October 2011
2 posts
One case for queues
Ted Dzubia recently posted The Case Against Queues. I have to grant him that, like anything else, queues can be over/misused, so probably they are being in some parts. Film at 11. (I would say that re useful metrics to alarm on, the time between a message arriving on a queue and it being acked as processed is typically easy to measure and to set sensible thresholds for.)
In an Google+ discussion...
One, Two, Testing
The first official DLC for Portal 2 came out today. It’s a new Co-op campaign.
Now this kind of play is probably great fun, but I still haven’t managed to play the co-operative campaign that originally came with the game. Because, you know, you have to be organized enough to dovetail the windows in your packed social schedules and all that.
So I was kind of hoping for a new set of...
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Forcing functions that are better than comments
A recent thread at work discussed the value (or otherwise) of comments in code. I think comments on anything owned and used by a small team are usually a code smell.
One of the excuses offered for comments was that if you wrote e.g. JavaDoc for some code, then that forces you to think about the details of the code’s behavior and the way that it presents itself to clients; and that such...
Google Plus minus writes
Google+ finally began to roll-out an API. Yay! But, it is read-only. Boo!
I write my stuff here, in a space (i.e. under a domain name) that I own.
Some people have chosen to follow me on Google+ and from this I conclude they may want to read what I write. The obvious way to link the resources is to post a link on Google+ each time that I write something here. I was hoping for a Google+ API that...
July 2011
2 posts
Google Identity
These are some thoughts in response to a post by Pavlos on Google+, on Google+. (They are posted here on my blog in order to be consistent with their content! Consider this a trackback. Hmmm, whatever happened to trackback?)
I have three things to say here. First, whatever Google’s worthy plans may be re other long-term benefits of having well-defined identities in this new space, we should...
http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html →
Great write-up of a fascinating - nay, disruptive - architecture for applications that handle a very large number of highly interdependent requests - event-driven, tuned to processor caches, and pushing all the concurrency out to the edges.
May 2011
1 post
Who is ready to make some science?
When Portal 2 came out, I had grand plans for a detailed post discussing the game, the multi-stage ARG that surrounded the launch, the plans for DLC, and lastly my thoughts on whether the less clinical look of the game would get in the way of homebrew levels.
Skip to the end… no, it has not. Wish there had been another two scenes in the middle act of the game? Install this Sphere of...
February 2011
2 posts
What would Feynman do? - Fabulous Adventures In... →
I’m not sure this totally disproves the value of interview questions that provoke thinking outside the box, but I found this to be a very funny dismantling of the well-known “three lamps and three switches” puzzle.
Mixing a Modern web presence
Under the banner of Miss Fitz-Poste Modern Mixers, my partner Julie and her friend/cofounder Emily (henceforth, “the Fitz-Postes”) for about a year have been running a mostly monthly vintage-themed event: a new-fangled take on the old-fashioned concept of a social mixer.
The exact content varies with the theme but this Sunday afternoon’s Hello to Berlin will do as an example:...
January 2011
1 post
Decloaked
The last time I updated here, I said I was journeying off into the desert. More than three months since, if I had readers I didn’t know they’d probably be a bit worried about me.
No, the trip was only a week as planned. A similarly brief description: the sheer scale of the landscape (mountains en route, then sands as far as the eye can see) was vastly impressive. I got to ride a camel...
October 2010
1 post
Desertion
A quick note that I’m out the country and offline for about a week. Mostly at the edge of a Moroccan desert, back Wednesday 13th.
September 2010
1 post
http://cspangled.blogspot.com/2010/09/better-way-of... →
After a few months away, Albert has returned to log much wisdom at level INFO.
August 2010
5 posts
All Your Face Are Belong To Us
Well someone had to make the obvious joke re Facebook applying for a trademark on the term “face”, even if I am late as usual.
Surely You're Trolling, Mr Allen!
Reading about Paul Allen’s recent round of “…but on the web” e-commerce patent suits reminds me of one of the most objectionable aspects of the current patent system: the way that when a new technology or medium appears, rights to using it in combination with existing ideas seem to get assigned in a “first post!” manner. It always makes me think of this excerpt...
