IntelliJ Idea Community Edition
The company I work for have been slow approving my upgrade license for Intellij Idea so I was forced to choose between going back to the older version or trying out the free open source community edition.
The community edition doesn’t include most of the J2EE features that ultimate includes so I was expecting the downgrade [...]
The Value of Testing
I just wanted a highlight a post over at the Caffeinated Coder because I thought it was particularly well thought out. In it Russell talks about his changing approach to testing after many years. Often when you read about TDD (or testing in general) it’s from a eager proponent who declares it [...]
The Pac-Man Dossier
I came across The-Pac-Man Dossier the other day. It is fascinating reading. It’s easy to look at a game like pac-man and think… well that would be easy to program – a one screen maze with some ghosts with some fairly basic path finding – what could be hard about that. Well [...]
Google Chrome
I’ve been using Google Chrome recently. For the most part it seems to be a stable and fast browser. I have had a problem at home with it importing my bookmarks. The real killer for me at the moment is the lack of plugins. If they come out with delicious, adblocker [...]
Double Checked Locking
After warning someone about the problems of double checked locking I discovered it’s been fixed in Java 5. Simply add the volatile keyword and it’s all good.
See Wikipedia for all the details.
The Rule of Silence
The book The Art of Unix Programming outlines some of the conventions that good Unix programs often follow. One of these is the Rule of Silence:
Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
When most Unix command lines run, you know they worked because they don’t spit out [...]
More fun and games with Internet Explorer
IE continues to amaze me with the most bizarre bugs.
JVM Languages
I think my favourite blog at the moment would be Charles Nutter’s. You can always count on him for enthusiastic informative postings. It isn’t hard to tell he loves his job – it comes through very strongly in his posts. His last post was a pearler. In it he talks about [...]
Followup: Converting from Java to Groovy one step at a time
Charles Nutter is in on the fun with a Ruby version:
def subn(n, list)
return [[]] if n == 0
return [] if list.empty?
remainder = list[1..-1]
subn(n-1, remainder).collect {|it| [list[ 0 ]] + it } + subn(n, remainder)
end
That made me realise there was [...]
Converting from Java to Groovy one step at a time
I came across a post on (cadr life) the other day about creating a function to find all subsequences of a list with a certain length. The Java version was particularly icky and in his post he shows the equivalent code in a couple of languages. I thought it might be interesting to [...]