Category: Rant

Ouch

A few weeks ago my physiotherapist gave me some exercises for my wrist, which I damaged in a kayaking injury. I was supposed to do 15-30 reps of these three exercises with a 1-2 pound weight. Well, I couldn’t find a 1-2 pound weight, so I started off doing 10 reps with a 5 pound weight. That was going ok, so I went up to 15 reps, and that worked ok too. But last night I tried to do 20 reps. That was too much. My wrist hurts like hell today. I think I’m going to go back to 10 reps again, and step up more slowly.

Not my day

I came home to find that my USB KVM, which I’ve had for about a month, is dead. It switches, the screen shows the resolution as sort of a double image, but neither computer comes out of the screen saver. If I power off the KVM and power it on again, the Linux box at least shows messages indicating that it’s come alive again. But it doesn’t work.

Bugger it, doesn’t anybody make reliable equipment designed to work 24/7 for months at a time?

When does a unit test become a system test?

In my part of the big project I’m on, I have a class called a Playlist, and a corresponding database table. Based on my analysis of how many Playlists are likely to be used in the lifetime of a system, I decided that an int would be more than adequate storage space for the sequential internal id number. Actually, a short would probably be adequate, but there isn’t any compelling reason to use shorts on modern systems since they don’t save much storage and they’re slower to process (is that true in Java? I know it is in C/C++.) And so I happily used this id all over the code.
Continue reading “When does a unit test become a system test?”

The Waypoint Generator is boned

It’s official – the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has decided to remove public access to the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF). For more information about what DAFIF is, why it’s important, and why it’s being taken away from us, see this page.

I don’t think my waypoint generators will die, but they sure won’t be as useful for people outside of the United States as their data gets staler and staler.

This is a sad day for me.