Friday, October 11, 2002

They Write the Right Stuff I lost track of which blog I found this by (read it on my Zaurus travelling to the office) but there's an interesting article on the development of the software that powers the space shuttle. Its sounds kinda boring work too with all those specifications but its hard to argue with the quality and massively-bug free code. I think the modern equivalent of 40,000 page specifications is lots of test cases that demonstrate what the software should do; document requirements through test code. There's an interesting part in the article where the software team is divided into two teams coders who write the code testers who try and break the code And there's a healthy competition between the two. If the test cases are written in software this could amount to one team of people writing test cases to try break the code and another team trying to write bullet proof code to get past the test cases. I think both teams could learn alot from each other. In particular the testers should really be developers who know how to develop unit and integration testing software. Far too often in the software world testing teams are viewed as people who 'push buttons' rather than people who develop test cases to automatically test software. I wonder if it'd help if software teams took turns being in both camps? Say 2 weeks a month they spend purely writing test cases to try break a part of the system, the next 2 weeks they spend writing code on another part of the system to try get past the test cases put in place by the other team. This could lead to some healhy competition. 11:57:32 AM    comment []

hsqldb startup slow?!. hsqldb slow?!. commons sql. BTW I don't think I'd recommend hsqldb to anyone unless its just for temporary data used by unit test cases. It only stores the statements executed, not the data. So startup time can take a long time if you use it for more than a day. I know Jason works on Axion, but I'd have to say the above statement is bollocks. I've used hsqldb databases ('script files') with tens of thousands of records that start nearly instantly. For development speed it is a kickass database. [rebelutionary] Sure, use hsqldb for development. My point was, I wouldn't trust it as a long term database. Even using just a few megs of data over time could involve millions of SQL statements. You're startup time will just get slower and slower over time as the number of statements to execute on startup increases. Sure tens of thousands is pretty fast (since its all in RAM afterall) but try it with hundreds of millions of SQL statements evaluated after a large amount of continual use. Try use 1Gb of continually updating data over a long period of time. Once its started hsql is fast, since its all just in RAM anyways, so its good for temporary stuff, development tasks, testing etc.  Handy development tool but I wouldn't use it for real, permanent, production data that I'd care about if I lost it. I've used hsqldb alot in the past and its been very useful. Though these days I do find Axion is better written, better documented and much better tested so don't think I'll be going back any time soon. 11:14:22 AM    comment []

subscriber stats... Lies, etc.. Just signed up with nedstat. Thanks to James for the link. One thing occurs - most regular weblog readers are probably using RSS. Is there any way to get stats on how many people are subscribed to your feed? [Pushing the envelope] I've no idea. In fact I rarely ever visit the websites of the blogs I read; I tend to just read them inside Radio's aggregator. So I don't think hit counts on the home page include RSS consumers. There's the 100 most subscribed to feeds, though I'm not sure if thats only including Radio subscribers or not. Considering Joel on Software is #86 and he gets 8 million hits a year; I doubt we'll show up on this list any time soon :-) 12:42:53 AM    comment []