Desgrange.net

A long time ago (2004?) I bought a LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 1TB. At that time it was quite a huge hard drive (by size and capacity), biggest single disks were about 250GB (given the size I supposed that the LaCie was made of 4 250GB disks in some RAID-0 or JBOD array).

So five years later (last week) it died. But even now, losing 1TB of data is a bit disappointing. Hopefully there was not much important data on it (I store important data on a RAID-5 array or on a TimeMachined part of my Mac).

So, what to do with a dead disk? Dismantle it of course.

First unscrew the back panel:

Push the content / pull the case:

Unscrew everything else:

So yes, there was 4 Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 250GB hard disks inside. I already tested 2 of them, one is dead, the other one is fine. I hope only one is dead so I will be able to reuse 750GB of the original 1TB.

In the overall I think it’s the third hard drive dying this year. Last year it was two mother boards. Why electronic hardware is so unreliable lately? (and I try to do my best to take care of it but it looks like it’s not enough, hardware is still failing at some point)

I still have somewhere an old Victor computer from the 80s (I can’t find it on the internet, but it’s not a Victor 9000) and it’s still working (at least last time I plugged it in).

Depuis ma déception précédente j’ai essayé un autre restaurant japonais à Ixelles, le Hama-Shin.

Population

J’y suis allé en sortant du travail, et à 19h il n’y a pas grand monde encore dans les restaurants, d’ailleurs j’étais le premier client. Quelques personnes supplémentaires sont arrivées pendant que je mangeais, une seule personne japonaise. Bref, je n’y suis pas allé au bon moment pour voir quel type de population fréquente ce restaurant.

Ambiance

Bof. C’est une ancienne maison transformée en restaurant comme on en voit beaucoup, donc de base pas japonais du tout. Quelques tableaux style japonais accrochés aux murs et c’est à peu près tout.

Nourriture

La partie la plus importante :-). Je ne sais pas si le restaurant a une spécialité mais la carte est plus étendue dans la section sushi/sashimi/maki que pour le reste, j’ai donc opté pour le menu avec un assortiment de sushi/sashimi/maki.

En entrée j’ai eu une soupe miso (ça c’est toujours bien), des brocolis vapeur avec une sorte de mayonnaise (pas mauvais) et du calamar (ou du poulpe ? un truc avec des tentacules, plutôt bon).

Suivi donc de l’assortiment de sushi/sashimi/maki. Niveau quantité j’ai eu largement assez. Pour le reste, ça dépendait un peu des poissons, le thon était pas mauvais, le saumon un peu moyen et les autres poissons pas top. Rien d’exceptionnel donc mais dans l’ensemble c’était clairement mieux qu’au Yamayu Santatsu.

Prix

• Le menu : 35 €
• Une Asahi : 4 € (la Owa est à 5 €)

Conclusion

Restaurant japonais correcte, un poil trop cher quand même.

Remarque

• Sur la facture du restaurant il est écrit “Restaurant Yamayu Santatsu S.P.R.L.”, une filiale du Yamayu Santatsu ?
• Leur lecteur de carte bancaire lis la piste magnétique et pas la puce (il y en a beaucoup comme ça en Belgique, hallucinant)

After XP Day France 2009 in May, I will now attend XP Day BeNeLux 2009 in November 23rd/24th.

If you want to register, be quick, there are only 8% places left.

Here are the sessions I think I will try to attend:

• Setting up and running a space for programmers’ training. I never went to any Coding Dojo, it might be interesting to learn a bit about it. The session is presented by Emmanuel Gaillot, I remember seeing him several times (in previous XP Day France I think) but I never went to any of his sessions.
• The Toyota way management principles for sustained lean and agile. I think the title is quite self explaining about why the session might be interesting. That session is presented by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and Portia Tung. People are usually very satisfied by their sessions, I have seen only one presentation by Pascal, it was about Lean (presentation organized by Zenika).
• The quadrants of effectiveness game. I already know a bit the subject, it will at least refresh my memory.
• Writing user stories and estimating techniques for enterprise agile. I don’t feel very comfortable when writing user stories, I’ve a lack of experience in that domain.
• Flying horses - cleaner code in other languages. I have been using mostly only Java for the last 5 years, except a year using Erlang, so having a look to some other languages might be insightful.
• Solve conflicts without compromise. Who can not be interested by that?
• The yellow brick road. Sounds interesting.

Interfaces

During the session on mock objects there was a digression about interfaces. I have seen too often interfaces in a way that I don’t like. I will use the same example as Eric:

Let’s say that you have a FileManager, providing some services to manage files I suppose ;-), you may have an interface called IFileManager. And usually there is only one implementation of IFileManager which is FileManager.

