Inklings: a tumblelog

Radiohead truly rock my world!

Might have some good ideas and guidelines for webapp interfaces in general.

So true. Now if only more langauges with strong static type systems had a decent type system like O’Caml or Haskell…

It’s so long since I’ve needed to do this that I’d forgotten. How embarrassing!

A miniature classic!

Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.

Genius!

To read.

Branching in svn fills me with the fear of jeebus, but there’s one circumstance in which I use it, kinda. I maintain at least two branches of most of my work project, the mainline branch being in SVN at work and the other on my laptop. I don’t have internet connectivity in my house (long story), so I move work back and forth using a USB stick. I merge work back and forth between the two. All my works stuff is kept in Bazaar repositories at home, but all my other stuff is kept in my SVK repository. I really have to ditch SVK.

An interesting looking anti-phishing mechanism.

Holy crap! Must have!

Great piece on how backwards general management practices are and how they can be improved.

Damnit, I wish I’d thought of that!

On the beauty of indirection (and the FreeBSD VFS).

Not a bad programming font by any means.

Another programming font.

Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches? What if it controlled your life?

Scary stuff.

Interesting…

Heh!

Agreed, but some of the commentators come across as morons and don’t seem to get that automation is our friend and you will eventually need to run those test again. The guy who came up with ‘Big Testing Up Front’ seemed as if he was aiming to look particularly moronic. There also seems to be some confusion between white-box testing, which is what developers do, and black-box testing, which is what dedicated testers do. They also don’t seem to get that automated tests are meant to hit the bit below the water, not the user interface, and even then there are ways to ameliorate this. Sigh. Automated testing isn’t a panacea, and has never been marketed as such, but it does make development easier because at least you’ve some chance of catching bugs and getting a feel for the problem and how your code will be used.

To read.

Good thinking there.

Been there… ;-)

Hurray!

All those grey rat bastards from America should be exterminated. They’re nothing but vicious vermin.

Bazaar plugin that adds support for foreign Subversion repositories. This allows committing changes to Subversion branches as if they were native Bazaar branches.

Well, that pretty much removes any reason I have for bothering with SVN out of work anymore.

Internet Explorer, you bloody suck.

Once you get a piece of code to the point where you believe it works–it’s passing its tests–go back over it and edit it. That is, go back and edit it for clarity, flow, and style. Just as if it were an essay.

Now, if only more people would do that…

Hah, hah, hah, hah! Stick it to ‘em, Thom!

Ack! It’ll only go clockwise for me, but some of the guys here on the office and on #linux see it going anticlockwise or oscilating. I don’t think I agree with the left/right brain associations though, they seem bogus.

RNV is an implementation of Relax NG Compact Syntax validator in ANSI C. The command-line utility uses Expat.

To throw at people who still won’t use friggin’ joins properly.

Seriously, read this.

Now, ain’t that the truth! That’s John McCarthy for those who don’t recognise the face.

Because the default apache.conf/httpd.conf file is horrible.

And this, kids, is why I’m a hardass about how you do your markup.

Interesting, but butt-ugly, and the interface could do with work.

Crockford’s chapter in ‘Beautiful Code’, which implements a parser for a version of JavaScript with all the cruft dropped and a number of design errors fixed. The method used for implementing the parser is the main focus of the piece and is really, really elegant. If you’ve any interest in parsing, it’s worth a read. In fact, read it anyway.

It appears that you can have relative URLs that drop the protocol, but keep the server name. Didn’t know that.

Instant comedy gold!

A to-do list for Vim.

The people who wrote Outlook are Tardmonkeys.

A PHP extension that tells you what is being included, where it’s being included, and when.

These considerations add a layer of complexity to software design. As developers, we tend to think of adding new features simply as adding optional ways of usage that users can ignore, but there’s more to it than that. As users, we feel like we should use the options that are provided to us, whether it makes sense or not. I suspect this is one of the reasons for software spoilage.

This is why I’m very cautious about giving in to feature requests: while well-intentioned, they’ve a habit of ultimately making the software worse. Witness WinAmp: it steadily got worse after WinAmp 2. And it’s not alone.

Looks pretty cool, and I can see it being useful for some apps in work.

Read the via link too. It explains why I learned ages ago to do things up in black-and-white first, and then add colour carefully.

Also read this.

Michael Feathers reimplements JUnit in O’Caml as a learning experience.