/next-years-programming-language/ There really is a Stephen Colbert's Tek Jannsen Adventures http://undefined.com/ia/2008/05/01/whaddya-know/ RUBY IS WRONG PYTHON IS WRONG http://undefined.com/ia/2008/05/01/ruby-and-python-are-both-wrong/ I saw this icon on my plane flight back from Tampa.   I'm curious what the designer intended it to mean.   I came up with the following ideas: Men and Women should put the number 0 on a pedestal. Do not have sexual intercourse on this plane, or you will have blank-faced babies ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/28/caption-contest/ Regarding this story - Is there anybody out there? First, the Drake Equation called, they want their calculations back. Second, 1979 called, they want their song lyrics back Third, the journalistic standards on this article are mind-numbingly bad.... A 0.01% chance that life develops???? That's per-planet. Think about that for a moment. ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/18/chance-of-life-developing-in-the-universe/ (This cookbook assumes you know the basics about how to get started with Selenium RC. These examples are also in Java, but should be pretty much consistent for any language) Finding text in a certain place on the page: Use XPath, treating the HTML of your page as well-formed XML. browser.getText("//div[@id='content']/table/*/tr[2]/td[1]") (In English: ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/15/selenium-rc-cookbook-part-1/ From April, 2006 - Cedric Beust explains "Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream" Personally, I think he turned out dead wrong on this.  If the AARP is building a large-scale software project in Ruby-on-Rails, with the ongoing back-and-forth between Django and Rails, and the various efforts to "port" ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/11/visit-the-wayback-machine/ If Test-First Development (TFD) is a specialized subset of Test-Driven Development (TDD), then surely the equivalent specialized subset of Behavior-Driven Development is Behavior-First Development. Today I had my first experience in developing BFD. I know what you're thinking:  BFD. But it's a BFD to me.  Using a rather exotic concoction of DBUnit, HSQLDB, ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/10/bfd/ I'm sure everyone else in the world found and mastered  XPath Checker long ago, but for those of you who haven't, it is a fantastic Add-on for Firefox that lets you practice XPath expressions on real, live web pages. Why would you want to do that?  If you want to write Functional ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/10/latest-cool-tool/ Hudson Good Continuous Integration tool. Nice charts, easy to use, fairly flexible out of the box.   A _lot_ less setup work than CruiseControl.  And the plugin system is well done, and pretty nifty. Struts2 An incoherent mess.  Documentation is spotty, uses a lot of contrived toy examples that blow up on anything ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/04/04/recent-impressions/ An oldy, but a goody, one that I haven't seen before. One comment I saw recently was "it means 'practices of the best'" - as in "the things that the best software developers/consultants do". I don't find that argument particularly persuasive.  For several reasons: No one knows who the very "best" software developer ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/03/24/best-practices/ To keep everyone in the loop, I've taken a job at Stelligent, which is an agile consulting company in Reston, VA.   They have a neat focus on infrastructure instead of process, and since that's where many of my philosophical struggles with Agile are, I'm excited at the prospect of sharing ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/03/24/stelligent/ Let's say you're using Hudson as your build/Continuous Integration tool. And let's assume you have some jobs running inside Hudson that you want to keep running, even if the build machine blows up. You probably want to maintain: Hudson itself All the plugins The overall configuration The per-job configuration Naturally, then, ... http://undefined.com/ia/2008/03/24/versioning-a-hudson-job-configuration/