I think this is wrong for at least two reasons:

• Usefulness. If there is only one implementation, why do you need an interface?
• Naming. The interface name should represent the “role”, so FileManager is suitable for the interface name, IFileManager has no meaning. Then the implementation should reflect what kind of implementation you have, like LocalFileManager, DistributedFileManager or a DummyFileManager for your tests (but not an ugly FileManagerImpl).

So usually, when I see a software with that kind one 1 to 1 relationship between interface and implementation and using bad names, it raises a warning light in my head, telling me that the person who wrote that code did not really now what he was doing (only applying some old and bad coding rules without trying to understand why it was useful for). As Antonio says, prefix ‘I’ for interface and suffix ‘Impl’ for implementations are signs of code smell.

I even have seen some interfaces with only one or two methods, the implementation had a lot more methods… and the concrete class was directly used in other classes… so yes, very useful interface :-.

Sometimes, when writing tests, I need to mock some classes that I haven’t defined any interface for… and since several mock libraries are able to mock concrete classes I still not extract any interface.

I like simple classes, with simple roles, so mostly all public methods (except constructor and setters) are the “implied” interface.

So my point on interfaces is “use an interface only when you really need it” (that reminds me YAGNI):

• when you need several implementations of a given “role”,
• when defining some “ability” (sorry I don’t find the right term) like Clonable, Closable, Comprable, Serializable, Anything-able (if you can add “able” at the end, it’s a good sign that you might be able to extract an interface for that ;-)).

Mock objects

So yes, we also spoke about mock objects. Steve Freeman was trying to explain us some stuff, I have the feeling that there was something in his speech that was enlightening but I didn’t really get it (that’s why it’s only a feeling for the moment).

What I remember is that, when writing tests:

• mock the collaborating classes that change the outside world,
• use stubs, dummy implementations, etc. otherwise.

I don’t fully understand the reason yet. But something I learn recently and that was says during the session: mock only the code you own, don’t mock external resources.

So for instance, if you have a Customer object, a table full of customers in your database, don’t try to mock JDBC classes like Connection, ResultSet and so on. Create a class accessing the data, let say CustomerDAO (I don’t like the name, but hey, it’s only an example), and then you can mock your CustomerDAO in your software.

I imagine that CustomerDAO will then be tested in integration tests (it’s a class using external software/server/stuff right? Can’t really unit test it (except maybe some data storage specific logic I may have to write in it)).

Anyway, it was an interesting session.

Misc

Books recommended during the session:

• Growing object-oriented software guided by tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce.
• Object design by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Alan McKean.
• xUnit test patterns by Gerard Meszaros.

Frameworks:

• jMock (the framework I usually use)
• EasyMock
• Mockito (more recent, I started using it a bit at work a week ago, looks quite nice)

Cette semaine je suis allé manger au restaurant Yamayu Santatsu à Ixelles, spécialisé dans les sushis.

Population

Lors de mon passage, il n’y avait quasiment que des européens dans la salle au niveau de l’entrée et autour du bar, par contre il me semble avoir vu plus de japonais dans une autre partie à l’arrière du restaurant. Je ne sais pas si c’est toujours comme ça, mais je préfère quand les gens sont un peu plus mélangés.

Ambiance

Je me suis retrouvé à une table pas très bien positionnée, donc pas terrible niveau ambiance, je pense que ça doit être beaucoup mieux près du bar.

Nourriture

Alors dans un restaurant spécialisé dans les sushis, je prends le menu sushi. Je dois dire que j’ai été assez déçu :

• les sushis étaient un peu trop gros,
• trop de wasabi (ça couvrait une bonne partie du goût),
• le riz n’avait rien d’exceptionnel,
• le poisson, pareil, limite j’ai trouvé le thon pas terrible,
• pour certains sushis dont le poisson n’est naturellement pas fort en goût, ils ont rajouté des herbes ; je ne sais pas exactement ce que c’était, mais pour le coup j’ai trouvé qu’elles avaient trop de goût et là clairement pour sentir celui du poisson c’était mort.

Prix

• Le menu sushi : 28 €
• Une bière Owa : 4 €

Conclusion

Je ne retournerais certainement pas prendre des sushis chez eux. Surtout à ce prix là. Rue Sainte Anne à Paris, je comprendrais presque le prix (et j’aurais certainement eu de meilleurs sushis) mais là, en périphérie de Bruxelles je trouve que c’est abusé.

Par contre j’ai vu que l’on pouvait y manger des sukiyaki, et ça je doute qu’on puisse le faire mal ;-).