If they do, these guys may have figured out what they dream about! ElectricSheep.org. Electric Sheep is a really cool screen saver that's been around for a while, but I finally saw it in action this week. It looked incredible, and then when I heard more of the story behind it, I had to install it. :) I've shown it to a few people and everyone...

I was writing a short Ant script to generate the static HTML version of my blog, back everything up and then push it up via FTP to the hosting web server. The FTP task gave me a little trouble, so I'm passing the solution on in the hopes it will save someone else some time. I know that Ant's FTP task is an optional task and requires the Apache...

I use Technorati for much of my blog searches. Yes, it can be slow and it's not nearly as reliable as Google or Yahoo, but it works enough to keep me happy. Why? It's got a great UI for showing my saved searches (a "Watchlist") and it also shows me the top searches for each hour (which I find terribly interesting). For the last several days,...

Jeffery Fredrick posted a great blog entry on a comment by Michael Feathers called Rules for Unit Tests. It's a great set of litmus tests you can apply to your so-called unit tests and see if they really are unit tests. So what other types of tests are there? I'm glad you asked! ;) Taken from Ship It!, pages 43 and 44. There are many different...

It's largely died down now but there was a great bit of back-and-forth about Rails either being overhyped or great stuff. Justin Gehtland, Ted Neward, Dion Almaer and Glenn Vanderburg all jumped in and commented. I'm sure there are more posts out there I missed! This is more than a great opportunity to watch a few folks fire friendly volleys...

Ship It!, thanks to the Pragmatic Programmer guys and O'Reilly, is selling all around the world. And because I'm a first time author and apparently have too much free time, I look for (and sometimes find) reviews from time to time in other languages. Since I can't read Japanese or French very well, I rely on the Google Language Tools to do my...

I got a note today from Hiroshi Sakurai, one of our shirt contest winners. I loved his note: Hi Jared I received ShipIt! T-shirt yesterday. It is cool! Today is the first day to wear the T-shirt to work. I can't see what it says on my back while wearing it, but I love it. Thanks fot the nice T-shirt So we decided to post a better version of the...

I was fortunate enough to be involved with getting the JCoverage fork (called Cobertura) launched. Although my role was primarily managerial, not technical, I still enjoy watching it grow. SourceForge tells me that the project has nearly 250,000 "Project Web Hits". Today Mark Doliner and company (Grzegorz Lukasik, Jeremy Thomerson and others)...

I just saw a post on Slashdot about Subway. It was a comment, not a complete story... however it sounds interesting. From the Subway web page: The Subway project aims to create a Web development stack combining the ideas and spirit of Ruby on Rails with a comprehensive suite of prewritten Python web libraries and tools. So, do you know Python...

You may recall my post from a few days about about configuring Rails on Windows. Well, three other people I know ran into a second problem. It's trivial once it's solved but it can be quite frustrating. In a nutshell, add the following line to your database.yml port: 3306 if you run into this error: No connection could be made because the...

Here's a practical way to get your Blitzkrieg Testing rolling. It comes from Johanna Rothman's blog, Managing Product Development. Here's a short excerpt: Not every product has smoke tests (a series of tests you can run after each build to make sure the product works well enough to continue development and testing). Smoke tests provide early...

I have two bits of CI news to pass along. First, CruiseControl.NET is almost at version 1.0 Those of you who don't like the Java/Ant integration of the original CruiseControl for your C++ projects have a great alternative in CC.NET. Here's Mike Robert's post on the release. And here are the release notes. Native msbuild support! Second, Jeffery...

I've been corresponding with Jay Zimmerman about the NFJS tour and it looks like I'll get a shot at speaking at two events! I'll be a trial speaker in Reston, Virginia October 28th-30th and in Charlotte, NC November 4th-6th. If people like me I'll get to come back again. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity and being in the same event as...

I've had problems with my upper back and shoulder area for years. I've had a gradually worsening problem with a muscle that cramps or seizes. The muscular lockups have been at times spread into the shoulder, the other side of my back, etc. I've been in physical therapy, on various meds, ergo chairs, keyboards, workstations, track balls, etc,...

I am always hearing someone talking about Tomcat not being able to handle production work loads, etc. I've pointed out (over and over) examples of Tomcat working fine in a production environment. The last company I worked at (a small biotech) had a six figure software package that ran on Tomcat. This evening I saw a very interesting blog entry...