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#Relaxing.

Nice Gunns :-)

> Hocus Focus automatically hides application windows that have been inactive for a certain period of time, leaving only the applications you’re using visible. It’s a great way to keep your screens clutter free and your mind focused on the task at hand.

#OSX #App #productivity

Place du Conseil, Villefranche

As an independent Dropbox hackweek project, I thought it’d be fun to build an open source estimator that catches common [password] patterns, and as a corollary, doesn’t penalize sufficiently complex passphrases like 'correcthorsebatterystaple'.

#security #authentication

Don’t put refactoring stories on the backlog. Instead, invest in learning what habitable code looks like, how to write habitable code, and how to improve the habitability of existing code. That’s what will make you go fast; that’s what will get you out of the thickets.

#sdev #technical-debt #refactoring

Ron Jeffries started an interesting topic on the XP mailing list. He said, "I think sometimes there's too much refactoring, and refactoring in the wrong places. ... How can we find a balance between too much refactoring and too little?" I thought this was a great topic. Test-Driven Development gets all of the attention, but I think merciless refactoring is the part of XP that has all of the subtleties, and where the coolest stuff happens. Imagine! Do this right, and your code gets cheaper to modify over time! That's so amazing, most people don't even think it's possible. Some even go out of their way to ridicule and belittle those who suggest it could be.

#refactoring #XP

I've used these rules with a large number of teams. They encourage good design and rapid feedback and they seem to help teams avoid a lot of trouble.

#testing #XP

Football celebrations, Denver style.

#NFL #Football #Broncos

Autumn sun w java-junk.

#rayban #wayfarer

Kotlin External Annotation Syntax

Recently I've been starting to investigate other languages that run on the JVM. Kotlin caught my eye for a number of reasons, but in particular it's being developed by IntelliJ, which should mean the IDE support should be pretty good.

One of the stand-out features in Kotlin is that the type system is designed to understand null safety. This can pose some challenges when calling out to existing Java libraries, including the JRE itself. To overcome this the Kotlin compiler includes a feature called 'external annotations' that allows the null-safety of a given method to be specified outside of the JAR in an XML file. This solution is based on the existing IDE feature.

If you're using IntelliJ the IDE can generate the relevant annotation XML for you; if not you'll have to edit the XML manually. As far as I know the syntax for these XML files is not officially documented. The examples below are provided for the curious in case you're trying to figure this out.

This first example annotates the Integer.valueOf(String) method to indicate that the return value cannot be null.

This second example annotates the Integer.valueOf(String, int) method to indicate that the first method parameter cannot be null. Note that method numbers are indexed from 0.

I hope this helps if you need to edit these annotation files by hand!

#Kotlin #JVM

Data delivered over an unencrypted channel is insecure, untrustworthy, and trivially intercepted. We owe it to our users to protect the security, privacy, and integrity of their data — all data must be encrypted while in flight and at rest. Historically, concerns over performance have been the common excuse to avoid these obligations, but today that is a false dichotomy. Let's dispel some myths.

#security #SSL #HTTP

In this post we'll compare JBehave vs Cucumber against their applicability for Java test automation. We compare them using the same scale as for BDD Engines Comparison post with some additional detalization on features.

#Java #testing #BDD

Terrier is a highly flexible, efficient, and effective open source search engine, readily deployable on large-scale collections of documents. Terrier implements state-of-the-art indexing and retrieval functionalities, and provides an ideal platform for the rapid development and evaluation of large-scale retrieval applications. Terrier is open source, and is a comprehensive, flexible and transparent platform for research and experimentation in text retrieval. Research can easily be carried out on standard TREC and CLEF test collections. Terrier is written in Java, and is developed at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow.

#Java #text #search

Fascinating discussion of open source wrt Wordpress themes:

Theme code necessarily derives from WordPress and thus must be licensed under the GPL if it is distributed.

#open-source #licensing #IPR

The density of problems is very visible to us now, and we see that we can’t just take a quick wipe at the field and do ourselves any good. We have a lot of refactoring to do to get back to a clean field. We are tempted to ask for time from our product owner to refactor. Often, that time is not granted: we’re asking for time to fix what we screwed up in the past. Not likely anyone is going to cut us any slack on that. If we do get the time, we won’t get a very good result. We’ll clean up what we see, as well as we can in the time available, which will never be enough. We took many weeks to get the code this bad, and we’ll surely not get that many weeks to fix it.

#sdev #technical-debt #xp

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I am johnstok