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
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.
Lately, we’ve been playing around with stylesheets for print and directly ran into some problems.
This snippet in Firefox
only prints exactly one page (that means it even stops in the middle of a line when the page is full).
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Once in a while it happens that you have to roll back some changes you made in a branch that was already signed off, reintegrated into the trunk and deleted. This is how it can be achieved:
1. resurrect your branch by copying the revision you want to roll back (here: 28120) to a new branch:
svn copy http://svn.domain.com/branches/new_feature@28120 http://svn.domain.com/branches/new_feature -m “restore temporarily”
2. in your local copy, undo the specific change (c -28120 is the same as -r 28120:28119):
svn merge -c -28120 http://svn.domain.com/branches/new_feature
3. the usual: build, test, commit. >> more…
Last Saturday I visitied decoded, a conference dedicated to the beautiful things one can do with code. Topics ranged from art projects over open source hardware to more serious topics like visualization of data.
All talks were awesome (and I totally want an arduino for Christmas), but the one that kept me researching and having new ideas was the one of Moritz Stefaner about visualizing information. He has some really inspiring websites (here and here). I especially liked his contribution to the book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search” – it’s about search, visualization and it even has formulas. What more could one want? >> more…
