Author Archives: Nicolas Riousset

Why you should give a try to the Pomodoro time management technique

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I’ve first heard from the Pomodoro technique a couple of years ago from a friend at work. You can find details on the official website, but in short : it’s a focusing technique where you work in short intervals (25 minutes), separated by 5 minutes breaks. A timer is used to “wake you up” when your interval is finished. The idea is that focused period of work (with no interruption), separated by short break improves mental agility, increases productivity, prevents burnout, will end starvation in the world, solve the middle east conflicts, etc. Continue reading →

Eclipse : How to debug a C++ console application using a native Windows console instead of the IDE integrated one ?

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You’re using Eclipse to develop a C/C++ Windows command line application, and instead of debugging using the Eclipse integrated console you would like to use a native DOS/Windows console. Some reasons to do so are that the Eclipse integrated console doesn’t deal very well with some DOS console features (like cursor positioning), and it may buffer some inputs. Happily, it is possible to configure Eclipse to use a native console !
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The maintainability legend

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I came across a couple of articles today talking about software maintainability. This one, from Greg Jorgensen, is fun to read. Greg is specialized in dealing with unmaintainable legacy software, and he lists  everything developers should do to keep him in business. This other one, from Matt DuVall, is about the myth of maintainability and talks about all these design errors made in the name of maintainability.

I couldn’t agree more with these two articles. Developers spend way too much time Continue reading →

How to configure SearchBlox to index a “form authenticated” web site ?

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You’re working in a company which has many sources of information. There’s this wiki maintained by the support team, and the sharepoint intranet used by the marketing team. There’s also this shared folder where anyone drops Word, excel, PDF files. The developers also have their JIRA bug tracker. Looking for a piece of information is a nightmare. You looked for a tool that would index all of this data and make it searchable from one single place, and eventually found SearchBlox. Built on top on the Apache Lucene search engine, SearchBlox offers a really nice and easy to use interface. There even is a free edition ! But soon you hit a problem : how do you index a website requiring authentication ?

SearchBlox

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