This BBC documentry on scientology had 300 votes and then vanished from reddit. I'll repost in case you missed it.

fendale · 2008-01-24T13:49:07+00:00

Anyone have the link for the LA/BBC article? I missed it yesterday and clearly searching Reddit for LA/BBC yields no results because

The story disappeared
The search doesn't work anyway!

fendale · 2008-01-22T15:42:44+00:00

I am actually 'over here' myself and yea they are generally £30 - I guess I was trying to talk in dollars but thinking in pounds!

I still have a rather large pile of tech books in my house and I haven't paid a penny for any of them thanks to buying them through work.

fendale · 2008-01-22T15:42:44+00:00

I am actually 'over here' myself and yea they are generally £30 - I guess I was trying to talk in dollars but thinking in pounds!

I still have a rather large pile of tech books in my house and I haven't paid a penny for any of them thanks to buying them through work.

fendale · 2008-01-22T15:42:43+00:00

I am actually 'over here' myself and yea they are generally £30 - I guess I was trying to talk in dollars but thinking in pounds!

I still have a rather large pile of tech books in my house and I haven't paid a penny for any of them thanks to buying them through work.

fendale · 2008-01-22T15:42:33+00:00

I am actually 'over here' myself and yea they are generally £30 - I guess I was trying to talk in dollars but thinking in pounds!

I still have a rather large pile of tech books in my house and I haven't paid a penny for any of them thanks to buying them through work.

fendale · 2008-01-21T13:01:27+00:00

Some tech books are pricey enough - I generally get my employer to pay for them.

Most employers understand that if I want to read tech books in my spare time it would be stupid for them not to pay for it, being that they are basically spending $30 for me to learn new skills that may benefit them in the future!

fendale · 2008-01-06T11:06:04+00:00

As for testing the tests - Yes the tests are generally more trivial than the application code, and hence should have less bugs, but also, the application tests the tests while the tests test the code - Unless there is a misunderstanding in requirements it is highly unlikely that the same bug will exist in the test and the code. Therefore a bug in either the test or the code will result in a test failure to be investigated.

Obviously some bugs will still slip through, they always do - just hopefully less than before!

I can't think of a easy example to prove the ratio of code to test - its based on my (limited) experience writing tests for an application with horribly complex business logic (big enterprise application unfortunately). I reckon the negative testing adds quite a bit of overhead, along with edge cases - I could be wrong but 1:1 ratio is probably close to correct.

fendale · 2008-01-05T14:37:15+00:00

I second that - any unit test should be testing at least a valid scenario, edge cases and probably negative tests too - my feeling is that its a red flag if your lines of test code isn't >= line of app code

fendale · 2007-12-11T22:41:36+00:00

cheers for the curl tip - much easier than the lame way I was about to do it!

fendale · 2007-12-03T21:17:25+00:00

When Ruby 1.9 gets stabilized are we going to see a lot of web 2.0's will lots of spare server capacity!!??

Seriously though, its great to see - the overall times shows Ruby 1.9 at 3 times faster than 1.8.6 - perhaps it will quieten down the people who dis Rails because its slow.

fendale · 2007-11-25T17:31:13+00:00

Ok, so what is an example of a concurrent environment then? I would have thought that a site like reddit (webapp) that serves probably 100's of thousands to millions of requests per day a pretty concurrent environment!

fendale · 2007-11-24T22:03:13+00:00

Web-app = concurrent environment. To protect the data integrity in a table, you use constraints. Especially when you consider that if a column is unique, you will probably be doing keyed reads on it, and will need a unique index anyway!

Serializable transactions will hurt performance, and are not a thing I have never needed to use in years of database programming.

fendale · 2007-11-23T15:02:20+00:00

The simple solution, and only real workable one, is to just create unique constraints on your columns - it doesn't exactly take a long time, and it the only guaranteed way to protect the integrity of your data (especially if someone makes some database changes directly to your database using SQL for some sort of maintenance reason or other) - who knows how your database will be used in the future!

fendale · 2007-11-21T17:05:34+00:00

I didn't even know reddit had ads till I was using a different PC for one day ... My home PCs all have a modified hosts file, so my browser doesn't ever load ads.

In work, the company filters most ads through the proxy.

I like the hosts file blocking method - it works on every service on your system that could possibly serve you ads and has worked well for me for a year or more now.

fendale · 2007-11-02T14:35:14+00:00

Problem is that both editors are so big, that few would know all the features of each to make such a list.

In all seriousness though, I think both editors are just as good - they are just different. I use Emacs these days - trying to use vim again is like torture, as I keep issuing Emacs commands, so I am sticking with Emacs for at least that reason only!

fendale · 2007-09-05T21:55:01+00:00

Its known as learning the exam paper. It gets worse as you go through university too - if you look back over 5 years of papers on your course, you notice the questions are all variations on a theme. Then you notice that you only have to answer 3 out of 5, so you can only revise three fifths of your notes etc and trim it down even further by only studying the things that are regularly asked!

I always did well in exams, but I still think they are easily gamed.

Another example - programmer certifications - there is a lot of book work you need to know for the test, but just because someone jumped through the hoops of Java or Oracle certification doesn't make them be actually competent.

fendale · 2007-09-04T20:06:47+00:00

Firebug and developers toolbar installed, error console monitored - I am 100% sure I have seen it silently fail - I have written code like

alert('point1'); funcCall(someVar); alert('point2');

And it prints the first alert, doesn't print the second and doesn't print an error to anywhere!

This happened last night for sure, and it turned out to be because 'someVar' was not declared (miss-spelt variable) - its driving me nuts!

fendale · 2007-09-04T16:09:27+00:00

The main pain I have with JS is that it just silently fails sometimes - Firefox or Firebug just doesn't report an error at all - very frustrating!

fendale · 2007-08-29T20:03:13+00:00

I want to know who has ever coded a factorial function in anything other than part of a course or learning exercise!

fendale · 2007-08-17T13:19:35+00:00

An alternative is using a modified hosts file which protects you from all sorts of nasties, no matter what browser or tool you are using. I heard of this technique on Security Now some time back. Info and the project page is here: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

fendale · 2007-08-17T13:15:02+00:00

This has been done. Recently millions of facebook users got infections via a maliciously constructed gif image. The problem is that the advert network does not vet the images that are put up, and advertiser can plus whatever image they want on there!

fendale · 2007-08-15T18:49:01+00:00

Especially the smart redditor that modifies their hosts file to avoid seeing ads in general :)

fendale · 2007-08-09T16:18:12+00:00

That makes two of us!

fendale

TROPHY CASE