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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Interesting meditation on the festival of Las Posadas

I really should have posted this before Christmas. Paxpdx, writing over at Street Prophets: In Mexico tomorrow, families and neighbors will begin the traditional novena (nine days) in preparation for the Nativity of Christ, Las Posadas. For each of the next nine nights, the faithful will reenact Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to […]

Nat Pryce has some good ideas about writing test code

Nat Pryce over at Mistaeks I Hav Made has an interesting series on writing test code, starting with Test Data Builders and then enhancing the technique with Define common state and avoid aliasing problems Combining builders Emphase the domain model with factory methods Factoring out duplicated logic creates a domain-specific embedded language for testing This […]

Astronomy Pictures of the Year for 2007

The Astronomy Picture of the Day site continues to make the world a better place. APOD: 2007: Astronomy Pictures of the Year for 2007 And they now have an RSS feed of their own (though it only shows thumbnails of the pictures): http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod.rss

Cargo Cult Programming

James Bach proposes a fancy word in the same thought-space as what I call “Cargo Cult Programming”. How often have you heard somebody say “My program didn’t work, but {the local guru|the Javadoc|MSDN|a Google search} told me that if I sprinkled some extra lines of random code, the problem would go away.” Then, on the […]