The Desktop Fishbowl
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Saturday, 10 August 2002

I've spent the last few hours trying to clean up the code of my Wiki, with a goal of eventually ending up with something I can make more widely available. One big problem. I was lazy when I wrote this. No unit tests. I'm trying to do major changes to the functionality, and there's nothing telling me what I have, or haven't broken. You get this interesting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you make a big change, one of those "what have I missed?" feelings. If I'd written unit tests, I'd have a little green bar to tell me nothing was broken. Of course, what I should do is take time out to write tests now. But... 4:39:15 PM

Error seen whilst opening an MS Word document which amused me no end: wvError: (decode_simple.c:514) Alert, insane repeat "insane" paragraph structure, making wild stab in the dark to attempt to continue [polonius] Heh. 4:03:42 PM

After spending the last few days banging my head up against JBoss 3.0, I'd like to post the obligatory link to Richard Stallman's Why Free Software Needs Free Documentation. 12:29:28 PM

Why are people so afraid of Java? I came across a post on the cms-list mailing list that I found quite disturbing. This guy was looking for a Content Management System written in PHP because "java is s...l...o...w..."? Where did he get this from? Has he ever tried a java app before? [Rick Salsa via Anthony Eden] This always amuses me. "Java is slow because it's a byte-code interpreted language with JIT compilation. So use [foo], which is a fully interpreted scripting language!" 9:49:31 AM