I hate 1% problems. No this isn’t an OWS slogan. I’m thinking of those code issues that really aren’t a problem 99% of the time, but when they bite, they’re really hard to debug and they cause real pain. Several common cases in Java:

1. Using java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar instead of JodaTime.
2. Not specifying a Locale when doing language sensitive operations such as toLowerCase() and toUpperCase().
3. Not escaping strings passed to SQL, XML, HTML or other external formats.

What I hate most is that it’s really, really hard to convince other developers that these are problems they should take seriously.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 10:58 am and is filed under Java, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

Last week one of my colleagues hit me with an idea that was so obvious when he pointed it out I wondered why I hadn’t realized it before:

If you’re designing for reuse, you’re doing it wrong.

In 2012 the only code you should be writing is what’s needed for the immediate task at hand. Don’t design for reuse. Don’t consider reuse. Don’t waste one minute of your day making code reusable.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 14th, 2012 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

In 2011 my New Year’s resolution is to do more things the easy way, even if it takes longer the first time. I am going to stop using brute force to solve problems. In particular:

• I am finally going to memorize how one redirects both stderr and stdout to the same stream. (2>&1 |)
• I am going to learn the sed? trick my advisor showed me 20 years ago for repeating a command from the shell history while substituting one word for another, instead of just using the arrow key to backup to and erase the string. (^string1^string2^ or !!:s/string1/string2/ or for global substitution, not just the first occurrence !!:gs/string1/string2/)
• I am going to increase my regex fu and use regular expressions consistently instead of just editing 20 lines of copy and paste code. (This would be easier if every editor didn’t have subtly different syntax.)
• I am going to use Python to automate repetitive tasks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 1st, 2011 at 9:41 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

Have you ever seen an Ant error message like this?

BUILD FAILED
/Users/elharo/Projects/XOM/build.xml:545: Problem: failed to create task or type scp
Cause: Could not load a dependent class com/jcraft/jsch/Logger
       It is not enough to have Ant's optional JARs
       you need the JAR files that the optional tasks depend upon.
       Ant's optional task dependencies are listed in the manual.
Action: Determine what extra JAR files are needed, and place them in one of:
        -/opt/ant/lib
        -/Users/elharo/.ant/lib
        -a directory added on the command line with the -lib argument

Do not panic, this is a common problem.
The commonest cause is a missing JAR.

This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem

As usual, the ant error message is completely unhelpful, though for once it’s at least technically correct. (Most of the time when ant says, “This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem”, it is in fact a bug and not a configuration problem.) Here’s what’s really happening.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 5:40 am and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.

Is req a request or a requisition?

Is res a response, a reservation, a resume, or a result?

Is def a default or a definition?

Is rng a range or a random number generator?

Is v1 version 1 or value 1?

Is e an event, an entity, or an exception?

Is f a file or a float?

Is lst a list or the least value?

Is temp a temporary variable or a temperature reading?

Is rep a representation, a representative, a repetition, or a reputation?

Is tm a time or a trademark? Or even another temporary variable? And if it is a time, is it a timestamp, a time of day, or a duration? (These are three very different things.)

Is admin an administrator, an administrative assistant, or a system administrator?

In context, you can usually figure these things out, but you have to think about them. That’s inefficient. Far better to just spell out what you mean from the get go.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 5:32 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment or trackback from your own site.