I am not a third party
You may be aware that because of its unsuitability as a mechanism to give third-party applications suitable access to a user’s account, Twitter are phasing out Basic Auth at the end of this month, supporting only OAuth from then on. This is annoying for those of us who individually automate some aspect of our Twitter use - Dave Winer’s reaction is illustrative. I recently sighed and...
Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google →
A great piece by Charles Nutter laying out the context and content of Oracle’s patent claims against Android.
Recommended Listening: CometD and Push Technology
...
July 2010
2 posts
Re-opening Portal (my favorite custom maps)
A few co-workers recently succumbed to peer pressure and got around to playing Portal. There has been much quoting of GLaDOS and xkcd recently as a result.
I loved playing the game and many user-created maps. So for those who have tackled the Advanced Chambers and still want more, I’ve put together a list of my favorites.
(I won’t link directly; you will probably find them all on ...
Prince pun
My late joke re the Prince thing: though still mostly downloaded, he’s now the artist formally known through Print
June 2010
1 post
PeepCode: Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and... →
The scales fell from my eyes as I read Geoffrey Grosenbach’s post on how Rails’ restful route to controller action translation has become a pointless, wasteful abstraction.
May 2010
1 post
Exporting your Facebook graph
I’m not a real Facebook user. I have a “ghost” account on there that puts my tumblelog on the wall, and redirects people to my real home outside the Facebook walls. The ghost also acts as my doorway into searching the Facebook network, and helping my partner with the Miss Fitz-Poste’s Modern Mixers fan page. One of the things that has kept me from spending time there is the...
April 2010
3 posts
This is not an XKCD strip
Team: *lunchtime discussion about the differences between company "director" and "acting director" roles*
Andy: ...and we would call the other one "director prime". Right, this has got too nerdy, end conversation.
Anthony: But we were only one pun away from Star Trek... do you think there's a Godwin's Law variant specific to nerd talk? Some topic whose probability of being discussed gradually approaches 1?
Andy: This topic.
March 2010
3 posts
Enterprise Java
class $$$
{
public static $$$ $$$$( $$$ $$$ )
{
return $$$;
}
}
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/ →
This document makes me happy.
February 2010
3 posts
WatchBrian Swan gave a strongly anti-mock talk as part of the most recent ScotRUG. It was pretty much point-for-point how I feel on the subject (apart from the bit at the start on “no getter” coding, with which I have had little contact.)
Buzzing noise - irritating but deliberate?
There seems to be a blog consensus that Google screwed up the launch of Buzz and that even the idea there could be privacy concerns caught them by surprise.
Well, maybe. Certainly they could have done better, and lessened the worst kind of damage. But I speculate they knew the auto-follow would cause disquiet, and did it anyway. Every previous Google attempt at social networks (Orkut,...
January 2010
3 posts
https://panopticlick.eff.org/ →
The EFF have been looking into how many bits of identifying information your browser provides to the sites you visit. They suspect: very many. They have an experiment called Panopticlick running to test this out for real. It’s fascinating. As an example, my own fingerprint was unique amongst the 50K they’d sampled so far.
Uncle Bob: mocking mocking and testing outcomes →
Bob Martin wrote a great article on the overuse of mocking frameworks.
His position is that whilst they are sometimes useful, they shouldn’t be the hammer with which you hit every nail - which is how they are often presented.
He advocates hand-rolled mocks for the simple cases, and realizing that when this gets painful, you have a code smell re the coupling of the classes in the system...
Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great...
December 2009
4 posts
WatchOnLive demo - could cloud really get game?
Steve Perlman of OnLive demos the cloud gaming service at Columbia NYC (48min video.)
You plug a box into your TV, or a 1MB plug-in into your low-end PC or mobile device. You subscribe to the service (now in public beta) and rent/”buy” access to games. They lease the very high-end main servers the games run on.
Eighty milliseconds from...
rashitproductnaming.apple.com
People keep speculating that Apple’s tablet will be called the iSlate. Seems a bad idea unless they’re really confident it won’t get delayed.
