Monthly Archives: March 2007

Test-Driven Development: Best and Bad Practices

Test-driven development (TDD) has been seen as an aspect of the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology since the rapid growth of XP mind-share in the early 2000s. This view has begun to change as more developers are trying TDD even without a commitment to XP. Here I’ll talk about just a few of the important things you should and should not do when developing with TDD.

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Wilkes University Update: Why all development will move to the Mac

In my Why all development will move to the Mac entry I identified several reasons I think the Mac will become the dominant platform of the future. Now more evidence as Wilkes University is moving to all Apple hardware. Read the article in Computerworld. They apparently will dual boot Windows, but the head of the IT department acknowledges that part of the decision was based on the perceived superiority of OS X.

Number One Maurice!

After a period of time when other Maurice Careys were at the top of the Google search, I have returned. At one point I held the top spot due to my frequent posts on a Linux user group. Now my website holds the top position. This of course is not exactly a SEO coup. How many people are actually Googling my name? Never the less there is a certain sense of pride that comes along with being the number one Google result. Personally I see it as a basic principle of geekiness. If Google thinks your number one then you got some geek credz, otherwise maybe not.

A year and a half in the life of our Mac Mini.

It isn’t something I think about much but today I was a little astonished when I realized the Mac mini has been running for about 18 months. Not continuously. I did shut it down for about six hours once when I upgraded the memory at a friends house. Another time it was down for about four hours when I moved my office. Other than those ten hours of rest the mini has been restarted when Apple released updates to the OS that insist on a restart.

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How To Prove It

I just took a look around my work area to see what the most useful thing has been over the past week. It has been a rather long week since I’ve been studying for an exam. There is nothing I hate worse than exams. They are the least practical way to evaluate real knowledge that I can think of, but that is another story. What I found to be most useful is How to Prove It: A Structured Approach, a book that does a good job of presenting a very important skill for anyone working toward a degree in Computer Science (or math I imagine). I really wish I had known about this when I was getting my Bachelor’s degree. It would have helped a great deal with the “introductory” courses in discrete math, computer science theory, and graph theory.

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