malvasia bianca

[ I apologize for all the acronyms in the first paragraph of the post. I will explain what one of them means over the course of this entry, but if you’re here for, say, video game thoughts instead of technical geekery, then you would be correct in interpreting that as a sign that you should […]

Last week, I went to a talk by Mike Cohn on “Agile Estimating and Planning”. Good timing: I’d been thinking that I should get around to reading his book on the subject. Which I won a copy of at the drawing after the talk; apparently my recent remarkable good luck has (correctly) decided that I […]

A quote from Morgan and Liker’s The Toyota Product Development System: Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it. Here’s the full context (pp. 95-96; […]

I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute. Gyoza stadium sounds awesome. Star Wars in ASCII. I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…) I suppose you’ve already seen […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

One of the things I need to do in Ruby is read and update data stored in an existing SQL database. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I thought I’d look at existing libraries that provide this functionality. The pickaxe book didn’t give anything useful, but I saved some posts in a newsgroup thread on […]

An addendum to my note from earlier today: the constructor problem is more annoying than I’d thought, because (as I just discovered!) the static constructor method is harder to carry out than I’d realized. After all, the static constructor method still has to create an object of the type in question, which means that it […]

I miss function overloading. I can see why they left it out of Ruby: overloading based on static types is, of course, right out, which only leaves us overloading based on the number of arguments. And even that has a bit of a staticish feel to it, and, what with Ruby’s nice varargs handling (nothing […]

[I suspect I’ll be writing a fair amount about Ruby, and am too lazy to come up with clever names. And I don’t want to rename old posts, so I’m retroactively declaring this to be Ruby notes 1 and this to be Ruby notes 2.] I just learned about creating arrays of strings using %w{}. […]

I was going to write about Ruby and SQL, but I’m having fun doing other Ruby-related stuff this afternoon, so I’ll write about that instead. I was writing this unit test, for a class DeveloperWriter. And I got tired of typing DeveloperWriter.new(“arg”) all the time. (Actually, I got tired of typing new DeveloperWriter(“arg”) and then […]

I wrote my first Ruby code yesterday. It was a port of a date wrapper that I wrote in Java for dbcdb: its only job is to convert to/from written representations, and to have some special dates representing “I read this once, but I don’t remember exactly when” and “I’m in the middle of reading […]

The Poppendiecks’ latest book gives an interesting analysis of types of testing. (Taken originally from Brian Marick’s blog.) They propose that you divide testing up in two different ways: on the one hand, you can classify tests as either intended to support programming or to critique the product. On the other hand, you can classify […]

I should really catch up on my blogging; in the mean time, some random links: Will it blend? I know where I’m buying my next blender from. John Baez on the state of fundamental physics. Just the link for the panda fan in your family. A followup to a traffic experiments article that I mentioned […]

One thing that’s been bothering me at work recently: our response time to bugs is absurdly slow. Even bugs that are marked as high priority take a while to get worked on; bugs that aren’t marked as high priority may well never get worked on. Now, some of this is a classification issue: maybe a […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]

I’ve finished the last important code cleanups from my dbcdb code: I removed some proxy objects that had been used for lazy loading. I was really surprised to see how much that cleaned up certain aspects of the code: my Entity objects’ constructors got a lot cleaner, useless attribute setters/getters were removed, and in general […]

I’ve deprecated the old compound author pages – they’re still there, but now nobody links to them. Instead, pages for books written by multiple authors link directly to the individual authors’ pages. A matter of a change of a couple of lines of code. (Though all of my acceptance tests passed unchanged after that – […]

Today’s dbcdb projects: Improve the appearance of pages with long fields: now the long field doesn’t get forced to start on the next line. I’d hoped this would fix the Internet Explorer problem, but it doesn’t (though it improves it): for reasons that I haven’t yet investigated, I have to have the key float: left […]

Some compelling (to me, at least) articles/etc. on the excellence of Ruby: Martin Fower says people he works with are significantly more productive in Ruby. Tim Bray says: “Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. Over the last week I’ve got an unreasonable amount of work done in a ridiculously short period of time, with lots […]

I’ve made a couple of dbcdb changes. Now every page contains a link to let you search for all blog posts mentioning it. Which required a bit of WordPress futzing: it turns out that WordPress doesn’t let you search for double quotes by default. Also, I replaced the ISBN and ASIN fields that were really […]