Coffee and Clover

Did some drills with JUnit to see how my habits compare to the philosophy of Test Driven Development. I just kept drilling to the point where I wasn't thinking about it so I can record what I do unconsciously. The Results? Good: Code comes up pretty fast considering that I'm also writing test procedures. My testing time is vastly reduced by the JUnit tester. Somewhat gotten the hang of the automatic refactoring commands. Bad: I'm skipping the fail steps. According to Charo it's a reflex of those whose habit is to code right the first time.

Problem solved. Nothing wrong with Tomcat or Ubuntu (yay!), just that Eclipse wasn't set to autobuild. Was beginning to suspect as much when I was seeing the wrong database names in the error window. My weird URL problem was traced to my tweaking of the IP settings when I was trying to get the notebook to talk to my home router. Turns out Ubuntu can't work with my router's security settings. Not an issue right now since the Philcox technician replaced my modem with one that has a wireless network and the notebook connected straight away. Live and learn, the problem with learning so many things at the same time, LOL! Goofs like this are what make learning more permanent ... and they're funny as long as they happen in a safe environment. A nice cap for the day was despite the rains and the traffic I was able to finally plunk myself down into a Megamall seat to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (very very well made) with two minutes to spare. Back to tech l sti...

After things simply not working right I decided to redo my dev setup. Decided to nuke my Eclipse setup and start over. Wrestled with the notebook all morning trying to get Tomcat running. Thanks to Ealden came a simple solution: install all of the above somewhere else. Turns out the permissions, lack of it really, was causing all the problems and the simple solution was to place everything together where permissions are not an issue. The IDE is finally cooperating ... big sigh of relief. [edit] Some more setting up when I got to the lecture room then Charo was able to tidy up the last pieces. Web apps now running. Yay. She still wants to nuke the partition to install OpenSuse. Yet another step on the journey of the guy who was given a different setup. :p Hey, on the great news side I'm getting pretty comfy with the Linux terminal.

I'd been wondering why my learning rate had dropped dramatically recently and it's only today that I realized why. Turns out something I took for granted actually has a dramatic impact on how fast I take in new concepts ... writing. Being visuo-kinesthetic I learn fastest when my eyes and my body are engaged at the same time. Powerpoint slides and onscreen documentation satisfy the visual component but it would seem the auditory element (a lecturer) cannot make up for the lack of the squiggles I do to re-visualize the material. I knew note sketching helped my learning but it's only now I realized how much it does so. It also explains why I have a heavy hand (literally) when I take notes. This is the longest I've gone in learning new material without a rigid table to write on. Looks like I have to find ways of compensating. Right now I'm trying alternative documentation to try and trigger my other learning faculties. It won't be as fast but I think it will w...

"Ready ... Fire ... Aim! ... Aim! ... Aim!" So goes the mantra of eXtreme Programming (XP). It's funny how many can get hung up on making plans and sticking to them much like a gun (ready, aim, fire) when a more flexible approach like XP is not only able to produce more usable interim results but is also more intuitive than it initially looks. People forget that when they do even the simplest tasks like walking, cooking, or even talking they may look like they're following some plan but at the microscopic level are making unconscious adjustments. Take walking as an example: we walk around puddles, step over cracks, avoid oil slicks and chewing gum. When someone is coming our way we step aside. When it starts raining we shift to covered walks. At the macroscopic level it looks like we stuck to a plan of getting from point A to point B, but all throughout the trip we'd been making adjustments. In fact each step we take involves hundreds to thousands of adjustments h...

There was a time that I was a bit intimidated by learning enterprise level computing. Happily technology has changed all that and the components that make up all the big programming projects today have evolved into a form that is most compatible with my way of thinking. So right now I'm rush-learning stuff from programming practice to development methodologies. They at the same time are very new to me and very familiar. Looks like it was a very good time for me to jump into this. I wondered how my brain would keep up under a torrent of information and now I know how my learning process works under these conditions. First comes the torrent of raw info, maybe half-comprehended. Second is a period of osmosis which lasts a few days where the info sinks in and the essential philosophies get isolated. After this a set of distilled questions comes out whose answers will complete the learning. I'm dead tired and having fun. I just hope my body can keep up.