Author Archives: Brad
Agile vs. No Silver Bullet
I’ve been returning to my source materials on Agile software development/project management methods recently, just to stay fresh. As part of my study, I ran across a blog post (more of a petulant rant, actually) that cites (actually, mentions in … Continue reading
Traveling Salesman Attack! (Hadoop and Genetic Algorithms)
For one of my “coffee projects” (things I work on for about 20-30 minutes each morning to warm my brain up and stay amused), I wrote a genetic algorithm attack on the Traveling Salesman problem. Because I’m a Big Data … Continue reading
TDD Makes Software Go Faster
One of the gripes I hear about TDD is that it takes too much time. People look at the idea of it and think, “So I have to write code and tests and update the tests when the code changes? … Continue reading
Quick Hits: Unit Testing iPhone Apps
I have a few things to add to the woefully incomplete official documentation on setting up automated tests in your iPhone apps: You need to add your main application executable target as a direct dependency of the test target, so … Continue reading
UINavigationController Tricks
For an iPhone UI I’m developing, I need to have one UINavigationController nested inside another, and to have the inner UINavigationController’s events push a view on to the outer one’s stack. CocoaTouch didn’t give this to me for free, but … Continue reading
Google Maps events in Mobile Safari and PhoneGap for iPhone
Having trouble getting your Google Maps div to respond to events like you want in Mobile Safari or a PhoneGap app for iPhone? So was I. Disabling pinch-zoom is simple enough, but getting a finger drag to (a) not move … Continue reading
Quick Hits: Setting the User Agent Header in Webrat
If you’ve read the new PragProg beta e-book on RSpec, you may have read that you can set HTTP headers for your Webrat request like so: Given /^I am browsing the site using Safari$/ do header "User-Agent" , "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; … Continue reading
Ruby/Hadoop talk on Tuesday
A note for interested parties: I (Brad) will be giving a short (10-15 minute) talk on using Ruby with Hadoop for distributed computing. The plan is to give an ultra-brief description of the MapReduce algorithm and Hadoop, show 2 examples … Continue reading
Playing with JRuby, Part 1A
First, thanks to Lopex, Charles/Headius, and Thomas for their well-coordinated effort to alleviate some of my JRuby ignorance in my earlier post. And for not going out of their way to make fun of my janky “benchmarks” – like I … Continue reading
Playing with JRuby, Part 1
As part of a new project, I’m experimenting with JRuby, to see (a) if the alleged performance gains are all that and (b) see how far the Java integration – especially interface implementation – can be pushed. On the performance … Continue reading