Sunday, January 5, 2003

ncurses on OsX I've got my own screwy way of installing ncurses under MacOS X, but this article has me rethinking things. The hard part about being ahead of the game is undoing all that has already been done. The nice part about starting over using Fink is that it should just work out of the box and I won't have to do all the work everytime. The bad part of this is that the server I needed to make the modification on first had never had Fink installed... so this is going to take a while. Comments () 6:53:48 PM

Agile Database Refactoring Scott Ambler has written several very good articles on database refactoring from an agile development perspective: The Process of Database Refactoring, Catalog of Database Refactorings and A UML Profile for Data Modeling. There are several more; see the section titled 'Agile Database Techniques' on the main page of agiledata.org. Evolutionary Database Design by Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage covers things from a slightly different perspective, while keeping to the agile methodology. Scott also wrote this Java coding standards document, which I found somewhat amazing, as I agree with it nearly completely. I believe that this is the first article outside of Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++" where I've seen someone recommend putting constants on the left side of evaluation (comparison) operations. Perhaps I haven't been paying very close attention. For example: if ( someVar == 0 ) {} if ( someOtherVar = 0 ) {} versus if ( 0 == someVar ) {} if ( 0 = someOtherVar ) {} The second comparison (with someOtherVar) is obviously a bug, but won't be caught by normal means. The easy way to catch it is to have the constant on the left side where it can not be modified. I catch about six bugs per year with this and have been doing it since about 1995. You do the math. Comments () 9:31:32 AM

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