craig
Two Eclipse Icons in Windows 7 taskbar
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 found that the following workaround works with the option “Always combine, hide labels” for taskbar buttons. Check your “eclipse.ini” in your Eclipse directory for the [...]
How to divide without using division operator
I attended a talk at the Toronto Agile Tour on Deliberate Practice that focused on TDD Games and other programming challenges like Kata. Among the challenges were things like solving a problem without using the ‘if’ keyword, or without using primitives. Solving simple problems using these challenges makes us better programmers because they force us to come [...]
Keep calm and carry on
“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. The horror! The horror! My team and I did not manage to complete all the work that we’d committed to in the Sprint. [...]
How to be Agile when using 3rd party software framework
It can be difficult to be Agile when working with 3rd party software framework. The vendor product may dictate many aspects of the software architecture thwarting your attempts at automated testing and continuous build. However there are steps you can take to make Agile easier. I’ll discuss a few of the options that have worked for [...]
ControlTier: Initial Impressions
For the last 2 months, we’ve been using ControlTier to automate deployments to our integration and QA environments. Our deployment is a little more complicated that most Java applications because it runs on a pseudo-grid. That is, there are 2 clustered JBoss servers, a database server, and 4+ Linux servers that each run about 8 [...]