bookmark_borderSee more conversion options in preview in OS X 10.8

See more conversion options in preview in OS X 10.8

Lets say you have a file (image.png) and you want to convert it to a BMP for whatever reason. It seems in OS X 10.8 you can still do this, but the options are a bit hidden.

This link gives the hint to do this. Within preview you need to hold the “option” key first so you can choose “save as”. After that you still need to hold the option key when you use the ‘format’ dropdown so you can select the BMP format. If you don’t do this, you will not see the BMP format.

bookmark_borderThe making of Stefan Hendriks

Do you have facebook? If so, then you are probably familiar with the timeline feature.

I have decided to write up a timeline about myself. It gives a view of who I am, what I did, when and how I got influenced. It also showcases my projects in a chronological order.

If you want to read the timeline, head to the making of Stefan Hendriks!

bookmark_border(Win 7) How to really change your default locale for Java

Since I could not find an easy solution for this problem I have decided to blog about this.

Lets say your machine (running Windows 7) is running in a Dutch locale. If you install the JDK and request the default locale in your application you will get: nl_NL

I’m testing this with the following code:

import java.util.Locale;

public class DefaultLocaleTester {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		Locale defaultLocale = Locale.getDefault();
		System.out.println("Default locale is : " + defaultLocale);
	}
}

Lets say I want to make this return en_US. The official docs of Oracle say that you should change your system settings:

– go to Control Panel
– go to Region and Language
– go to tab “Administrative”
– click “Change system locale”
– change to locale you want
– restart and you’re done!

So we do this, and we run the test application again.

You will found out, this will not work. When I rerun the test application I still got nl_NL.

On stackoverflow someone had the answer to this problem. You should be changing your Format instead. So:

– go to Control Panel
– go to Region and Language
– go to tab “Formats” (is default selected)
– change language in Formats dropdown to the locale you want

Now re-run the test code, and you’ll see it will be using the locale you want.

Thanks to Martin Bartlett on Stackoverflow for his answer!

bookmark_borderMerry Christmas, a Happy new year and a coderetreat!

I probably won’t be blogging some tech articles this year. So let me say it already:

Merry christmas and a happy new year!

Coming in 2012:
Want to do some cool coding, and you’re nearby Amsterdam? Check out the code retreat I am organizing at 7th of january in 2012! And join it! 😀

bookmark_borderThe ‘unit’ in unit testing; and kinds of unit tests.

Recently I had the oppertunity to explain some students about what unit testing was. I started off with the question of “What does unit testing mean?”. They gave different types of answers. One of them talked about the smallest piece of code. And even though he is ‘right’. I asked him to apply this knowledge to his current code where he said “But I don’t want to test my get/set methods, that is useless!”. And so, our definition of ‘unit testing’ became unclear again.

So what is a unit test? According to this article on wikipedia “A unit is the smallest testable part of an application”. But what does that mean? What is the ‘smallest testable part’? Do you need to test get/set methods? Do you need to test assigning values? Yes and no.

Even though the smallest testable part is related to lines of code, I believe it also is related to behavior. I think a better description for unit testing would be to test the smallest piece of behavior of an application. Most of the time you probably will be testing very little pieces of code with it. As long as there is some behavior (context) you want to test.

So do get/set methods fall into this category? Depends… Get/Set methods in themselves are, without context, useless. Returning a value or setting a value is not much worth of testing. However, if you test a method that calls a get/set method and does something with it, that is another story. When code is executed within a certain context, it is perfectly valid to unit test it. An example: getTotalPrice that just returns a value “price” is not worth to be testing. A getTotalPrice that does some calculation is a good candidate to test!

With software development, it is the expected behavior of the software that matters. I compare this with designing interfaces (seperating what and how), where you’re busy thinking what you would expect from a certain object when using it. The behavior of the software; how it presents itself and how the user can interact with it (the how), is different from how the software realizes this behavior (the what). When thinking in terms of behavior when writing code, we force ourselves to think of what the software should be doing, and not *how* it should be coded to do that. Test Driven Development is a way of forcing you to write code that has a good design. It clearly a functional (behavior) point of view.

With that said, a unit test should aim to test the smallest possible piece of behavior. When a total price is shown. There are a few steps taken before it is shown on the screen. One of the important behaviors is that the totalprice is calculated somewhere. Testing the calculation of the totalprice is a unit test. This is a State based test. (Does the class give expected output X when using input Y?)

The totalPrice is calculated from certain input. The output is shown on the screen.
A controller class is putting input and output together, making sure the totalPrice is being calculated and pushed to the view. Making sure that the controller uses its collaborators to do that is also a unit test. This is called a collaboration test. (Does my class call the collaborators that I expect, with the parameters I expect?, yes you do that by Mocking)

Even though with these two tests, you still miss an important type of test. You still need to test if your interfaces behave as they say they should. Should you test interfaces of external (3rd party) API’s? Probably not. Unless you have a reason to distrust your supplier of the API. Testing interfaces are called Contract Tests and look a lot like State based tests. These tests are making sure your expectations about the interfaces are validated! If you don’t do that you will get defects, even though you test states and behaviors.

Last but not least. It is useful to test broader pieces of behavior. For example, if you use Spring to bootstrap your webapp. You probably need to make sure everything is autowired correctly. That is an integration test. There are multiple types of integration tests. An often used integration test is to connect to a database, put data in, fire up some methods and test their behavior. All of them are integration tests. Hence, even testing whole pages (end-to-end tests) using Selenium, those are also integration tests, although at a much higher level.

In time I will blog more about the type of unit tests.