Always write the trivial unit test.

A lot of developers fall out of the habit of writing unit tests, and I definitely understand that pain. I can fall out of the habit, too, and there’s something oddly intimidating about looking at a class and creating a unit test for it. It’s not clear to me what the underlying problem really is: perhaps there just too much to test, and so it is hard to know where to start. Whatever the reason, I find that I can break through that boundary if I just create the test and write:

@Test
public void checkFramework() {
    assertTrue(true);
}

Once I get past that point, suddenly the unit tests just flow out of me. But if I don’t get past that point, it’s easy to wander off into cowboy land.

Popularity: 9% [?]

So, I finally got RMagick installed on Ubuntu. Here are some greatest hit error messages I got while trying to do so:
"configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables"
configure: error: Can't install RMagick. Can't find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program.
in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)

The answer is that you need to install the following packages:

• g++ (Yes, even if you have gcc installed)
• imagemagick
• libc6-dev
• libmagick9
• libmagick++9-dev
• libmagic9-dev
• ruby1.8-dev

Once that’s done, then do the gem install RMagick.

Popularity: 13% [?]

It was a stupid post, done in boredom, which just shared other people’s work. It ended up eating a non-negligible amounts of bandwidth: more than the rest of the blog put together, actually. And I doubt it really pulled in a whole lot of recurring readers — if I’m wrong, drop me a comment and tell me so.

So I’ve wiped it out. I hope nobody is crushed.

Popularity: 5% [?]

So, I was going to get a System76 laptop, when Alicia pointed out that I can get twice the computer for ~$300 less by buying a Toshiba A215-7437. I told her about my epic yet ultimately futile struggle with Linux laptops and laptop wireless cards, but her faith in the open source community would not waver. Finally, she sold me, and we got one.

Well, my fear proved well-founded. We were about to scrap the plan, when the community over on an incredibly useful blog post centered around getting Ubuntu up on the A215-S7407 (which is basically the same computer) saved the day. I’ve now got wireless on the computer, and I have faith that the sound card stuff can eventually be resolved.

Until then, though, I’ve kept Vista around on another partition for the podcasting stuff. (BTW, Ubuntu makes dual-booting stupid simple.) But at least now I have a mobile development environment that’s worth something!

Popularity: 5% [?]

As long-term readers already know, I am a big fan of Fit automated through Ant — AntFit. One example of my Fit/AntFit code is online, although I’m surprised the company I wrote that for let my co-worker release it, and it’s without details or explanation.

One thing I am writing to warn people about, though, since it’s eaten a lot of time both times I used it, is that the the “Fit” Ant task provided by AntFit must fork if you want it to respect your classpath nested attributes. If you don’t have the fork=”true” property, you’re going to be in for a world of pain.

So just fork it. Save yourself the hassle.

Popularity: 7% [?]