Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Watch the differences! (Score 4, Interesting) 345

Something that we've found incredibly useful here and in past workplaces was to watch the _differences_ between Gimpel PC-Lint runs, rather than just the whole output.

The output for one of our projects, even with custom error suppression and a large number of "fixups" for lint, borders on 120MiB of text. But you can quickly reduce this to a "status report" consisting of statistics about the number of errors -- and with a line-number-aware diff tool, report just any new stuff of interest. It's easy to flag common categories of problems for your engine to raise these to the top of the notification e-mails.

Keeping all this data around (it's text, it compresses really well) allows you to mine it in the future. We've had several cases where Lint caught wind of something early on, but it was lost in the noise or a rush to get a milestone out -- when we find and fix it, we're able to quickly audit old lint reports both for when it was introduced and also if there are indicators that it's happening in other places.

And you can do some fun things like do analysis of types of warnings generated by author, etc -- play games with yourself to lower your lint "score" over time...

The big thing is keeping a bit of time for maintenance (not more than an hour a week, at this point) so that the signal/noise ratio of the diffs and stats reports that are mailed out stays high. Talking to your developers about what they like / don't like and tailoring the reports over time helps a lot -- and it's an opportunity to get some surreptitious programming language education done, too.

Power

Submission + - MIT powers lightbulb wirelessly

kcurtis writes: According to the Boston Globe, MIT Researchers lit a light bulb remotely. The successful experiment to lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb. Details about WiTricity, or wireless electricity, are scheduled to be reported today in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.

Slashdot Top Deals

Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than being flat broke and having a stomach ache. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"

Working...