Mark W. Shead

Does College Really Matter

OS X has an environmental variable called CLICOLOR. If it is set, it turns on color for command line commands. So…
export CLICOLOR=true
will turn on color. If you want to enable this for everyone, you could do that by putting it in /etc/profile.

This guy says that using Subversion and Cruisecontrol cut their costs by 92%. It would be interesting to see how he calculated this. Regardless, it is amazing how many quality tools are available for free now.
Why Subversion Rocks
In a recent study I performed on my development groups process improvement over the past 5 […]

Here is an interesting discussion about the dangers of design patterns. Design patterns can be a great way to solve problems, but many times they become an excuse to over-architect solutions. Design patterns should reduce complexity. If they introduce more complexity, you are doing something wrong.
The myth of design patterns is that they […]

Practice. Expect to practice with your version control system before you go live. This means you need to have a copy of your data. If you are exporting data from CVS to Subversion, it is probably a good idea to keep the import files around for a while in case you […]

Here is a scary scenario for a programmer. Unfortunately it is probably not too uncommon. Imagine you are starting a new job. Before accepting the position you ask all the right questions, but on your first day you discover the following:

The lead programer left two months ago. (You already knew this.) […]

Cobertura is a fork of jCoverage. It runs reports to let you see how much of your code is being tested by unit tests. This is incredibly useful to find areas of your code where a bug would go undetected.
It looks like there is a plugin for Maven already, so I’m […]

One of the things I need to do at my new job is get an issue tracking system in place. At Reslife, we put in Cerberus for tracking help desk request. Coming into a place that doesn’t have any type of system to track issues made me realize how much I took Cerberus […]

When using maven to generate a multi project I’ve run into an error where it says that it reached the “entity expansion limit” of 64,000. This appears to be coming from the SAX parser which is validating all the HTML pages. I’ve looked for a way to turn this parsing off, but so […]

Maven 1.0 has some problems with memory leaks. Most of the time these aren’t issues, but if you are trying to compile a multiproject you might run into problems. By default Maven tells java to let it have up to 256MB of ram. If you need to increase this you’ll need to […]