Recently we discovered that our tool that creates digital archives (copies of online project rooms) had a couple of minor bugs, which we are currently fixing. They turned up on account of the fact that linux file systems can hack almost anything, whereas Windows’ file and folder name conventions are prehistoric – think Win 3.1.
Seat belts fastened? Did you know that you cannot have folder names with a trailing space? Dots “.” at the end of file names aren’t permitted, either. Same for any \/*<>?:”| chars in your file/folder names. To top it up, the maximum path length permitted is 255 characters. >> more…
To make our user interface more shiny we recently decided to use animated gifs in a couple of places. Especially when using ajax to reload some areas of the page we want to show a spinning wheel 
. For the user it feels more like something is going on (something is beeing processed) instead of having some kind of frozen screen. But with Internet Explorer it is not done with just placing an animated gif in the page. IE stops animating the gif in a couple of scenarios. Here you can see some hacks to convince IE to animated the gifs again: >> more…
Three years ago we closed our old Jira database because it was overflowing with over 1600 bugs and issues and improvements. We had nobody who treated this database as his baby and consequently everybody just dumped stuff into it. Development was regularly critized for not acting on all those requests. For some reason the expectation had been created that this was some sort of queue and eventually everything droped into it would be worked on.
Timo then stepped up, started fresh and has been owning our bug count ever since. He constantly kept an eye on the list and made sure we never were over two to three hundred. Also he regularly interfaced with everybody else in the company to get their priorities as to which issues should be worked on first. But overall the count kept increasing slowly. >> more…
Although at conject the participation of women in software development is quite high – compared to the average numbers in IT – we would love to have even more smart colleagues in general and female ones in particular. Fortunately there’s a program called Cybermentor, which allows women working in the field of MINT (mathematics, IT, natural science, technics) to share their professional enthusiasm with school girls via email exchange.
Underrepresentation of women in these fields is not caused by lack of talent, but by wrong stereotypes and missing appropriate role models. Aim of the program is to support and boost the interest of girls in these fields, which is quite high and unbiased in primary school, but declines in the period of adolescence. Therefore it seems to be promising to intervene in these age. >> more…
We use the javascript window.setTimeout method for a recursive call of a function with certain parameters. Because the function call has to be constructed by string concatenation, we have to escape potential quotes inside the parameters. After some regex headache we came up with the following generic solution:
function escapeQuotes(value) {
value = value.replace(/([^\\])'|^'/g, "$1\\'");
return value.replace(/([^\\])"|^"/g, "$1\\\"");
}
Feel free to use it or simply test your regex reading capabilities.
If you ever want to resurrect files that you somehow deleted (like we did last week…) from Subversion – this is how it works:
1. Find the latest revision where the files (here: my_lost_folder) still existed (for example, 409)
2. Do
svn copy http://repository.com/branches/old/lost_folder@409 ./lost_folder
The files are not only brought back to live, but also automatically added to Subversion again.
Good thing I read the SVN book yesterday 
While looking up some svn commands, I recently stumbled upon this free book. After skimming over it one cloudy Sunday afternoon, I’d say it’s a really nice introduction. I especially recommend it to Subversion users who didn’t consider it necessary to read any documentations on Subversion – just like me. After reading the book I gained a lot of confidence using SVN, not being afraid to break something any more.
The book was written by members of the Subversion development team and focusses on the command line usage of SVN on unix. It’s style is enjoably matter-of-factly, but never boring. >> more…
Nope, this has nothing to do with fuller hair neither something else you can wear on your head. The Parallel extensions are an easy to use upgrade to your .NET Framework enabling you to use the benefits of your Multi-Core System.
Recent mid range systems use 2.0 up to 3.0 GHz CPUs. The first 3.06 GHz PC in Germany (buyable for everyone) were sold at the end of November 2002. Two years before, in March 2000, the first PC with 1GHz to buy was released. Due to the cooling problematic the upper limit for CPU speed is locked to the magic edge of about 4GHz. New generations of processors since 2003 got more cache, changed in size (results in reduction of heat) or introduced more cores. >> more…
Designing great applications really is about putting yourself in the shoes of your users.
Here is another neat example of a team going the extra mile. What happens if I lose my mobile phone connection in the middle of a call (e.g. while passing through a tunnel)? With my Palm Treo I would just end up on the home screen, having to got to recent calls to dial the number. >> more…
We use Selectors that return a list of objects all over the application and of course we want to use them in our Fitnesse tests.
To be able to do so, we introduced a new kind of Fixture that uses reflection to fill a map – one entry for each result of the selector. Basically, all we did was expand Fitnesse’s RowFixture and override the query() Method: >> more…
