Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Quite often I want to pipe the content of multiple files into a command line utility. An example would be to count the lines of sql in my project. This is another case, where xargs comes in handy: find . -name “*.sql” | xargs cat | wc -l

I recently had the pleasure of supporting a new system throughout its first month of production. This was a good opportunity to refresh my command line skills. As it happened I spent a lot of time looking at log files trying to figure out what happened to the productions system. I figured, that a graphical…

I quite like to use immutable value objects. They are really useful. However there are limits to this. Especially when it comes to objects with rich internal structures. Here you end up with a multi-line nested constructor call to create your object. I don’t think this is terribly readable. Also I see that people make…

Every now and then even the über-geek can’t avoid the use of non-command-line-tools. Currently I am doing a bit of production support work, so tail, grep, and awk are my friends. However people expect emails, excel spreadsheets, and similar stuff. So what to do? Well use the best of both worlds pipe your output into…

Last Thursday I had the honour of giving a talk on the seaside web framework. It is implemented in smalltalk and it provides a lot of interesting ideas: Using builders rather than templates to spit out html. A component model for composing interfaces as well as for expressing page flow. Encaspulating Ajax goodness Excellent debugging…

In an earlier post I did describe a possibly better way of handling fixture tear down in JUnit. In this post I look at the way assertions work. JUnit is actually widely used as a driver for all kinds of tests, not only unit tests. I think this is perfectly reasonable as it leverages all…