Recently I was co-lecturing a workshop about web application developement with CouchDB. The event took place in the scope of a Summer University, which explicitly claims to provide a setting for lecturers to improve and to try out experimental teaching concepts.
Apart from simply distributing the share of work and apart from parallelizing preparation as well as oral presentation, my impression is that lecturing in pairs has positive side effects similiar to pair programming: >> more…
After seeing it at last year’s decoded conference I wanted to have an arduino and finally got me a Lilypad – its purple, sewable, cute little sister designed to build interactive clothing. It was even more fun than I thought and I spent a whole weekend and several evenings designing, programming, debugging and sewing my first interactive shirt.
That’s how I made it…
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I want to test a method of a class “Service”
The problem is, that Converter provides no way to determine which drawings have been added. So I tried the following, like I would have done in Java – subclass the Converter and add the needed methods.
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Finally I found a case, where I really like C# regions: to structure unit tests. Usually there is more than one test per method and finding the place, where the testing of one method starts and the other ends is quite annoying.
In all other classes I still think that the only use of regions is to find which parts of a class should be extracted into a new class 
On Monday, I started working on a new product (well, the product is not new, I only joined) and it’s neither Java nor Grails, but .NET. Which means working with a new (also not new, but I haven’t used in in ten years) OS, a new IDE, new team, new code, …
Luckily, there’s ReSharper, a great tool for visual studio, that let’s me use all the shortcuts I know from IntelliJ IDEA.
But as all the rest is so new and exciting, be prepared for a lot of beginner’s posts about C#, Team Foundation Server, working off-site and alike.
Awesome tool:
rlwrap is a wrapper that uses the GNU readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any other command. Input history is kept between invocations, separately for each command; history completion and search work as in bash and completion word lists can be specified on the command line.
rlwrap compiles and runs on most Unix(-like) systems, including cygwin.
Get it here
As only few developers and few architects might know, the idea of design patterns – popular in computer sciences – originates from the playground of architecture and built environment. It was Christopher Alexander with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein who wrote “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” in 1977. In this book they describe patterns extracted from the rich (european) architectural history and how to apply them to current problems. Each pattern consists of a description of the problem, a sketch of the prototypical situation, a solution and a reference to related problems. Exactly the same way as the Gang of Four adapted it for problems in computer science in their book “Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” in 1994. Apart from the formal characteristics in both areas the idea of design patterns produces an answer to the same question: how to transfer previous experiences into productive sources of knowledge? >> more…
Working on my first operations story, configuring new switches for the data center, and being really annoyed and amused by the amount of acronyms in the manual.
My favorite is:
GVRP,
- that’s GARP VLAN Registration Protocol
- and that is Generic Attribute Registration Protocol and Virtual Local Area Network
That makes a total of “Generic Attribute Registration Protocol Virtual Local Area Network Registration Protocol”. Wow.
Just found this great shortcut in subversion (introduced in 1.6):
Instead of typing the whole path to your repository root, you can simply use a caret (^). This is especially useful when switching to a branch
svn switch ^/branches/new
or merging the trunk
svn merge ^/trunk
Before that I always did svn info, copied the path, etc. etc.
