Spotted the use of the <splash> task in the Hibernate build.xml today (via BPH). So of course I had to add it to Clover’s build file. You can see the results in the following screenshot. The <splash> task shows an image and a progress bar while the build is executing (the image can even be an animated .gif). This is cool and fun, but “cool” is not the only reason why I added it to a production build file....
I’ve been tweaking quite a few Ant build files at work in the last couple of weeks. Firstly, thank crap for IDEA and its Ant completion mode (Eclipse has a similar mode). Also, being able to comment out a whole XML block with Ctrl-Shift-/ is nice, too. Secondly, there is a certain amount of noise in an Ant XML file. Now, I know that I recently made noises myself in defence of Ant’s verbosity, but I decided to do a little thought experiment and see what an Ant build file might look like in some alternate syntaxes....
The first law of thermodynamics states something like this: the total energy of the system plus the surroundings is constant. Or basically energy is conserved; it cannot be created or destroyed, just moved around. This first law is an important realization for chemists/physicists, and underpins the way they look at problems. I think there is a similar realization that can be made regarding the complexity of software systems, and that it can change the way you look at and design software....
(Greets: Conor, OJB, Malcolm and BPH.) UPDATED (2003-07-09T06:54:05+0000) Brendan has implemented this as an IDEA plugin Your innovation got me thinking - of a lateral solution - no hardware mods required. see attached :-)
BMC has posted some of his thoughts on meetings. I used to work with BMC, and meetings never did seem to get in our way. BMC’s four rules for meeting attendence: If someone hasn’t spoken in the last 10 minutes at a meeting, then they shouldn’t be there. If one person speaks more than 80% of the time, then it is a presentation rather than a meeting. Use email or voice mail to distribute the information....
This idiom is a cool little trick, but I’ve seen coders scratching their head trying to work out what it does; so a detailed explanation is in order. The ^ bitwise exclusive-or operator (or “XOR”) is standard computer science fare. An XOR is often used to flip bits in a byte/word. In Java, the ^ bitwise operator works on all the integer types (int, byte, short, char, and long) and performs an XOR between each corresponding bit in the arguments....
The other day, I recalled first program I ever wrote. Actually, I remember it distinctly. I was in Year 8 (aged 13 or 14) of high school. It was a bright warm summers day but cool and dark in the computer lab (the curtains were always closed on such days). Some mates and I had spent the last couple of weeks typing programs from books into the Apple IIe computers in the lab....
I use the following code idiom all the time. I know it seems simple, and I know there are other ways of doing it, but when I first saw it a penny dropped. Writer out = ...; List l = ...; String sep = ""; for (Iterator i = l.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) { String s = (String) i.next(); out.write(sep); out.write(s); sep = ","; } You can see how this works:...