07.30.05
Posted in Programming, SAnToS at 12:11 am by Todd
I just finished a post on Dave Churchville’s blog that provides me a new term with a great explanation and examples: Technical Debt.
This seems to hit the sweet spot for me in my professional life right now. It seems like I am paying down my Bandera technical debt as we speak. And at the same time, I am paying down others technical debt as well. Which has forced me into writing up development policies and procedures so that the accumulation of debt will slow. Which, on the whole, is a good idea. But it is certainly not fun, exciting work in which I see a large payoff coming anytime soon. It is more likely to just start another round of bickering which might result in the work being completely scrapped.
On the bright side, I can now put “wrote a horrible, demented, useless development policy” on my resume.
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07.29.05
Posted in About Me, Manhattan at 10:13 pm by Todd
Since I keep getting pictures of my friends’ babies, I figured I would share a picture of my baby … my new house and the new rock wall that I built. First, a front view. You can see the rock wall runs from my front walk around the corner (with a big bulge at the end around a tree).
And a top view so you can see how I snaked it to provide some interesting lines.
You might also notice the big white thing in the front yard. Not sure what it is yet but I will likely be tearing it out the ground soon. Hopefully it is unimportant (or it might be a very expensive bad decision). More on that later.
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Posted in Programming at 9:48 pm by Todd
I was reading Brian Marick’s blog and he mentioned a new book on FIT. So I decided to investigate it.
What I found was rather disappointing. It seems like it is just a “business-friendly” interface for testing. In other words, we define test cases in Word or Excel, export it to HTML, and then write “fixtures” that the framework will understand. The framework will then color-code the tests (pass/fail).
So I guess it sounds like a good way to go about interacting with customers, but it seems like it would not be enough to fill up a book (maybe a nice sized pamphet?). In my view, which is obviously blinded by technology and my inexperience, this is a Word/Excel frontend to JUnit and the fixture is a TestCase. Not sure it made sense to read in HTML (especially HTML built from Word/Excel, yuck!) and create a new framework to do testing. But then again, to each his own.
Or possibly, I just don’t understand it well enough to form a real opinion. I will leave it up to my vast number of readers (what is it up to now, 2?) to judge.
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07.26.05
Posted in SAnToS at 9:36 pm by Todd
Well, my nemisis has caught me off guard again. The machine that runs GForge and hosts all of our projects in the SAnToS lab has crashed again this morning. So of course, I have to trek all the way down a whole flight of stairs (for those of you that are not computer people, walking more than a few feet is quite a heavy workout, especially in the morning) to check the console. Once there I noticed quite a few kernel panics so I tried the 3 finger salute. That failed to do anything of value. So I had to resort to the worst way to reboot a pc … hitting the power button. And then I had to trek all the way back up a flight of stairs. By the time I got back to my office, I had to take a nap (it’s ok, I work for the government, they don’t expect me to work hard).
But, I should be happy because the machine came alive without having to mess with it. Just had to login and run a script that starts up the ssh server (you would think that 3 guys with MS degress in CS would know how to setup init scripts and take the few precious minutes to do this). All in all, not the worst start to the day. But it did remind me that we should probably spend some time updating packages on the machine again (one of my least favorite jobs that I usually pawn off on the smart people in the group).
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