Author Archives: Sampo J.

CoffeeScript vs. TypeScript vs. Dart

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Sampo J.

Software often requires two or three iterations before you get it right.  In our case this led to starting a rewrite of our hybrid mobile application.  It had been developed over several years by a diverse group of people with … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Web | Tagged , , , | 29 Comments

Benchmarking Amazon t1.micro instances

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Sampo J.

Note:  The t1.micro instance type has been superseded by the t2 family, which are much better suited for general use.  I ran some tests on the t2 family as well. Amazon t1.micro instances are the most affordable EC2 instance types.  Their … Continue reading →

Posted in Amazon AWS | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

The Gimp is dead, long live the Gimp!

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Sampo J.

I have been an avid user of the Gimp for well over a decade now. I started using it in the mid 90’s around version 0.60.  I was promoting it to my friends as a great image manipulation tool, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Gimp, Linux | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Switching to Linux Mint

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Sampo J.

This is a description of my migration from Ubuntu to Linux Mint 14.  As this was my work laptop, there are some additional requirements that need to be met by the system.  In particular, I review: Configurability and ease of … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Linux Mint, VirtualBox | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

No-nonsense ASCII chart

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Sampo J.

There are a lot of ASCII charts floating around the Internet.  However all of them seem to have a few fundamental problems:  They include the whole ASCII set in the chart and cram too much information of each char, making … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding | Tagged | Leave a comment

Android Torture

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Sampo J.

Okay, this is my first rant post.  It’s 5:30 in the morning and I’m writing a blog post thanks to my new-and-shiny Samsung Galaxy S3. I was recently force-upgraded from my Nokia E7 because its USB-adapter broke off – again.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Android | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Documenting Cucumber steps

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Sampo J.

One of the great things in Cucumber testing is that as you go along, you start to accumulate ready step definitions, which makes writing new tests even faster.  Several times I’ve actually been surprised that a definition for a step … Continue reading →

Posted in Cucumber, Testing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Dump World on failure

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Sampo J.

One of the most important aspects of test reports is that when something fails, you can easily debug what went wrong.  Splitting tests into logical, small tests that exercise a single functionality in the system goes a long way toward … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, Cucumber, Testing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

API testing with Cucumber

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Sampo J.

In our project we have a REST API using JSON that is used both internally by our mobile clients and offered externally to third parties.  Since we were consolidating all functional testing to Cucumber, it was natural to experiment what … Continue reading →

Posted in Coding, Cucumber | Tagged , , | 3 Comments