Unmask Password

I've been doing a lot of work around encryption lately. One of the tasks involved creating a dialog allowing the user to enter their password for encryption or decryption. One feature I put on this dialog was a "mask password" checkbox. When checked, the password appears as asterisks, meaning the people near the person are … Continue reading Unmask Password →

CITCON London 2006

The Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) is hitting London this October, and there's a fair chance that I'll put in an appearance (pending my other obligations). Details are at http://www.citconf.com/.

CVs and Findability

My CV (or resume - call it what you will) has been by far the biggest bandwidth resource on my website - by a factor of 4! It didn't help that it was a pdf file weighing in at over 400Kb. I have since converted this document to use semantic html, meaning that it is … Continue reading CVs and Findability →

Moving Hosting Location

This is just an advance warning that access to exubero.com may be patchy over the next couple of days, as I move house. Against all best practices for hosting arrangements, I actually serve the exubero.com website from a computer at my home. This is very flexible and cheap for me, as I can point the … Continue reading Moving Hosting Location →

Moderating JUnit Messages

The JUnit mailing list is the place to go when asking about questions not on the FAQ. However, being a moderated list, it can sometimes take a long time for the emails to work their way through the moderation queue. I've been stung a few times myself; an email I sent once took 5 days … Continue reading Moderating JUnit Messages →

Refactoring Editors

After a 6 year hiatus from C++ (doing mainly Java), I've finally jumped back into doing some C++ development using Microsoft Visual Studio. I was quite keen to see how the development environments compare after some many years away. In summary, I was severely disappointed. A bit of background: I was a long time user … Continue reading Refactoring Editors →

Extreme Tuesday Club

Tonight, I'm off to try my first experience of the Extreme Tuesday Club. I've been meaning to get along for a long time, especially after attending XPDay 5 last year (which is organised by the XTC), but Doug Clinton finally gave me a good excuse to turn up.

Java Black Belt

Thanks to a tip off from the Java Posse last month, I started investigating the Java Black Belt certification community site. In the past, I've been sceptical of certification processes, as I believed that my CV was a better and more accurate indication of my skills than than anything that a certification could say about … Continue reading Java Black Belt →

Ant Build Components

I'm kicking myself regarding this one: although I was working for six months sitting within a backwards bitch slap of Hugh Reid, I didn't really have a proper look at the Ant build system he was setting up. Luckily, on my very last day in the office, Hugh showed me his write up about his … Continue reading Ant Build Components →

Singletons are Evil

This is a recurring problem I have: trying to explain my aversion to the Singleton Pattern (hereby re-christened the Singleton Anti-pattern). I've finally tracked down a number of links that explain the issue. There have been a few articles written over the years, but these are my favourites: Singleton Considered Stupid Use your Singletons Wisely … Continue reading Singletons are Evil →