Oct 21 2008

I wish I had OSX….

Category: WindowsPhil @ 8:37 pm

Right…. I’d rather take that $2500+ and buy 3 Linux laptops or 2 quad core decked out desktops!!!  I am forced to use Microsoft Windows XP at work and am always on the lookout for software to make the environment usable. I happened to run across a blog that mentioned RocketDock. I know there are other tools for windows that will emulate the Apple dock, but this one seems pretty cool, and best of all, it is free! There are lots of themes and plug-ins to make it interesting… I figured that I would give it a try for a few days and see how it works out. At least I can try to have a better user experience.

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Oct 15 2008

Does your code suck?

Category: TestingPhil @ 8:23 pm

Sounds like something I would say… but not this time!  My company hired Dave Astels to do some consulting work a few years ago… probably after he wrote his TDD book. After meeting him at work one day, I started following his blogs…

I happened to run across this post from 2004 “Why Your Code Sucks, it is kind of old… but I really liked the point it was making….  I also thought the comments were very interesting.

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Oct 13 2008

Monday Morning Fun…

Category: MiscPhil @ 7:54 am

It’s 6AM, I am on my way to work, it is a beautiful fall Monday morning. I’m cruising down Route 7, flying along with all of the other early birds, listening to the Sports Junkies,  and they my luck changes…  I swear he was almost standing there, stupid deer!  He might have been walking into the road, but who knows, it was pitch black at that time of the day. I kind of glanced off to my right and I saw his glowing gold eye right there in front of me… Pretty freaky to hit a deer with a Miata! All I know is there were cars all around me, so I did not have any way of missing him. When I hit it, the car actually went sideways. I did this swervy little maneuver and was able to recover.  My legs were I little shaky, it scared the crap out of me!  It does not look that bad in the picture, but the hood will not open and my car is now a cyclops! That stupid deer went down the whole side of the car,  the door and front an real panels are all creased!

The thing I don’t understand, why me?  This is actually the 4th deer that I have hit (plus several other close calls)! The first one basically totaled my car; the car was un-drivable after t-boning it. The next two were just side swipes, just taking of my mirrors for fun! One was kind of funny, it was a huge deer that actually ran into me when I was driving thru Round Hill! Put a nice dent in my door!

Unfortunately, the car does not want to turn to the right anymore, it makes some pretty bad noises… I need to crawl under it and pull out some fiberglass.  Hopefully the insurance company will be friendly!

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Oct 03 2008

What's up with creating your own loggers?

Category: JavaPhil @ 6:18 pm

I have been pushing SLF4J for a long time now… When talking with other developers, (even when I talk to myself!) they have such strong convictions to “how they implemented it last time”, that it is really hard to get them to consider something different. Especially when it is as boring as logging!

I can’t tell you how many App1Logger.java, App2Logger.java, logger framework implementations I have seen over the years. When JDK 1.4 logging was introduced, (good or bad), I jumped on it. It was nice to not have to “have discussions” about what logging API we were going to use. I personally hated all of the wrappers (this dislike goes beyond logging wrappers too!)

So where is this going? I had an interesting idea yesterday when talking to someone about SLF4J. I believe that SLF4J is more of an API than an implementation. SFL4J provides a logging API and a collection of plug-able implementations. One could say that JCL (Jakarta Commons Logging) is an API, but also includes a “magic” implementation picker. This implementation picker is wired into JCL, defining a specific implementation philosophy. This philosophy has proven to be way more pain than gain. As for as the JDK1.4 and Log4J frameworks, I would classify them as purely implementations, with a matching, uncouple-able API.

Then it hit me… I can roll my own implementation and plug it in under SLF4J. I really don’t what to roll my own, but the point is that I can add custom behavior to my logging system without creating a wrapper framework. I think this is pretty cool!

So, that really only leaves one question: do you like the SLF4J logging API? Sure, it has some short coming, but what code does not? Overall, I think it is a perfectly sufficient API for the needs of anything I’ve encountered.

Once again.. call me crazy!

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