Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

Cedric's having another go at JUnit. Again he misses the point: extensions to JUnit are not JUnit itself, and JUnit can't be blamed for people extending it to the wrong way.

This is obvious, but differences between environments cause problems. You can expect bugs to cluster around them.

A while back, I blogged about how Hibernate named queries rock. I found another reason why they rock today: it lets you hide what your persistent properties are called.

Steve Hayes brings up a lovely quote. The opposite of a testable design is a detestable design.

When declaring a FactoryMethod, put identifying parameters first.

If you use Checkstyle, especially as part of an automated build, you may notice that the size of the log file can be a bit big. I did, anyway, so I wrote a stylesheet to trim it down to size.

This is a minor annoyance, but hey... iPods seem to have problems with large bookmarkable files. Specifically, they start skipping, which makes the playback annoying.

Large non-bookmarkable files: no problems. So it's something to do with keeping the bookmark in sync with the file. sigh.

So, I either need to split those 1-hour podcasts into things less than about 32MB, or convert them to a lower quality level. Anyone got a decent command-line tool to do this that I can plug into iPodder?

The NY Times has an article on problems with the US education system">.

The author, Diane Ravitch, points out the following:

It is hardly fair to blame high schools for the poor skills of their entering students. If students start high school without the basic skills needed to read, write and solve mathematics problems, then the governors should focus on strengthening the standards of their states' junior high schools.

So that's the problem: the US expects senior high schools to teach grammar school subjects. And Ms Ravitch thinks the solution is to get junior high schools to do it instead...

If a student can not adequately read, write, and perform arithmetic by the end of grammar school (primary school here in Oz), then either keep them there or flag them as a special needs student. Heck, if they can't do it by grade 4 there's an issue.

Earlier in the article:

Only a minority of students - whether in 4th, 8th or 12th grade - reach proficiency as measured by the Education Department's National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Big surprise: if they're not proficient at grade 4, a student is unlikely to become so in grade 8. This is really simple: if a student starts to slip behind, they need to be caught fast - the longer you leave it, the less likely they'll ever become proficient.

Steve brings up a quote that I've always liked: By definition, risk-takers often fail.

I really, really, shouldn't bite, but... Cedric is asking about dependent test methods and if they are evil. Well, they may not be evil, but they are at least mildly naughty.

It seems that the tradition of the National Party leader selling out the party's constituents whenever it conflicts with Liberal Party policy is alive and well.

A National Party think tank came up with the stunningly obvious idea of using T3 proceeds to pay for bush broadband rollouts". But John Anderson has nixed the idea - apparently he thinks the private sector can do it better.

According to the NY Times, some science musuems are refusing to show movies that mention controversial topics, such as evolution or the Big Bang. They should be ashamed to call themselves science musuems.

I'm shocked at myself... I'm downloading the Visual Studio C# beta! And I want to use it! Argh!

(Writing utilities, with GUIs, that manipulate objects via COM is not a task Java is intended for, I'm afraid...)

There's a couple of posts going around about another post comparing Ta-Da with Bla-Bla. Look, folks, this isn't comparing the two languages: this is comparing different coding styles, that strangely enough value different things!

I'd introduced a Hibernate user type into the code base a few days ago. I'd based it on an example in the (more or less) wonderful book Hibernate in Action. Naturally, however, I'd copied the example with a bug in it!