There seems to be a great demand for HTML documents that don’t include white-space between paragraphs – similar to going into the paragraph formatting in Word and setting space before and space after to zero. This is very simple to achieve in HTML, but people just keep coming up with strange ways to attempt to achieve it.

The most common way people try to get around the problem is by putting their entire document in one P tag and using BRs. You can pick these people because they set their HTML editors to insert a BR on enter instead of inserting a new paragraph. The end result looks right in all browsers but destroys the semantic structure of the document. I imagine it would be much harder to navigate through the document using a screen reader too, since skipping paragraphs seems like a nice way to skim. The problem people most often run into with this approach is that their editor still treats the whole big block as a paragraph, so when they apply a heading style the entire document becomes a H1 tag with a bunch of BRs.

Useful tool for writing performance tests: Japex.  Must remember to use that when we do our next round of profiling. Doug’s suggestion is that once we identify a bottleneck in the code, we write a performance test for it with Japex then try to optimize it until we reach the desired performance level. I’m not sure that our codebase is likely to see performance regressions in the same area again (I can’t ever recall having to reoptimize the same section of code), however having the test would be able to quantify how much of a performance benefit we get which would be a useful metric to know.

As part of planning our wedding next year, the lovely Janet and I have begun looking into photographers. It seems that at least some photographers apply the same dodgy lock-in practices as software companies do by holding onto the copyright of the pictures they take at your wedding and forcing you to go back to them for reprints.

Apart from the fact that I’m somewhat uncomfortable with anyone owning the photographic memories of our wedding, the terms and conditions from one particular photographer are just ridiculous. This particular photographer will quite happily provide you with a DVD of all the photos they take in high resolution – you just have to wait two and a half years after your wedding and pay an extra $750. I’m not sure what happens if he happens to be hit by a bus in those two years or if for some other reason he goes out of business.  As we left our meeting with this photographer I felt quite uneasy about this terms – just feeling that something was wrong, however as I thought more about it, I thought of more and more situations where it would really come back to bite us.

There is one major problem with test driven development – it makes it easy to get lost. When you don’t use TDD, you tend to run your application a whole lot to see what effect your latest code has made. With test driven development, you run your atomic tests a whole lot instead. The trouble is, if your unit tests are taking you in the wrong direction, it can be a long time before you find out.

I’ve been developing some custom views (javax.swing.text.View subclasses) in the last few days. These are right up the alley of GUI code that people tend to find difficult to test but I’ve been pushing forward with test driven development with a fair bit of success. The main approach I’ve been using is to mock out pretty much everything the view interacts with and test it’s logic more than it’s actual rendering. In fact, this particular view doesn’t do any rendering of it’s own, but it does do a lot of layout of child views etc.

Note to self: I must read up on Andy Roberts’ Delta Web proposal and get involved. It looks decidedly useful.

Most code bases have some kind of code debt associated with them, legacy code bases tend to have lots of code debt. The good news is, paying back that code debt isn’t a complete time sink – it has definite advantages too. Obviously, reducing code debt tends to make the team go faster, but it also tends to fix bugs.

Quite often where there is debt, there is not just a lack of maintainability but actual bugs that are frustrating your users. By cleaning up the code, you will often fix those bugs without any special effort to do so – it just happens because of the simplified design.

In an effort to reduce the ridiculous amount of time wasted on April Fools day, the USA will be separated from Canada and Mexico and towed westward across the international date line, thus making April fools day start first in the US and letting them post all the pointless drivel to the internet prior to the rest of the world waking up. With the current location of the US, Australians have to put up not only with 24 hours of their own stupid April fools jokes but with an extra 12-16 hours of the US’s jokes the next morning.

There’s a very persistent (and very stupid) referrer spammer pummelling my blog and I’m getting sick of it – not least of all because at one point it actually managed to completely overwhelm the tiny little virtual server my blog runs on so that nothing else could access it. Given that I’m using WordPress with Apache, what’s the easiest way to block it?

Someone really needs to sort this out once and for all. It’s pretty simple to get Java installed so that you can run it – getting it installed so that the packaging system is satisfied that it’s there involves various bits of voodoo and integrating it so that you can use applets in Firefox is still a pain. Can we just decide on a standard location for the plugin file so that it can be auto-installed, or maybe even just a standard config file that tells the JRE installer where the Firefox plugin directory is?

Quite some time ago, I argued that unprivileged users were too annoying to be usable in Windows. Today I took shipment of a shiny new computer and figured that for once I might actually try applying all these ideas that are meant to make Windows secure. Previously I’ve just kept Windows safely behind a firewall and done my web browsing and email on my Mac – essentially eliminating any way for unvetted code to get to my PC.

Often when you define an interface there is a series of generic tests which can be applied to every implementation of that interface. For instance, the java.util.List interface carefully defines the behavior that all implementations must have. A simple way of testing these behaviors are present is to use JUnit’s ability to inherit test methods.

Define a base class with a test method for what you want and an abstract method to create the actual instance: