andrewmccall.com - Latest Comments

Re: Some thoughts on unit tests

stack — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:33:24 -0000

Andrew: You mentioned making up mock objects for hbase. Can I see what you did? Trying to make the hbase tests run faster overall... Thanks. St.Ack

Re: Some thoughts on unit tests

John Hunsley — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:57:31 -0000

Some rules I apply when writing unit test -

1. Never write tests which rely on a resource outside of the code you're testing. i.e. Make mock objects for DAO's and stubs for external resources such as a web service end point.

2. Only test business logic. There's no point writing a test case which tests getters and setters, as you've said, and no point testing that framework you are using does the job it is supposed to do, that should be tested within that framework project itself.

Re: I’ve made a little JSR303 annotation library

andrewmccall — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:34:35 -0000

Hey John, It's a bit rough around the edges. I was wanted to use the JSR 303 stuff on my beans and let Spring annotate them in the front end like I'd been doing with earlier Hibernate Annotations versions. That was pretty much the main goal and it's just about the least amount of code that can easily accomplish it. Then of course there were some validations I wanted, like email addresses, urls and stuff so I pulled them all out into a separate project and I figured that since I'd find it useful someone else might too. So take it and play with it.

I'll eventually get around to adding a licence, but it'll be something like Apache 2.

Got any validation code lying around you want to contribute? I know you've got some phone number stuff. ;)

Re: I’ve made a little JSR303 annotation library

John Hunsley — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:19:57 -0000

Nice 1, I like small wrapper packages like this, small steps!

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

andrewmccall — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:15:25 -0000

TIm, That sound interesting, I've not played with Solr but I am creating a lucene index using some of the field in some of the tables - the cluster is running some highly customised nutch jobs based on the code here: http://github.com/andrewmccall/nutchbase. I considered putting the user Ids in a luncene index and using that to find users, but I was a bit reticent to implement it because I felt there was too much I didn't know.

Thinking about it again, I may just look at both implementations in more depth because it may be a better way to go especially as indexes start to pile up.

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

Tim Sell — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:32:15 -0000

Just an idea.
Have you considered using a search server for the indexing/searching and hbase for storing?
You'd have to keep them in sync of course, but solr is quite useful. You can optimize for just returning ids, by indexing fields and not storing them and there is progress on sharding if you really need it. It doesn't scale to billions of rows of course, but it unlikely that will be a problem for users. You can do exact matches on any of the fields, and of course utilise full text searches where appropriate.

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

andrewmccall — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:58:49 -0000

Thanks for that Jonathan, good to know I'm more or less on the right path. Now that you mention it I remember reading about it in the doc but since forgot. Looked again and saw this:

http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/docs/current/api...

Which I'll look into and post about if it's useful.

Re: Hbase for storing Users?

Jonathan Gray — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:30:04 -0000

Basic secondary indexing on HBase is done as you describe. Create an additional table for each index where the row id is the indexed field. This is also included as an integrated feature using TransactionalHBase which will take care of managing the secondary tables for you. It uses OCC (optimistic concurrency control) for safety.

In my own usage, I manage the secondary tables at the application level. This is faster but less safe.

I have plans to add a less safe, but fast server-side implementation of this in the future for my own purposes. But I also heard there's a chance OCC will be pluggable for the current implementation, in which case I'd just use that. Sign up to the mailing list, 0.20.0 release coming up soon and that will be determined for that release.

Re: Twitter Spam, is it really an issue?

andrewhyde — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:30:48 -0000

I would add to Jeremy's comment: I don't want to see the mass emails going out over and over to new users. If this becomes commonplace, the affiliate marketers will take over, and then it will suck for everyone.

Great post.

Re: Twitter Spam, is it really an issue?

jeremytanner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:55:16 -0000

The idea is that spam is useless email. Twitter emails you when someone follows you. If they unfollow before you even read that email, that email is useless to you. It gets irritating at 10 or 25 of them daily and gets worse as they build.

"I’m doing my best to follow people interesting and working in similar fields, to me some level of engagement with a hundred followers would be better than shouting at ten thousand. "

Good on you.

Jeremy

Re: Working from home

Calvin Jones — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:41:13 -0000

Hi Andrew,

Great post -- and thanks for the link to mine.

I've been working from home since 2001, and there really is no going back. I love the freedom it affords, and although there are significant challenges the good outweighs the bad exponentially.

Check out this tongue-in-cheek look at some of the less well publicised benefits of working from home that I wrote over on the SOHO Solo West Cork blog (a network specifically for home based workers in South West Ireland).

Listening to the traffic report on the radio has become one of the favourite parts of my day :-).

Re: I’m loving Zemanta

andrewmccall — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:38:56 -0000

I'm using the wordpress plugin, so far the best I've installed yet.

Re: I’m loving Zemanta

BCoelho2000 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:40:17 -0000

One of the things that I like most about Zemanta is the tight integration with the browser.

Zemanta becomes one with the browser freeing you to do what you do best: delivering great content!