Jakub Korab

Month: January 2008

  • Poorly Formatted Code Costs You Money

    After nearly 10 years of working on complex systems I think I have nailed down why poorly formatted code annoys me so much. It wastes time. Complex logic requires whitespace in order for the reader to make sense of it in the same way that punctuation is used in sentences. If the whole thing looks […]

  • Extreme Kites

    It is really fantastic when you get great service these days. I bought a bag for my kite board a couple of weeks ago from Extreme Kites in the UK, for an upcoming trip to Australia. Mike from the shop had a problem getting the right size bag in on time, and after finding out […]

  • Unit Testing the Database Tier

    Unit testing database code is a bit of a funny problem. Most developers can pretty easily get their heads around unit testing a piece of Java code using interfaces and mock objects. When it comes to database code or DAOs, it suddenly becomes particularly difficult. But why, what is so difficult about testing stuff against […]

  • Weak, Soft and Phantom References

    Bob Lee posted yesterday about one of his sessions at Javapolis (viewable at Parley’s), that covered heaps of good stuff about dependency injection and API design. At the end he mentions weak and soft references. What? Who? Not exactly a language feature that I have come across in the day to day, so I did […]

  • Home Cooked vs Open Source. Or, Don’t Build Your Own Workflow.

    First thing’s first. I love open source. I think that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. That thing that we were always told about since computer science, that of the open marketplace for components to be shared and reused HAS happened. Just not in the “buy this billing component” kind of way. It’s even […]

  • Blogger compatible permalinks in WordPress

    A couple of folks have asked me how I got my old Blogger permalinks to work on the new blog. It’s super simple. Under Options -> Permalinks in the admin console, add the following custom structure “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html”. You can then set up the little Blogger redirect/DNS cheat method I described in the last post and […]

  • Oooh yeah, that’s better.

    I finally took the plunge and switched over to this new domain (nice, isn’t it?) running on WordPress. I can’t believe how easy it was. The initial setup was magic. Download WordPress. Set up a database, add a user, upload the zip file and extract, fire up the domain in a browser. The first page […]

  • This blog is moving!

    New Year, New Home! This blog is now moving onto a new domain – www.jakubkorab.net If you RSS me, please update your feed to point to here. See you on the other side!

  • Why does a PC have to take 2 minutes to start up?

    Technology review published an article on a technology that will get new PC’s booting to a useable state in a few seconds as opposed to the couple of minutes that it currently takes – albeit with an operating system parallel to Windows. http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20072/?a=f This has been a real pain for me, as I am in […]

  • Sequence diagram voodoo?

    Every once in a while I forget how to do something in UML. InformIT have a great guide on the use of the notation just for this purpose. Nice. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=360441&seqNum=5&rl=1