Brugge Blog

Javadoc is an amazing tool. It’s hard to imagine dealing with the Java libraries, let alone any other component or project API, without it. One thing that’s annoying, though, is that it is chatty, and it is hard to tell it “do your job, and don’t tell me all of the things you want to […]

I started checking out StatSVN a few months ago, and have since been able to set it up for a couple of projects. I’ve got to say that the developers have been very helpful in resolving a couple of problems quickly, and have even gone and added some really interesting features, like a code churn […]

I learned about BookBurro last month at a GreaseMonkey session at the Great Lakes Software Symposium, and if anything can make the value of GreaseMonkey real, this is it. GreaseMonkey’s idea is fiendishly simple, to let you attach some of your own JavaScript to a web page. There are tons of useful GreaseMonkey scripts out […]

Ned Batchelder has a link to a story on a tour of Pixar. As he says, it’s quite amazing. These are not your father’s (or your) cubicles. I get the sense that the people who work there would love what they do no matter where they had to work, but that having surroundings like that […]

It seems like a number of tools I use or have wanted are getting released, updated or just kicked off recently. The latest I found is StatSVN, a slick tool for documenting the activity on an Subversion repository.
It looks like this is a fork of StatCVS that started as a university project. This one is […]

Nicely in the spirit of Live CDs, ThoughtWorks has given build masters an interesting jumpstart: Buildix. Sure, it’s more than just a build master tool, since it’s aimed at creating a whole team support environment (Subversion source control, Trac bug tracking/wiki, and CruiseControl for builds), but the person who typically sets these things up is […]

I like pleasant surprises. In the world of software tools, those are when I come across something that I thought didn’t exist, or wouldn’t exist for the forseeable future. For code coverage tools, I’ve been using Emma for a few years, and stopped checking for Eclipse plugins long ago, but now one has magically appeared: […]

If you have ever had to understand a database structure, with or without printed documentation, you will appreciate SchemaSpy, the kind of tool I always like (generating documentation from a source) and which I’ve needed of late. Need an entity-relationship diagram? Done. Need a data dictionary? Done. Point this at your database and it does […]

If there’s one thing that programmers dislike more than writing documentation of their code, it’s creating diagrams of their code. For Java developers, the Javadoc tool was a huge step forward, letting you create up-to-date browsable documentation in a heartbeat. Now you can do the same thing with UML thanks to the good folks who […]

The diversity of operating systems in my daily life has expanded recently, and it’s an interesting change. At work I’ve gone from Windows XP and a smattering of HP-UX, to Linux and a smattering of XP. At home I’ve gone from XP to OS X.
My first reaction to the change was to celebrate the […]