Dragons in the Algorithm
Adventures in Programming
by Michael Chermside

When to Wrap a Library

I find that this comes up fairly frequently. You find some useful library: perhaps it does logging, or enforces design-by-contract, or it provides an API for calling web services. But someone on the team suggests that instead of using the library directly, we should create a wrapper: "that way, if …

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Posted Sun 03 July 2011 by mcherm in Programming

Setting Low Prices

I am in no way an expert on the tricky art of pricing, but I do have an interesting thought about the pricing of very cheap things.

By very cheap things, I am particularly thinking about electronic goods. People buy information (views of articles and things like that) or applications …

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Posted Mon 27 June 2011 by mcherm in Uncategorized

Election Guide - May 2011

Here is my election guide for the primary elections in May of 2011.

It is less neat than usual, partly because it has been completed at the last minute. Bold candidates are the ones I am endorsing.

PA Superior Court Judge, DEM candidate

David Wecht

PA Commonwealth Court Judge, DEM …

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Posted Tue 17 May 2011 by mcherm in Politics

Wrong SAAJ Version - a Spring bug

A few notes on a bug I had so next time I won't make the same mistake.

In spring-ws, in the class org.springframework.ws.soap.saaj.SaajSoapMessage, in the method getImplementation(), it uses SaajUtils.getSaajVersion(SOAPMessage) to determine the SAAJ version of this message. Unfortunately, that has a bug …

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Posted Sun 08 May 2011 by mcherm in Programming

How Wierd Is That!

On reddit, I recently answered a question which I thought was rather interesting.

There are 8 cards to be drawn from. We are 5 players, each person picks a card randomly from this pile.

The first time around, everyone picked cards at random. After the game was over, we shuffled …

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Posted Tue 03 May 2011 by mcherm in Math