Wave propagation
So yeah, Google Wave can be confusing, and certainly isn’t sufficiently dense in the average social/thinking circle to have been useful yet to, say, me. But I am impressed by its potential as a platform for prototyping new collaborative workflows. There are already some intriguing demos. I think this is fertile ground and wonder what else might blossom? See, I think this kind of application...
Kata lists
This post contains a collection of thoughts about coding katas.
A fair few are gripes - apologies for this negativity. I should start by saying I do love many aspects of the idiom:
practice as play
solving puzzles
simple examples to unearth core ideas
enjoying exploring multiple perspectives
But (perhaps because with passion comes a desire for perfection) I do find a few aspects of the...
November 2009
1 post
Model and motion capture for props →
Static props are considerably easier to create from scratch and script than are animations of a character model, so this won’t be as significant a time saver for machinima as character mo-cap is. Nevertheless, University of Cambridge present an interesting demo of capturing the mesh, skin and registered movement of real world objects through analyzing video from a single camera. [tag:...
October 2009
4 posts
Sometimes I don't GET it straight away
I recently encountered some wwweirdness I’m hoping someone smart can explain to me. So there’s a client computer A1, and a host C serving some web pages. If you ping or traceroute C from A1, the round trip time is consistently around 200ms. if you use a web browser on A to visit one of the pages that C hosts, then most of the time individual requests are served in a similar time. But...
Consultancy => Affiliates => Shareware =>... →
Every so often Giles Bowkett posts a wonderfully zigzagging river of consciousness. Even if he was completely wrong they’d still be worthy poetry. Enjoy the ride.
iplayer-dl is a real TV gem
Suppose you’re a (Ruby-biased) developer wanting to get at some BBC TV programme in a sane format. (The desktop iPlayer needed to play their default content is actually pretty shiny, but all DRM ends up hurting me eventually.)
How happy would you be if you could just do
% gem install iplayer-dl --source http://gemcutter.org % iplayer-dl http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/whatever
and end up with...
September 2009
5 posts
Chromey yum
I have loved the Google Chrome browser from the moment I saw it. But my main machine at home runs Ubuntu, and the only OS Chrome is properly released on as yet is Windows. So I found myself bizarrely looking forward to needing to launch Windows to play a game or develop in MSVC, since I got the side thrill of launching something shiny when it was time to look webwards.
But lately I’ve been...
LiveJournal OPML fail
LiveJournal appears not to have seen updates to any third-party feeds for around forty-eight hours. (It’s a known issue on their support page.) This impacts me, since I use LJ mainly as a feed reader - with very few exceptions, my “Friends” list is composed of syndicated feeds. So I haven’t seen updates from anyone I follow anywhere on the web for a couple of days.
Of...
http://anagramtubemap.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ →
Was pointed at this a week ago: reblogging it now because it continues to amuse me. Very fine anagram work.
undef defun
When a major programming language conference comes to your home city, it seems churlish to ignore it. I have done precious little functional programming in the last fifteen years, and/but ICFP includes tutorials in the DEFUN development track, which ought to have met my hopes for abbreviated but intense introduction to new languages and concepts. So I attended two tutorials today - but they were...
Recommended Listening: RPX and Identity Systems....
August 2009
4 posts
bub =~ s/pub/hub/
PubSubHubbub is a sensible step in the direction of a more distributed, less micro, real-time blogging system. Subscribers to a feed register with a third-party hub that then pushes updates to them. Publishers help out by telling hubs when they’ve updates to publish, and recommending hubs in their feed. Hubs take on the complexity of managing subscriptions, calculating and caching updates,...
Fringe 2009
For the last couple of years I managed to write a paragraph for each Edinburgh Fringe show I saw; this time it’s just headlines for my diary. My younger brother Stephen was excellent in Earnestina and it was great to have him in town and out of his shell for the Festival. Favorites shows were The Doubtful Guest (ninety minute faithful theatrical adaption of an awkward twenty-eight line...