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And Back to Arch
2025-02-09 Well, it lasted 18 months, but I’ve changed Linux distro again. I really thought I had settled on Fedora KDE - I really liked it.
The whole point to running Fedora was that I didn’t have to fix much with the OS, it just worked - until it didn’t. I have two main computers, a Framework laptop, and a stationary desktop computer, and they both got the same problem at the same time - the screen turned black after login if using Wayland, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it. Xorg worked decently, but both computers required re-installation. But the the whole point of running Fedora was that I shouldn’t have to deal with things like this. It should be noted that I was still on Fedora 40, and 41 had been out for three months.
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How I Create Test Objects in Java
2024-01-16 The Problem
When I write tests in Java, I find it tedious to manually create objects and setting attributes. Code easily turns out like this:
var foo = new Foo("Satellite", 1000, true); var bar = new Bar("Edward", "Scissorhands", List.of(foo)); // do stuff assertEquals(foo, bar.findByName("Satellite"));Here we're first creating a
Foo, which is then added to aBar. We then test that we can find theFoowhen we ask theBarto search for it.Distro Hopping
2023-08-24 A year and half ago I ended a two year experiment using Windows as my daily driver OS. In short, I felt WSL had too many wrinkles that annoyed me. I switched back to Linux and it was like coming home after being away for too long.
Since then I've tried a number of distros and desktop environments, and I believe I have finally settled on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition. Getting there took some time though, I tried a number of alternatives, and this is my condensed experience:
Hamburger Menu With Bulma and Hyperscript
2023-07-27 As part of a larger overhaul, I recently redid the navigation for this site and switched the CSS framework from Semantic UI to Bulma. The main reasons are that I find Bulma requires simpler HTML, and that it has no included JavaScript dependencies. JavaScript is needed for some features though, one of them being the burger menu.
Bulma has a
navbarcomponent that automatically adapts to touchscreen devices by hiding thenavbar-menuitem. It also supplies a burger menu item,navbar-burger, that is shown when thenavbar-menuis hidden.Connecting to a database From IntelliJ Running in WSL2
2020-01-19 I’m running Intellij inside Ubuntu on WSL 2, and today I had problems connecting to a database. It would connect randomly and then quickly lose connection. It turns out that the problem was with the way that IntelliJ stores passwords. When running in Linux, IntelliJ uses the Gnome Keyring, which I did not have running. The quick solution to the problem was to switch IntelliJ’s password save setting to “Never”.
Reinstalling Windows
2020-01-06 During the Christmas break, I have installed and set up Windows on my Lenovo X1 Extreme laptop. That might sound slightly stupid as it came installed with Windows, but as with every other non-Mac laptop I’ve owned/used over the last 20 years, I wiped the disk and installed Linux on it. Now it was the other way around.
I now do development on Ubuntu using Windows Terminal, editing in VS Code on Windows or IntelliJ in Ubuntu using X410.
Agile Quitter
2018-10-15 The other day my friend Aslam Khan wrote a post on Facebook about a talk he had held at Agile Africa 2018, and he wrote that this might be his “farewell to the agile community”
This resonated with me, since I’ve long felt that agile is no longer where I want to be. As much as I still believe in the original premise of agile and like teaching people how to think about undeterministic processes, most companies these days are looking for improvement without doing any meaningful change. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised as fifteen years ago agile was still an early adopter business, these days we’re dealing with the late majority and laggards trying to adopt some version of “scaled” agile.
Agile Isn't Punk Anymore, It's Arena Rock
2018-06-11 It was 1979 and the punk movement wasn’t going anywhere. The music was loud, the hairdos were spiky and a majority of the older generation really didn’t get what was happening.
In order to bring some order to the chaos, Swedish state television, the only one allowed at the time, decided to do a televised concert with what’s now punk legends Ebba Grön.
While the kids ran a mosh pit on the floor, older people were seated in stands behind. When the music was over a journalist asked the older people, “So, what did you think of this”. It was a weird time.
For the Fun Of It
2018-05-15 I came upon this awesome TED talk on “Why You Should Make Useless Things” by Simone Giertz thanks to Mikael Pawlo. The talk really resonated with me and articulated thoughts I have had for a long time.
I learned how to program BASIC from a book 37 years ago, one year before I actually saw and touched a real computer. A few months later I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC20. The first year I had it I didn’t have the tape recorder that allowed me to save my programs. So for a year whatever I did was ephemeral - as soon as I turned of the computer the program was gone. Sort of like a Groundhog Day version of Global Day of Code Retreat.
Emacs and PostgreSQL database names
2017-07-27 Emacs brings REPL-driven development to SQL using sql-mode, so you can have a SQL buffer running and send commands to it.
Today however sql-mode didn’t show a prompt when connecting to my local dev database. It turns out that sql-mode has a regexp looking for the prompt, which expects the database name to be all alphanumerics for some reason. It seems to be fixed but is not in the version I get from Arch Linux.