Taking better pictures

One of the things that I want to improve is my pictures taking. It's really bothered me when other people have been able to take better pictures than me on the same camera.

Some simple changes like knowing about using fill flash.

No fill:


Fill flash:


Another thing to be aware of is where you flash is with respect to the lens. If we turn our camera to take a "portrait" layout photo and have the flash underneath the lens, you have a huge shadow over the person's head. Not cool.


I'm sure that there are a ton more helpful hints to allow me to take better pictures, but until I can use a point-and-shoot camera well, I'm not going to upgrade to something fancier like an SLR.

They're coming to take me away...

Ever notice that a cubical is just a small room with padded walls where you can be observed for 8 hours a day? No? Just me then...

Integration vs Unit Testing

I love tests. If you have not worked with me, you have no idea how much I love them. They help me be lazy so that I do do more work with less time. It also helps that tests mean I can build a better product.

For the last couple of years, I have been writing integration tests in that the tests that I write for the UI layer go all the way down to the db. With unit tests, you are supposed to have mock objects for all dependencies. But here's the thing: I'm lazy and have not been sold on the idea of mocks for something like a db.

Why do I like integration tests? I have found many errors that I do not believe that I would have found with "unit tests". That and my perceived extra work with creating and managing mock objects. The disadvantages of integration tests?
1) You may be adding data to the db that wasn't intended
2) possible side effects from one test to another
3) slower!!!

# 3 is my biggest complaint right now. My test suite takes minutes to run. Seconds would be better. Less than 1 second would be best. Something that I think would help would be to have an in-memory database for Oracle. I've blogged about that before :-/ No luck finding one online tonight 'cause oracle.com seems to be down... (yikes!).

If you believe that "unit testing" as apposed to integration testing (with a unit testing framework) is the way to go, please comment on why. My mind is still open, I just have not seen an argument that has changed my mind and I am wondering if I am missing out on something.

Update: a co-worker pointed me to Oracle's TimesTen that will allow you to do in-memory testing. I have not tried it out yet, but I hope that there would be no difference in behaviour between TimesTen and 10g. One of the things that I have done with my tests is to make them run in a transaction and then just roll them back at the end of the test (by default). This solves all 3 problems. I am much happier now that I have done this. ;-)

My life as a project

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or just really sad, but I find it a lot easier to manage my life as I would a software project. You come up with some long term goals, figure out what "user stories" that you have to do to get there, map it out... still keeping in mind to stay flexible in the short term to deal with things you had no idea would pop up.

This "life as a project" though popped into my head the other day. Laura and I needed a quick and easy to to collaborate and keep track of "todo's" and lay out a plan of attack. So I installed a wiki that we both can assess and work with. Such a better solution than emailing text files around. We'll also use this for keeping track of our "lessons learned" (I call it a post-mortem) when we travel so we can improve.

Does this make me a super big nerd? Probably, but I see it as picking the right tools for the job. ;-)

QotD

"why can't I get through this door?"
"because it's a wall."

Commonly heard

Something that is commonly heard in our apartment is: "I'm too full, I don't want anything thing... Oooohh, is that chocolate?"

Other things could be cookies, beer, or pie. Life is Good. ;-)

Html img alt tag: Sometimes less is more

Sometimes less is more: providing useless info does not help anyone.

disclaimer: Most of this I learned from my co-worker who is visually impaired and uses a screen reader (SR). I wanted to blog about this since I feel that when people understand the reasons, they remember the solutions.

Web developers should know that the img tag requires an alt attribute to be set. What happens when you don't and use a SR? It reads the scr attribute. Yuck.

Okay, so that means we should always fill out the alt attribute? No. Sometimes it's good if you put alt="". Like for a spacer image, it's not going to help someone using a SR and it saying "Option One...spacer image... Option 2... spacer image...". Putting alt text on those images provides no useful info to the user.

That's not all. You have to make sure that the alt text makes sense in the context that you are displaying it as well. For example: I've got a table that lists widgets and I put an image beside the "widget name" that will bring the user to an edit screen. If I put the alt text as "edit a widget", that doesn't really help out the user too much. Someone not using a SR can make the cognitive leap that the image and text visually beside each other are associated. For someone using a SR they would have much more trouble. Alt text like "edit [widget name] widget" would be more useful.

Just another thing to keep in mind when building accessible web applications. ;-)