Thoughts on the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
ThoughtWorks published their March 2012 Technology Radar recently, and it is a must read for anyone with a passing interest in software development. Here are some of the things that I found particularly interesting: Things I were blissfully unaware of: Vagrant. It’s scripted delivery of dev environments using VirtualBox and Puppet / Chef. Quick, easy [...]
Fixing mintMenu crashing with AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘get_contents’
Mint has made my life difficult a few times now. The latest trick was getting the following error with a stack trace at start-up: AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘get_contents’ In my case the problem turned out to be a blanked out applications.menu file. To determine if this is the case, run: ls -ltr [...]
Getting started with some cool new-to-me stuff
I’ve been itching for a while to try out something new and not work related. Amongst others, I’m interested in learning: Gradle – I like Groovy and I like devops. Polyglot Maven is silly. I need to try this. Scala – Too many cool features to ignore. MongoDB – Well, more like something NoSQL in [...]
The CAP theorem
I was reminded again today of the CAP theorem. This is an oldie but quite a goody, especially with all the hype around the cloud and distributed systems these days. The theorem states that no distributed system can simultaneously guarantee Consistency, Availablility, and Partition Safety, and has been proven to be correct. So you can [...]
Good article on Drools unit tests
Found this article on unit testing Drools… pretty cool… they use Mockito to mock out the event listeners, allowing you to assert events fired in the rules engine. http://blog.athico.com/2011/10/cookbook-how-to-test-rules-using-xunit.html I’m more familiar with JMock than Mockito, but the ArgumentCaptor mechanism used here is something I’ve wanted more than a few times in JMock. In JMock [...]
Staying up to date
A few months ago, I moved from being a full time developer to being a full time architect, which has so far been great. One drawback though has been that I’m simply not finding the time to do any coding myself. Although there is plenty I can jump into and we do follow a hands-on [...]
Task choice and other existential matters
Assuming you’re not following some horribly outdated, draconian methodology where a spreadsheet-wielding project manager tells you exactly what to do and when to do it including bathroom breaks, dev teams these days mostly have a lot of flexibility. Of course for a particular project or sprint all the work still has to be done, but [...]
Mind map of PSP
I recently wrote the SEI certified PSP developer exam (and passed, yay). It’s a fairly difficult exam, and in preparation I did a mind map of the whole PSP book. I don’t think it’ll make too much sense without context from the book, but may be of interest to others writing the exam or practicing [...]
Fixing packet loss on Ubuntu 11.04 wireless
After installing Kubuntu 11.04, I started experiencing packet loss of around 50% to 60%. I finally found the solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1740056.html Turns out this is a common problem in kernel 2.6.38 (do ‘uname -a’ to check your kernel version), and possibly later versions until this is fixed. This problem occurs with the ath9k driver, so [...]
You need a Gravatar
I thought this would be fairly obvious, but in case it’s not and anyone out there is wondering… the avatar thumbnails on comments etc on this blog are auto-generated and look a bit odd. To get a proper image of your choice, you need to get a Gravatar. The nice thing about this is that [...]