Making Maven Play Nice with JUnit 4

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Jake

Convention over configuration can be a huge advantage, but it can also bite you in the ass sometimes.

Over the course of the last year, my job has taken me away from .net (and from blogging, obviously.) Currently, I’m working on a project that runs on top of Twitter Storm, which in written in Clojure and runs on the JVM. Like a lot of JVM-based open source projects today, it uses Maven to manage its build processes. I haven’t touched Java in a couple of years and I’ve never used Maven before this week. Continue reading →

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Mmmm… Chocolately

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Jake

Sometimes, when I go to technical training events, my effectiveness as a developer benefits far more immediately from some off-handed comment or casually demonstrated technique from the presenter than from the specific subject matter. I can’t even remember what I was supposed to be learning the first time I saw NuGet, which has saved me untold hours mucking with installers for Visual Studio. Similarly, this week at an ALT.net session on using Couchbase Server with .net, the presenter (John Zablocki, of dllHell.net)  was coincidentally using Chocolatey to install some software on his presentation machine and instantly saved me weeks of trying to remember and find about three dozen utilities and tools to put on my new laptop.

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Send in the Clouds: Google finally entering the commodity computing marketplace

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Jake

Today at I/O, Google announced that it is entering the commodity computing market with a new offering called “Compute Engine,” which the company says will offer Linux virtual machines on a “Google scale,” suggesting that the firm may be targeting the high-performance end of the cloud computing market.

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A moment of patent sanity

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Jake

Saying that a trial between tech giants Apple and Google would “impose costs disproportionate to the harm… and be contrary to the public interest,” and that neither side could show how the alleged infringement on each other’s UI-based patents were harmful, Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner dismissed with prejudice the suit and countersuit between two of the biggest players in the smartphone market. And Posner isn’t just any judge. The Journal of Legal Studies named him the most cited legal scholar of the twentieth century. Continue reading →

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