When faster is wrong, and slow is right

Gosling has an interesting post on the Java sin() and cos() methods - Sun's bug detail.

Simian, and some wacky results

What do you do when you see this from Simian?

<summary duplicatefilecount="2286" duplicatelinecount="229743" duplicateblockcount="16659" totalfilecount="3684" totalrawlinecount="1472768" totalsignificantlinecount="815444" processingtime="33657">

I suspect the answer is ...run

Agile 2005 Conference

A colleague is blogging from the Agile 2005 conference this week.

TDD with Velocity/xmlunit

A component I am working as part of a pricing system needed to generate HTML reports. A fellow consultant - from a rival consultancy :) - suggested I use Velocity. Velocity turned out to be an ideal fit for the problem I was solving. However, before I could write the code I needed to write the test - TDD. xmlunit was an ideal fit for the test cases - specifically the assertXpathEvaluatesTo method.

Evo - an old (1976) agile development methodology with 5 day iterations.

Know your software development tools

As Kevin Johnson states in Extreme Programming Applied (page 174) "pairs will be stronger if they both discover the most efficient way to use their tools". He also notes that shortcut keys "minimize the friction caused by back seat drivers". Having migrated to IntelliJ a few weeks back (from Eclipse) I have to agree with Kevin's shortcut point - I can't learn the Idea's keymap fast enough.

Is this the start of Microsoft moving towards Open Source?

OSDL boss hints at Microsoft collaboration

GridCache

DataSynapse GridServer has the concept of a GridCache. Only problem with GridCache is that it has no locking, no transactions, and is not a distributed data repository. Maybe DataSynapse should consider integrating Blitz into their product. GigaSpaces on the other hand has a distributed cache, but doesn't (I could be wrong) offer all the grid services that DataSynapse offers. Maybe DataSynapse and Gigaspaces should merge :)

Unit Testing Database Access code

HSQLDB appears to me to be a clean way of testing database access code. Just use the in-memory feature (jdbc:hsqldb:mem:), and implement your setUp method to create the appropriate tables, and tearDown to drop the tables.

Interesting to see that the Deutsche is listed as one of the openadaptor adopters - DrKW originally build openadaptor. Suprised no US investment banks are listed.

Came across Nagios today. Nagios is a monitoring program for host, service and networks. Nagios is fully pluggable, with the Nagios Exchange offering a selection of plugins. NSJS looks particularly interesting.

JBehave

A colleague mentioned JBehave yesterday. Not knowing much about the project, I googled and came across Magpiebrain's blog. The Velvick Underground reflects on the BA's view of JBehave, as does the Agile Business Coach.

Damian has a good overview of Grid Computing, particularly relevant to the project I'm now on.

Another day, another client

Having just finished working on a large Foreign Exchange (FX) project at a US client of Finetix, I'm now at a European bank (for Finetix) working on Grid Computing. The grid project is particular interesting for two of reasons:

• DataSynapse is the application we are working on
• Agile principles
  

About six years ago I wrote a grid computing framework and application. Unfortunately, neither saw the light of day. However the project did give me a good grounding in grid applications, so the new project I'm working on is very much a flash back to past experiences.

With regards to Agile, I'm a support of the Manifesto. This particular project has a number of ThoughtWork consultants attached to it, giving the project a real Agile flavour, not the more typical investment banking half baked Agile approach. Today out development environment is IntelliJ, Cruise Control with Emma, CheckStyle etc