Going Dark For November

30Oct07

Between the number of posts I churned out over last few weeks, and the spike in traffic after my recent post1 on Enterprise Ireland and Auctomatic, I’ve managed to break a lot of the mouse organ’s records2 this month. That’s probably going to change over the next few weeks though because I’ll be going [...]

Filed under: NaNoWriMo, Writing   |  Leave a Comment

WTF 2.0

24Oct07

I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the Web 2.0 label that seems to get applied to everything these days. It’s probably one of the most overused and misapplied marketing labels I’ve ever come across in my experience in the software industry. At least during the dot-com boom you knew what people were [...]

Filed under: Business, Marketing, Web2.0   |  7 Comments

Retrofitting Unit Tests Part 3 – Mock Object Hell

23Oct07

Picture by greefus groinks
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In the previous part of this series on retrofitting unit tests I talked about how you can break the unit-test as integration-test pattern by introducing mock objects. Probably the best way to do this is by using one of the many mock object toolkits out there1 . For [...]

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Rigging the Irish Election? I Have A Better Idea.

20Oct07

Picture by scamall
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Damien Mulley has a series of posts about how to rig the Irish election and it all sounds like a fierce hard amount of work to me. I have a much simpler idea about how you might influence the outcome of a general election in Ireland1.
1. Make sure your political [...]

Filed under: Humour, Politics   |  2 Comments

Retrofitting Unit Tests Part 2 – When A Unit Test Isn’t

19Oct07

Picture by icathing
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One of the most common mistakes I’ve found, particularly with teams who haven’t had a good deal of experience of unit testing or TDD, is that if they do have unit tests they’re often really integration tests with fake mustaches. A small, relatively self-contained piece of code needs a database [...]

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