There is a rustle in the posit-in notes. The water cooler ripples. USB-powered missile launchers inexplicably fire, whilst nerf guns jam mid-battle. There is the smell of sulfur in the air. The Great Rewrite Approaches. The signs were there. Grumbling from the developers – sometimes new to the project. “This code is horrible!”, “Completely unfit [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: antipatterns
I always had this blog to write, not to run a blog. I’ve written less and less over the last couple of years and part of this is down to the overhead of maintaining wordpress. My plan is to switch to a clean, hosted solution – and Tumblr is looking like what I want. I [...]
Categories: Blogging
I knocked this up to help testing on something I’ve been working on in my spare time. It would be a trivial exercise to extend this to build pages for specific URLs – this example returns the same markup for any example. The old codehaus site for Jetty contain lots of examples of how to [...]
Categories: howto
Tagged: programming, scala
It just threw up this playlist for me on the iPhone – it seems my own personal DJ has finally arrived: Beast Of Burden – Rolling Stones Idioteque – Radiohead (live) Born Under A Bad Sign – Jimi Hendrix I Got Mine – The Black Keys It’s Hard To Be a Saint In the City [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: iphone music
I’ve been neglecting things here at Magpiebrain Towers since my move to San Francisco. Blame the sunshine, a demanding new client, or just a relapse of extreme apathy. Whatever the cause, it seems that my inattention has been rewarded. Simon sent me an email the other day, wondering where the blog had gone. I brought [...]
Categories: Blogging
I’ve been working on a tool called Hairball to track setter and constructor injection, and use of singletons in Java code. Right now, the tool is capable of creating dot diagrams (for use with GraphViz) and graphml diagrams (for display in yEd). My initial motivation for hairball was as a tool to help me understand [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Update: There is a workaround for this problem, which allows you to sign-up for a prepaid account with AT&T which sidesteps the need for a Social Security Number. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has the full details. I’m working in the US at the moment, and decided to pick up an iPhone. I’m here long enough [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
I upgraded to the latest and greatest version of WordPress at the weekend, but forgot to reconstitute my .htaccess file, so everything apart from the index page was 404ing. Normal service should now be resumed, but please let me know if you spot anything odd.
Categories: Uncategorized
It’s that time again – after the success of March, what better than an April meet-up? No fixed topic (as usual) so just a general chat about Web 2.0 technologies in the relaxed atmosphere of a Pub in central London next door to where Sweeny Todd used to butcher people. Demos are welcome – so [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
I’ll be presenting on database refactoring and specifically dbdeploy at this year’s XTech conference. XTech 2007 runs from the 15th to the 18th of May in Paris, and my presentation will be first thing on the morning of the 17th. See you there…
Categories: Uncategorized