Author: Chris F Carroll

Making TDD even more efficient

Kent Beck is still kind of working on unit testing tools -- a couple of simple but great ideas that are baked into his re-launched JUnitMax:

  1. When running a test suite after a failure, give the most useful feedback first -- by running the failures first before the rest of the suite
  2. Otherwise, run the fastest tests first. This gives you 99% of the feedback as fast as possible

    3. Alas, only currently available for Eclipse.

The Cloud defined in a sentence, 12 bullet points and 3 pictures

Kudos to someone at apps.gov or NIST for a great 2 minute summary of the cloud. My summary of the summary:

Cloud Computing Defined

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort.
Cloud computing - picture by http://cloudtimes.org

Five Characteristics of Cloud Computing

  • On-demand, self service
  • Wide network access
  • Resources dynamically shared and allocated across customers
  • Elastic rapid provision and release
  • Metered service

Three Main Layers of Service Provided by Cloud Computing

  • Saas: Software as a service, for end-user consumers
  • Paas: Platform as a service, for software developers
  • Iaas: Infrastructure as a service, for system administrators

Two Axes of Choice for Cloud Deployment

  • Public vs Private
  • Outsourced vs In-house

And finally a bonus:

A History of Cloud Computing in Three Sentences

  • It began life as "Grid Computing" - a technology to solve large problems with parallel computing on widely distributed resources.
  • Grid computing matured to be offered as a metered service known as "utility computing".
  • This evolved via packaged solutions and self-service subscription over the internet into what is now known as Cloud Computing.

Condensed from http://info.apps.gov/content/what-cloud

AppleScript : Start a background process and get the pid to kill it

Like so:

do shell script ("cd /Users/myName/Sites/FitNesse ; java -jar fitnesse-standalone.jar -p 5555  &> fitNesse.log & echo $!")
set pid to the result
open location "http://localhost:5555/"
display dialog "Press okay to shutdown FitNesse (" & pid & ")" buttons {"OK"}
do shell script ("kill " & pid)

To see it work, open AppleScript Editor, and paste in the script.
Save it first as a script, then Export it as an Application.

A couple of tricks are involved, the two least well-known are perhaps:

  • $! will return the pid of the most recently started background process
  • You may not need to log output but you still apparently need an output redirection clause such as &> /dev/null". Otherwise AppleScript waits for the stdout / stderr to free up. Which never happens.
  • You usually want to cd to the right directory when you run a shell script from AppleScript