A fair while back I commented on a job opening at Microsoft, noting that my blog would probably work against me in that particular case due to it being so critical of Microsoft.  Robert Scoble noted that Microsoft don’t want to hire evangelists that just drink the company Kool-aid and have no credibility.  He’s right of course but slightly missed my original reasoning.  It’s not so much that I’ve made some negative comments about Microsoft – more that I pretty much have never said anything positive about Microsoft on my blog.  I was supportive in my “Missing The Point” entry about Microsoft’s new interoperability initiative and did defend beta releases which were relevant to Microsoft at the time, but that’s about it.  See for yourself.

Gianugo Rabellino has been playing with unit testing in Swing – an area that I’ve spent a lot of time complaining about in the past.  In his particular case he’s trying to send key events to Swing components programmatically so that his JUnit tests can run automatically.  As Gianugo discovered you can’t just create a KeyEvent and send it to Component.dispatchEvent() because it gets rerouted to the focus manager.

Gianugo’s solution was to display the component on screen in a JFrame and make sure it has focus.  However, we can go one better – we can simulate the component having focus.

I’ve set up a blog to keep track of the books I want to read.  This year I want to do a lot more reading, particularly on technical subjects but also just stuff in general.  The most recent entries are syndicated into this blog over on the right hand side of the main page and RSS junkies can grab the feed.

The basic idea of unit tests is that you write them once and run them a lot – you don’t check in your changes unless all the unit tests pass.  This is a great idea.

There is one problem with it – it prevents unit tests from being used as a specification of work to be done later.  I don’t mean it prevents test driven development where the tests are written then the code is to make them pass is added and then the tests and code are checked in.  I mean where a particularly complex piece of functionality is going to be added and the best way to ensure that all the use cases are covered is to write unit tests for them all and let them act as the specification (note: this doesn’t work well if you have a non-technical client, but if you are working on off the shelf software it can be very useful).  You need to plan the set of features to include in a release ahead of time so you wind up with a whole heap of new unit tests which are acting as this specification that at some point in the future you will make pass.  At the moment though, those tests are okay to fail.

I’ve spent a large chunk of this week investigating what the best way to set up continuous integration builds is for our product.  Being a cross platform application we need a continuous integration set up that builds on four different OSs constantly (Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux).  Ideally of course it would do so on all variants of those OSs and at some point that might be possible using vmware of some kind.  For now though, just building and running the automated tests on some version of the OSs we support is a huge improvement.  Fortunately, our build process already uses ant and requires just a single target be achieved.

I noticed today that The Kleptones have released an mp3 version of their broadcast on “The Rinse” entitled “From Detroit To J.A."   It’s not as good as “A Night At The Hip Hopera” but it is definitely enjoyable.  It involves a lot of Motown material but unfortunately they too often took the average lyrics instead of the sensational music.

My pick of the series would have to be “Really Rappin’ Something” mostly for it’s driving baritone sax line.  I must admit though that the use of the music from “Ben” (early Michael Jackson) as the backing for “Revolverlution” was an inspired choice.  I’m not sure where the words over the top came from but they are also brilliant – “The Revolution Will Be Televised”.

Ben Fowler points to AppFuse, a quick way to set up J2EE projects with more buzz words than you can shake a stick at.  Specifically it sets up a Tomcat/MySQL apps that:

Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo’s WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (or Spring MVC)

That’s a huge number of different technologies.  It’s not necessarily bad to use all those technologies together (in fact it’s probably very good) but it’s important to be aware that pragmatic programmers don’t use wizards they don’t understand.

It’s funny, last night I read this reuters article about Microsoft beginning an initiative to improve their interoperability and thought wow that’s excellent!  I bet Slashdot completely misses the point of the message and rants on about how Bill Gates also mentioned that opensource doesn’t necessarily lead to interoperability.  Sure enough, Bill Gates Claims Linux Has Poor Interoperability.  Sigh.

Gates of course is right – there are plenty of open source products out there that aren’t interoperable in one way or another.   Further, while Linux systems generally adhere to standard network protocols well, they have an abysmal track record of interoperability on the same system.  The best example of this would be the lack of robust drag and drop support.

For about the first time ever I actually looked at the MT activity log for this blog.  It’s interesting to see the massive amount of spam I’m blocking with MT-Blacklist – between 50 and 100 comments or trackbacks blocked every day.  The HTML entity block (which is now modified to block the use of numeric HTML entities for the letters e and o only due to it blocking too many trackbacks before) is by far and away the most effective – hopefully not too many of the things it’s blocking now are actual ham.  Please let me know if you think you’ve been blocked inappropriately.

Apparently in Britain, cartoon frogs are allowed to have genitals – assuming of course they don’t refer to them in a sexual manner.  This is obviously a great triumph for free speech in Britain and I’m sure the mobile phone ringtones the frog advertises would have been devastated if the frog had been void of genitalia.

It is however somewhat concerning that:

Five parents said they were embarrassed by questions their children had asked.

A little while back, Robert Scoble pointed to a job opening as an evangelist at Microsoft.  An evangelist looks like a pretty cushy job to me – flying around the world to conferences and posting on mailing lists and blogs a lot – something to look into becoming when I eventually get sick of coding all day.

Now by the job description I’d say I’m reasonably qualified for such a position and there’s good examples of evangelizing technologies on my blog.  Sadly, most of the technologies I comment positively about are competitors to Microsoft’s offerings and on a number of occasions I may have gone so far as to directly criticize Microsoft.  There appears to be a blog sized hole in my foot…

Brian put forward a Java pop quiz and it happens to be an area I know very well:

Without breaking out a compiler, or BeanShell ;-), what is the output from the following:

System.out.println("**" + foo != null ? foo : "NULL" + "**");

The statement is equivalent to:

System.out.println(foo);

Why?

The left most + operator is the first thing to be evaluated. So the if statement then evaluates whether or not "\*\*" + foo is null which it never is and so the value of foo is always output. Similarly, the "NULL" + "\*\*" may as well have just been "NULL**", in fact the compiler optimizes it to be exactly that as javap shows: