Fun with Typography!!

Want to try out some fonts - use this
A funny vid here[ direct link]

Comic sans is good for non professional usage but it seems to be used in most places(Is it because of microsoft??) : http://bancomicsans.com/home.html

Some sample fonts:

Open Google Serif

Open Google Sans-serif

Open Google Monospace

Open Google Arial

Open Google Comic Sans MS

Open Google Courier New

Open Google Georgia

Open Google Monotype Corsava

Open Google Tahoma

Open Google Times New Roman

Open Google Trebuchet

Open Google Verdana

Behaviour-driven development in Java - Junits evolved ?

As TDD is more of running junits(at a very unit level) and hence we focus very little in writing tests which check code as a functional unit.

BDD(behaviour-driven development) fills up this gap I think and is more closely aligned to developers way of thinking.
I see it more like an organized functional tests in code!

As such system work in unison and not just as a small unit. Hence a boundary has to be defined as to which all parts of the system should be tested and how based on time/money tradeoffs ?

Implementations of BDD for java: http://jbehave.org/
Implementations of BDD for groovy: Easyb

Reference: http://www.jroller.com/DhavalDalal/entry/preferring_bdd_over_tdd

Fast javascript testing

A nice javascript junit test driver to run from eclipse.
http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/
http://css.dzone.com/news/fast-javascript-testing

Speed up your maven build

Imagine a company having 10 modules each depending on the other. Lets say building it would take 15 minutes using maven. 
So the team would spend roughly in a day - (noOfBuildTimesPerDay x 15 minutes) x developerCount. This is bad.


Some options :
"mvn clean install" is good for small/medium sized projects but not for bigger ones.

Trade-off between time and space is always there. When space is not a major constraint , we can gain time by

"mvn clean install  -Dmaven.compile.fork=true  -Dmaven.junit.jvmargs=-Xmx512m -Dmaven.junit.fork=true"

With mvn clean, delete on windows is slower, instead if we rename it could boost the build time.
http://bosy.dailydev.org/2009/02/speed-up-your-maven-build-four-times.html

This cut the build time by around 30% on my PC. Thats an improvement isnt it.

I think it would be a big improvement if maven can reuse the classes generated by 
eclipse. Also having an exploded war deployment is an option to reduce pack and unpack times.

Ref:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/161698/how-can-i-speed-up-my-maven2-build

Real-Time Tracking and Tuning for Busy Tomcat Servers

A very nice article which details on possible options for tomcat server monitoring to tweak its performance.
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/32730/1954

Free your mind with mindmaps

Mindmaps help you quickly organize and load the knowledge into your brain. Also the noise words are minimal in a mindmap and hence our thinking pattern becomes clearer.

Some usefuls:
For presentation
http://www.mindmeister.com/26036305/presentation-zen-powerful-presentations
for vocabulary
http://www.mindmeister.com/1479825/new-words-oh-a-little-tidy

For a free software goto - freemind.org
online - http://www.mindmeister.com