Preston Lee's Blog

Tag: software

  • BitTorious Trials

    New in BitTorious v4! BitTorious v4 has been released, and has received a comprehensive internal upgrade to Rails 5 and PostgreSQL 9.5. Also, all official releases from v4 forward will be built as portable Docker containers and distributed via Docker Hub. Due to attempted abuses of the evaluation environment, we’ve unfortunately had to discontinue the…

  • Pairwise Sequence Alignment In JavaScript

    I just implemented a sample pairwise sequence aligner in JavaScript for a course. You can demo it at http://alignment.prestonlee.com, and grab the source code under an Apache 2 license at https://github.com/preston/alignment.

  • TGen News Dashboard Widget For Mac OS X

      The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization focused on developing clinically relevant medical diagnostics and smarter treatments related to genomic profiling. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the institute for over a year on a project related to breast cancer, and thought I’d share a widget I wrote keep…

  • AmericanExpress.com: Tip On Configuring Your Web App

    For all you web application developers, I’d like to briefly note the following stack trace I received from the American Express website while clicking around: And here is the same trace in plain-text format: JSPG0036E: Failed to find resource /cardcenter/common/interstitial.jsp Root Cause: java.io.FileNotFoundException: JSPG0036E: Failed to find resource /cardcenter/common/interstitial.jsp at com.ibm.ws.jsp.webcontainerext.AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.findWrapper(AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.java:322) at com.ibm.ws.jsp.webcontainerext.AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.handleRequest(AbstractJSPExtensionProcessor.java:284) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.handleRequest(WebApp.java:3548)…

  • Free Copy Of Portal With New Mac Steam Client

    Got a Mac? Like games? Great news! Value’s “Steam” software finally launched for Mac, allowing you to purchase some great gaming titles on your OS X machine. When a game is available on multiple platforms, a purchased license appear to be portable as well. And as a launch promotion, Value is giving away free copies…

  • Handling Fuzzy Requirements

    I had a great conversation with remi Taylor of OpenRain Software today on how to handle fuzzy requirements when the customer isn’t available. You’ve been there… you get an issue tracking ticket like “Add Foozle Support” only to find no explanation of what this means other than the issue title. The customer/decision maker decided to…

  • Identifying Senior Software Engineers: Six Critical Differences

    For HR and legal purposes, most development companies classify Software Engineers into ranks from I to IV (or V). The higher the rank, the higher the responsibilities, expectations, independence and pay grade. To cut it as an interviewer and manager, you’ll need to classify people accurately with a minimum amount of direct personal exposure: a…

  • Sufficiency In Software Testing

      When I was finishing up my B.S. I took a class in embedded software testing. The big assignment was to write the software that controls a single elevator, test the software to our satisfaction and deliver the whole shebang at the end of the semester. The critical lesson I learned from the course was…

  • Software Engineering Curse Words

    Here lie terms frequently used in software development which I don’t particularly care for. Programmer Commercial software is as much about programming as building bridges is about installing steel I-beams. Writing actual code is only part of the engineering effort. When I see a job posting entitled “Java Programmer” I usually suspect that this is…

  • Singletons Cause Cancer

    It’s been said before. I’ll say it again. The singleton pattern sucks. From a pragmatic point of view, it has two primary drawbacks: reuse and testability. Reuse A public static getInstance() method is, by definition, statically bound at compile time. Since you can’t override static methods, reusing singleton code via inheritance means you’ll need to…