My screen fonts under Ubuntu are occasionally completely screwed up. They show up in blue with overstrikes: I think this happens when I reboot my machine without a second monitor being attached to it, which it usually has. I suppose X.org gets confused when it cannot find a monitor that used to be there. To […]
Kinda offtopic, but I’m also an avid chessplayer, so… Crafty is recognized as one of the strongest open-source chess engines available, having once achieved a rating of 2792 on the internet chess server and having an estimated 2608 ELO rating. A default installation on Ubuntu 8.04 (e.g. aptitude install crafty and aptitude install crafty-books-medium) will […]
Should unit tests cover JavaBeans just to get a higher code coverage? These days I am working on a payment processing application that exposes its main interface as a SOAP web service. The API requires the client to build a wrapper object that packages the information needed for processing, for instance, a credit-card debit authorization: […]
Several home automation enthusiasts met again at LESO-PB to discuss recent developments in the field. There were four of us this time, Adil, Friedrich, David and yours truly. Friedrich openened the discussion by telling us about his ongoing work on the influence of light, especially its color, on human health. Early results suggest that proper […]
People often ask me what podcasts I regularly listen to. Well there are many of them and I won’t enumerate them all here, but I wanted to mention one that I listen to almost every day nowadays. Markus Voelter started Software Engineering Radio in January 2006. As he describes it on the website, this podcast […]
Spring is a great framework for externalizing the object graph of your application. Typically you write an XML config file that defines a number of Java objects (or “beans“) and how they are supposed to relate to each others. For example, suppose you have a class ThermalNode whose instances need to hold a reference to, […]
I just realized how late I was with a summary of our last Trends meeting, which we held on Tuesday January 27th at LESO. So here follow my distant recollections of the event. There were only three of us this time, but David was so kind as to give us a nice demo of the […]
There’s a nice feature in WordPress for including source code in your blog posts, but the Codex is not crystal-clear on how to activate it. According to this article, for example, all you have to do is to insert a shortcode tag and anything that goes inside that tag will be automatically formatted. But when […]
I am now convinced that even the most trivial pieces of code must be unit-tested. Recently I’ve been working on a Java implementation of a building thermal model. A textbook model with thermal nodes and thermal capacities and conductances between them. This is supposed to eventually become part of a generic testing harness for home […]
These days I’m working on a middleware application that bridges a company’s ERP and its warehouses. The ERP posts messages in a given XML schema, our application reads these messages, transforms them into the schema understood by the warehouse management system, and uploads onthem on the warehouse’s FTP server. We use XSLT to transform messages […]