Jonathan Aquino's Page

Just a quick note to translators: there is a unit test that you can use to check what strings remain to be translated. Make a copy of /test/pt_BR_TestTemp.php for your language and run it. This will list strings that are missing and strings that are no longer needed.

When reading a programming book, it can be tempting to skim the code examples. But they likely have some nuggets that are worth learning. The problem is that we don't like to read code written by other people - or at least it doesn't come naturally to us. What we need is a technique for rapid understanding of new code.



I propose reading the code aloud. Now, to make sure we don't get distracted by syntactic details, we can probably come up with some rules for what to omit.… Continue

Martin Fowler's Refactoring (1999) is a landmark book for software engineering. It is a catalog of techniques for cleaning up code. Unfortunately, this remarkable book is tarnished by some frivolous names chosen for its list of "refactoring smells" (anti-patterns). Unlike the memorable pattern names from… Continue

For the past day I have been building a new web service called FeedChopper. Basically you paste in a long web article or list of links or quotations, and it gives you an RSS feed that delivers one section (or link or quotation) each day to your feedreader.







I created it because I'll often come across some long article… Continue

IE 7 seemed to be faster than Firefox, so I decided to measure page-load times for the two browsers on four popular websites.







My test setup is shown below. None of the three browsers had any extensions installed. Page-load times were measured using IBM Page Detailer on my IBM T43 laptop with a wireless connection to a cable modem, in Victoria BC, Canada.…



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