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IAQ Links

By Jeffrey Howard
All rights reserved unless noted otherwise

Recently, I nuked the IAQ links and started over. Why? I just wasn't using them. There aren't many pages I visit often, and I tend to memorize the URLs of the ones I frequent regularly. As an experiment, I'm going to try using this page less as a bookmark page and more as a way of supporting products, serivces, and sites I like.

Funny Things

• Penny Arcade is.... is.... well, it's funny. I'm not nearly as involved in computer gaming as I was, but I still find PA a hilarious read.

Safety-Critical Systems

• Safeware Engineering Corporation is my current employer. We do requirements analysis and safety analysis of real-time embedded systems. We also offer a tool, called SpecTRM (Specification Tools and Requirements Methodology) that supports the development of real-time, embedded software-intensive systems (including safety-critical systems).

Software Development

• Easymock is a tool for dynamically generating mock objects for testing Java programs. In brief, a mock object is a testing stub with the ability to verify that its interactions with surrounding code are correct.
• Eclipse is a platform for developing tools. It provides windowing libraries, resource (file and directory) management, and a plugin architecture that allows different features and functions to be plugged into one underlying application. I work on an application built on Eclipse for my day job, and I'm very pleased with it.
• Java. What can I say? A lot of people hate it. Many think that it's killer app was dumb little scrolling marquees at the bottom of web pages, and it should've stayed there. Other people are now trying to use it to develop the next great wireless, embedded, PDA-phone-game console-pasta maker machine. Honestly, what I like most about it is the huge comparatively well-documented standard library.
• JUnit is a tool for automated regression testing of Java.
• MySQL is my database of choice at this point. The great debates over what's powerful enough to earn the title of a "real" database will probably still be raging long after I'm dead. I don't care. I've never built a web application that had to manage terabytes of data or a transaction speed of several hundred per second. MySQL does what I need it to do, and I don't have to pay a few grand per license.
• Perforce is my SCM tool of choice. I just wish they'd throw official support behind integration with Eclipse. I can see that Eclipse's resource model doesn't mesh well with the InterFile Branching system that Perforce uses. But I'm sure that they could do something to reconcile them, even if was a bit of a vile hack. In the meantime, the existing Perforce team provider plug-in serves well enough.
• PHP is my scripting language of choice for web work.
• Smarty is a template engine for PHP that I find very helpful. The idea is to separate the logic of your application from the presentation of the pages to the user.

Web Hosting

• Pair Networks is, without a doubt, the most amazing hosting service I've ever dealt with. Every hosting service promises high availability, lots of bandwidth, daily backups, and professional service and support. Pair is the only company I've dealt with that delivers all of the above. They've also branched out into providing domain name registration services as well.