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J2ME: Write Once, Be Disappointed Everywhere

We developers and other nerdy folk are used to using strange and klunky applications that do something special, and we’re used to that trade-off.
Eclipse is an IDE so it’s hard to imagine it not being baroque and difficult to use, requiring weeks of effort to become productive. JBidWatcher has saved me a lot of money […]

“Ruby faster than Python and Perl!” ORLY?

Ruby faster than Python and Perl! cries the headline. This is based on a benchmark that tests “i = i + 1” in a loop, so it’s a particularly useless benchmark, even in a world of benchmarks designed to test unrealistic scenarios that make the benchmark author’s product look good.

Bad, Bad Code

I’ve written before about tips for offshoring. One specific thing I said to watch for is the bait-and-switch of talent: during the sales process you’re shown rockstars, but the real code you get is written by clueless newbies. When you set up a project such that you’ve minimized the cost per hour of development, but […]

Rails, Fixtures, the Test DB, and Test::Unit

From what I’ve seen, Rails’ weakest features lie in the way it prepares the test database and test data, and Ruby’s Test::Unit isn’t much better than the awful but ubuiquitous JUnit that Java developers are accustomed to. I set out this week to impose my preferences on Rails in this area, and that took some […]

RCOV C0 line coverage more generous than EMMA’s C1 line coverage

Coverage tests in Ruby (with rcov) are less strict than in Java (with EMMA), so watch out - 100% coverage is easy to attain but not as meaningful.