Rocket Surgery

Skeptical about the claims from all the hyperventilating environmentalist whack-jobs?  Don’t believe that all the heat waves, cold waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, locust swarms, and toenail fungus infections across the planet are due to global warming?  Think that the fact that the polar ice caps melting on Mars might just suggest that solar activity and not humans are the cause of the one (gasp!) degree increase in temperatures over the past 100 years?

Then join me in celebrating Carbon Belch Day on June 12.  A day for lighting cigars, idling your car engine, leaving all the lights on, and turning the A/C down to 60 degrees.  A day for throwing your aluminum cans in the trash, taking a long shower, and leaving the water running while you brush your teeth.  A glorious day for cutting the grass using a gas-powered mower; for doing a half-load of laundry (both the washer and the dryer!); and for feeding the poor starving plants of the world by pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

C’mon!! Thumb your nose at the religion science of global warming and express your support for capitalism and western civilization!

I never read the book, but I certainly hope it was better.  It had to be, to be the classic that it is.

While this was definitely better than Speed Racer, it was not nearly as good as the first Narnia movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  At least that movie had some semblance of plot, some indication that there was a real reason why the Pensevie kids were in Narnia, and things actually developed.  This movie was a high-budget 2-1/2 hour episode of Itchy and Scratchy (”they fight, they fight, they fight fight fight fight fight!”).

Bad guy wants Prince dead so he can take the throne.  Pensevie kids are inexplicably brought back to Narnia to help him fight.  Deus ex machina in the form of Aslan saves the day.  The end.

Perhaps I am expecting too much from a kids’ movie, but it is truly a sophomore slump after the first one.  But really, it was just long and tiresome.

I just watched High Noon for the first time.  I decided to watch it after seeing Gary Cooper play Howard Roark in The Fountainhead and being very impressed with his screen presence.

The ballad that is sung by Tex Ritter at the beginning and played in snatches throughout was odd, but haunting.  It was also clearly what Mel Brooks was parodying in The Ballad of Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles - but I never knew that before.

And here’s a small confession - I missed a simple, central detail to the plot that had me confused the whole movie (I HATE doing that).  I missed the fact that the three guys hanging out at the train depot were waiting for Frank Miller to arrive.  I couldn’t figure out for most of the movie what the three guys were waiting for!  I mean, if they were going to trash the town and kill Marshall Kane, why did they need to wait for the train?  Why not just ride into town and get started?  Boy did I feel like an idiot.

But it didn’t stop me from enjoying it.  It wasn’t the best movie I ever saw — or even as good as Blazing Saddles in my opinion — but it was good.  I liked Gary Cooper in this too, so I think I’ll rent a few other movies he was in, to see if I like them.  It was also a hoot seeing a young Harry Morgan and a young Lloyd Bridges.

I just got made a committer to the Hudson project.  Of course, it’s not like I’m a bigshot or anything, but still, you don’t get to do this every day, so I gotta take my bragging rights when they come…

The second edition of Josh Bloch’s outstanding book Effective Java is coming out June 8, 2008.  I can’t wait.  If you don’t have the original version of this book, you are truly missing out.  It’s a great near-bible of doing things the right way with Java so code can be maintained and relied upon.

It’s available for order on Amazon.  And in interest of full disclosure, I have no financial interest in his book (unless having co-workers and colleagues write better code counts).

Andy Glover has written a post on using Gant with Hudson at his blog, The Disco Blog.

In case you didn’t know, Gant is a tool that uses Groovy scripts to invoke Ant tasks, so you write your builds as a Groovy script instead of an XML file, but you still get to use Ant’s power.  I may just start playing with this…

One of my favorite books on UI Design is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. While this great book is focused on Web UI design, the central theme is universal: As much as possible, software should be so self-obvious how to use it that no manual is necessary.

As I see it, at least one of three things is possible:

1. The creators of AnkhSVN should read this book
2. AnkhSVN cannot create branches
3. I’m an idiot.

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In my last post I talked about getting involved with the Hudson project. In this post I will describe the steps I took to set up my build environment.

1. Get JDK 6.0 (Hudson cannot be built using 5.0 or earlier) and install it.
2. Get Subversion and install it.

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In an earlier post I wrote about my experiences trying to write a plugin for Hudson. In that article, I wrote about how I basically gave up because I was having too hard a time wrestling with Maven for the small amount of code I was writing.

Well, time passes, and I decided to try again, but this time I decided to look into what it would take to fix an issue I’ve had with Hudson. (For the curious: at the time of this writing, Hudson cannot verify that your LDAP settings are correct if your server does not allow anonymous binding - issue 1589).

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In an earlier post I wrote about how you can use JMeter to do automated functional and regression testing for web services. In this post I will talk about how you can parameterize your tests from external files to quickly get more thorough tests.

Parameterizing tests means that you run the test with different data each time, the data being passed in as parameters to your test. Obviously it would be preferable to run the same test 50 times with different values than to explicity put 50 different tests in the script that are identical except for the value used (duh.)

JMeter has a facility for doing just that. In my opinion, it’s a bit crude, but it works, and that’s what really counts.

Let’s start with a JMeter test that calls a web service. (You can download my sample). The test calls a web service that gives you the words for an integer (e.g., “fifteen” for 15), and calls the service three times with the same value (15) hard-coded in it, and looks for a 200 response code from the service, and the word “fifteen” in the response SOAP envelope. Read the rest of this entry »