Upgraded to Leopard : Making use of /etc/paths.d and path_helper 12

Jan

24

2008

In Leopard, Apple has introduced a new mechanism for managing and maintaining your system path ($PATH). Previously (and in most current Linux environments) paths were managed by updating the PATH environment variable directly in either the system profile (/etc/profile) or your local profile (~/.bash_profile). Commonly you had entries like: export JAVA_HOME = /usr/lib/j2se/jdk1.5.0_13/ export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin ...
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citations

Testing those private methods

Jan

21

2008

I’ve been working my way through Working Effectively with Legacy Code and one of their strategies for testing classes has particularly hit home. Situation You’ve fixed a bug in a method that lacks any test cases and is not easily incorporated into a test harness. More often than not this method is private (because we ...
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Java

Innovation or Die – Pedal Power

Jan

20

2008

From the Google Blog: The contest said to “Innovate or Die” – and Team Aquaduct lives! In fact, the San Bruno, California team – consisting of John Lai, Adam Mack, Brian Mason, Eleanor Morgan, Paul Silberschatz – is living in grand (prize) style today after winning the first Innovate or Die Pedal-Powered Machine contest. The ...
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General Discussions

Google getting into Scientific Data Management

Jan

20

2008

A friend just pointed out a post over on Wired Science that talks a bit more about Google’s (previously) announced plans to begin providing infrastructure to enable scientists to more easily share and collaborate on large volumes of data. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. Giving scientists access to large volumes of data ...
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Open Source Software

Dishonest Programming

Jan

20

2008

There was an interesting post (by David Brady) included in the most recent dzone.com email that discussed the notion of Dishonest Programming. The last sentence does a decent job of summarizing the author’s thoughts: Any time you feel yourself being clever, ask yourself a key question: are you being deceptively simple, or simply deceptive? In ...
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Java

First Impressions of Hadoop 3

Jan

11

2008

The other night I sat down and spent some time playing around with Hadoop. What follows here is based on my brief understanding of the project and one nights worth of experience Hadoop is an Apache Lucene project that provides an open-source implementation of MapReduce. MapReduce is a programming model emphasizing parallel processing that has ...
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Open Source Software

thesixtyone.com – not just the same old music discovery service

Jan

8

2008

thesixtyone is a music discovery game that rewards those who help others listen to good new music. If you’ve ever seen digg.com, this is essentially a music equivalent. Artists upload music, listeners vote, and gradually songs make their way up the chart. Very Web 2.0 (in a good way). I’m sure there are others (pandora.com ...
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citations