Craig Pardey

Throwing somebody under the bus (ref) is a cowardly act, and one that particularly irks me.

I’ve been using Netezza for a few months now and this post captures my opinions based on my limited experience.

I’ve been over the high-level requirements and think it’ll probably take 8 weeks with 2 developers, so you should be able to deliver this by X.

According to the Hauppauge website, the Western Digital Live Hub works with the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q TV tuner.

Spring’s gotcha-of-the-day is around using @Value to resolve property placeholders in combination with @PropertySource.

I’ve been interviewing candidates quite a bit lately and I must admit that I quite enjoy the process.

Spring 3.2 has some very nice features for scheduling tasks.

The TestNG Eclipse plugin has a feature that will convert your unit tests from JUnit to TestNG in a few simple clicks, and it works pretty well for the most part.

I recently went through an exercise of converting Spring XML configuration files to Java-based configuration.

Bugs caused by multi-threading can be very difficult to find.

Video blogs, or vlogs, are becoming increasingly popular and if you have a decent following on Twitter/Facebook/etc then you probably also have a YouTube channel from which to pontificate.

Today is my last day at CIBC and that makes me sad.

Non-deterministic unit tests are like kryptonite for an automated build.

Consider the following code String[] s = new String[]{""}; List<String> list = Arrays.asList(s); list.clear(); All looks good, right?

Try this out for fun. int[] i = new int[]{1, 2, 3}; System.out.println(Arrays.asList(i).size()); Integer[] ii = new Integer[]{1, 2, 3}; System.out.println(Arrays.asList(ii).size()); Output: 1 3 What the hell, Java?

Every time I work with MQ and Spring JMS I want to poke my eyes out with a dull instrument.

This piece from the New York Times touches on a subject that I’m passionate about - the challenges of hiring good people.

I recently encountered the following error in Sonar 3.5 [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:sonar-maven-plugin:2.0:sonar (default-cli) on project smartfx: Can not execute Sonar: Missing column:period in DB.ALERTS -> [Help 1] org.apache.mave…

I recently encountered an issue with cloning a Mercurial repository where it would fail with an obtuse error stating that “[command returned code 255 Mon Mar 25 11:39:55 2013]”.

Troy Hunt’s Ghost Who Codes ignited something inside me.

There are many short methods in the Apache Commons libraries that seem like overkill at first glance, however, their purpose becomes more apparent when you examine the effect that these methods have on the readability of the caller.

I was getting this error when running a Sonar analysis recently.

Mercurial loads a bunch of different configuration files and overlays their values on top of each other.

When there’s a merge conflict in Mercurial, TortoiseHG will give you the option to ’take local’ or ’take other’ in addition to resolving the conflict.

Given the following code Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>(); map.put("123", "value"); Integer key = Integer.valueOf(123); String actual = map.get(key); What is the value of “actual”?

I recently set up a Mercurial server (Windows, Apache, ActiveDirectory and hgweb.wsgi).

java.util.logging.ErrorManager: 4: Unable to create [c:pache-tomcat-7.0.30 -Dcatalina.home=c:pache-tomcat-7.0.30\logs\] I was getting this error recently, and found that it was caused by having a trailing backslash on my CATALINA_HOME variable. i.e.

When I first started programming in object oriented languages I used inheritance to reduce code duplication.

------------------------------------------------------- T E S T S ------------------------------------------------------- [INFO] --- maven-dependency-plugin:2.1:tree (default-cli) @ junit-categories --- [INFO] com.craigpardey:junit-categories:jar:1.0-SNA…

I find it hard to remember all the .hgignore settings for a new Mercurial repository that I need, so here’s a bootstrap version syntax: glob .hgignore */target/** */.settings/** */.classpath */.project *.log *.orig

There was no stand-up this morning and it felt like my day never really started.

I encountered this error while setting up a Jenkins job to automate our Maven release process.

I encountered some code recently where a GUI client was listening for Object updates from a multi-threaded server, and it was using the version number on the Object to determine whether the incoming Object was the latest version.

If there was one piece of advice I could give to someone considering a career in software development it would be: Learn to f$%@cking type!

I recently embarked upon a performance investigation to figure out why a particular operation was slow.

My ex-project and I had been together for ten months.

Sometimes your code needs to call a static method in a 3rd party library and unit testing suddenly becomes difficult, particularly when that static method requires context in order to work.

I had an annoying problem on Windows 7 x64 with Helios x64 where I had pinned Eclipse to the taskbar but would see two icons whenever Eclipse was running.

I attended a talk at the Toronto Agile Tour on Deliberate Practice that focused on TDD Games and other programming challenges like Kata.

“I’ve had a talk with the Product Owner, and he’s decided to let you guys have an extra week to finish the work for this Sprint”, my Project Manager said on Friday afternoon.

It can be difficult to be Agile when working with 3rd party software framework.

For the last 2 months, we’ve been using ControlTier to automate deployments to our integration and QA environments.

Automation is good.

Deploying a sufficiently complicated application into a corporate environment involves navigating a sea of paperwork, getting all the appropriate “approvals” in place, co-ordinating with department managers to get time slots from their staff, and so on.

I read a great quote in I’m feeling lucky.

Automation isn’t about quality, it’s about scale.

Please use affirmative phrases when naming your boolean variables and flags - I find that it makes code much more readable.

When changing your password, please remember that it must be between 5 and 8 characters in length and should contain both letters and numbers.

Many large companies have explicit policies around which development tools to use.

There are many things to consider before switching to VOIP.