malvasia bianca

The last section of The Fifth Book of Peace talks about Thich Nhan Hanh a lot, so I decided to read one of his books next. One of his big themes is “mindful behavior”; as I understand it, this means that, when you do something, you should simply be doing that, not thinking about or […]

It’s fun having an excuse to interact interactively with a language, as I work through the Learning SQL examples and exercises; almost all of my interaction with languages since I was an undergraduate has been mediated through a compiler, and I’d forgotten what I was missing. Hmm: I suppose I interact with bash all the […]

Despite my earlier planning, I still haven’t done any work towards switching dbcdb to an SQL backend. Part of this is other things intervening in my life, but most of this is the inertia of starting something new, and that I haven’t broken tasks down enough. Today is a holiday, so I can spend some […]

One of the most interesting entries for me on the Agile Toolkit podcast is the one on promiscuous pairing and the least qualified implementor. What the interviewee proposes is that, when starting on a card, the person who knows the least about it should work on the card, pairing with somebody who knows more about […]

I finished reading an introductory SQL book. (Which seemed decent enough.) So now I don’t really have many excuses to avoid starting the transition of dbcdb to an SQL back end. Which I don’t really feel like doing, even though it’s clearly the right thing to do next. This means one thing: I should split […]

Martin Fowler just revised his The New Methodology paper; it’s a nice introductory exposition/justification of agile methods.

And now you can see the video games I’ve played recently. There’s still a little bit of refactoring to do on the code that I’ve checked in, and a little bit more code to write. But the previous constructs held up reasonably well; easy enough to add the new item types (video games, game consoles, […]

Okay, now I understand, at least a little. It would seem that, if A depends on B, using a part of B’s implementation that, say, returns an object of type C, then modifying C doesn’t cause the depend task to rebuild A unless you set closure to be true. Which is a little weird – […]

I finally have dependency checking right; I don’t know how I missed ant’s depend task before, but I’m using it now. I’m still a little surprised that the tutorials that I looked at didn’t point it out, and that it’s an optional task; on the other hand, there are enough C and C++ build systems […]

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

I added a book index. Pretty straightforward cutting and pasting, followed by some refactoring. The refactoring was a little different from normal. For one thing, it was my first experiment with writing generic classes in Java. (I’d written a generic function before, but not a generic class.) I learned a little more about what you […]

I recently lamented the design that I came up with for outputting HTML: I was combining a class accumulating HTML together with static methods that spit it out as text, leading to an unhappy marriage that I thought I knew how to deal with in C++ but couldn’t in Java. As I said at the […]

If you look at my recently read page, you’ll now see what I’m in the middle of. Which took about 5 minutes to implement. My internet explorer problems are an IE bug: the fifth item in the list of rules in the CSS spec on float positioning says that “The outer top of a floating […]

As threatened, I’ve extracted an HtmlWriter class. And certainly the code is an improvement, though there’s one thing about it I don’t like. The class has a couple of core responsibilities: it knows how to close the currently open tag, and it knows how to indent. (One could argue that it’s a bit pointless to […]

If you gaze upon the right side of this blog, you will now see a link to my list of recently read books. This was a pretty interesting story to implement. XP encourages you to always do the simplest thing that will cause all your tests to pass; one of their key phrases in support […]

Okay, now I’m mad at ant: I just changed a method from public to private, a method which was called by other classes, and ant didn’t recompile all the affected files: I had to wait until I got an error at runtime. So either ant doesn’t do what it should, or something’s seriously wrong with […]

After getting ant to do my compiling, I decided to get it to run my unit tests. Which it can now do acceptably, though the path was a bit rockier than I would have liked. Some steps: Copy down an example from a book, mutatis mutandem. Hmm: ant says it doesn’t know about the junit […]

I converted dbcdb’s build system from Make to ant a couple of days ago: besides ant being on my list of tools to learn about, it seems to be impossible for Make to work well with Java. Previously, I’d gotten around this by using a Makefile that works 99% of the time, and having my […]

My first attempt at adding CSS to dbcdb was nice, but it had some flaws. In some places, I didn’t express the syntax as gracefully as possible; it put in an ugly and unnecessary scroll bar if your web browser was less than 900 pixels wide; and bright red is pretty unsuitable for a header […]

I added a stylesheet to dbcdb; here is an example of what it currently looks like. Move your mouse over a link without clicking on it and notice the a:hover effect. Most of the issues involved formatting definition lists properly; this page was helpful. I did have to modify my HTML, though; before, for compound […]