Like, totally, random.

Shot!

2012-02-19T16:14:00.001+11:00

I thought I'd try my hand at a short story... I'll never forget my 21st birthday. A day that was set to be most ordinary turned into the most memorable, and puzzling day of my life so far. For it was the day that I was shot. Let me tell you the story. I'd been away from home for a few years, doing my national service.

The mice are driving the experiment

2011-11-05T12:33:00.002+11:00

My next speech on. For this one I thought I'd try to give the audience a window into the wild and wacky world of software development, as I see it. And the view isn't that good... A twig. It all started with a twig. Someone, a long time ago, prodded something, and noticed that it moved. Ever since then we have been poking away at things, and developing increasingly complex machines based on the

Beware what lies in the sand beneath

2011-08-21T21:43:00.000+10:00

Another month, another speech. This one was a fun one to give, as most people in the audience really hadn't heard of toxoplasmosis. Beware what lies in the sand beneath There is a parasite that lives amongst us. A parasite so small that when eaten by you, it will make its way through your gut wall, and then, using your bloodstream as a vehicle it moves to the sites in your body which it will

I don't understand the Australian IT business

2011-07-06T10:54:00.000+10:00

Here in Australia employers are screaming out that they can't get skilled IT employees. The situation is so bad, apparently, that we need the visa rules changed to allow IT specialists into the country (this link is one example of the articles that flood our papers). But at the same time, IT companies in Australia will hire only 1 in a 100 applicants! If you have a shortage of skilled people,

Be Prepared

2011-06-17T08:57:00.002+10:00

Another month, another speech.. Be PreparedIt has been a long day. The seats on the train are all taken. So you stand, hanging on to a strap as the train hustles you home. A girl near the end of the carriage unexpectedly jumps up, sobbing, and steps through the inter-leading door between the carriages. You see her framed by the door window, standing on the exposed, shaking, platform that

JavaScript, Functional Programming & UML?

2011-05-30T09:56:00.000+10:00

I come from a Java background. As I have been learning JavaScript through my naked server experiment I find myself wondering more and more if "traditional" Object Orientation is the right approach to JavaScript. I now agree: JavaScript is the most widely deployed functional language. When doing Java development we often share our thoughts via simple UML diagrams. They offer a nice visual way to

Mac sales: my curious lack of surprise

2011-05-24T10:54:00.002+10:00

I've just seen that at this moment in time Macs are doing rather well: roaring ahead whilst PC sales are declining. I normally build my own PC's, but recently decided that I want to change this pattern and actually buy one off the shelf. My principle stumbling block is that I don't see why PC's have to come in big boxes: the last one I built runs dual monitors and fits in a shoe box. However

JavaScript notes: AJAX and redirects

2011-05-23T21:50:00.000+10:00

More fun and games in my ongoing exploration of the world of JavaScript. At the moment I am playing with AJAX, and found myself wondering how one would deal with calls from clients whose users were not logged in. After a bit of experimenting I have found that if you do a plain redirect from the server, the browser happily follows it, but stuffs the result into the response passed to your

How to learn a speech?

2011-05-17T13:18:00.000+10:00

As a new Toastmaster member I have been troubled by the question of how to learn a speech. All of the other members I have seen talk seem blessed with wonderful memories, able to deliver impressive speeches flawlessly, without recourse to notes, powerpoint bullets, or any other apparent memory aid

My sunny optimism...

2011-05-02T13:19:00.004+10:00

A speech I recently gave: I can do anything. I honestly believe that with a little education, a little time and quite some practice, I can do just about anything a human is capable of. I am no super man. This is simply an attitude. An attitude that I have eventually realised to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I have never had to rely on anyone one else when I need to get

Scenario Planning and me. A short personal history.

2011-04-26T21:42:00.003+10:00

I have been fascinated by scenario planning for quite a few years – actually for most of my adult life. This is because I grew up in apartheid South Africa: and so was briefly exposed to the power of scenario planning. As were most South Africans of my age. A bit of history might be in order: trying to peer into the future has always been a human fascination. Way back when we used extispicy. We

CSS heuristics

2011-04-19T21:09:00.003+10:00

As a developer I believe that styling web sites should be done by practiced design guru's. But that us developers should have at the very least a basic understanding of what those design guru's are up to. Thus I have spent this last week wading through (and playing with) simple CSS experiments. It seems to my uninitiated eyes that the world of CSS is one of craftsmanship - knowledge gathered

The naked server

2011-04-13T10:26:00.001+10:00

Twitter have abandoned Rails for some parts of their application. I didn't find their description of the move to be fully informative. E.g.: just what do they mean when they say "we launched a replacement for our Ruby-on-Rails front-end"? Predictably the move got a few comments on the Ruby/Rails newsgroup that I subscribe to. The general consensus seemed to be "so what"? I think we might all

Software craftmanship

2011-04-06T10:25:00.004+10:00

Gojko Adzic has taken the bother to go through the Hudson/Jenkins code base and critique it. He doesn't find the code to be pretty, and wonders what impact this might have on software craftsmanship. I found the comments quite good. I wrote my own lengthy response, which I am going now going to quote, as I want to add a footnote. "Any long lived piece of code is going to have many people working

JavaScript notes: an Applet puzzle

2011-03-31T16:56:00.000+11:00

This one has driven me a little crazy over the last few hours. As part of my learning about JavaScript and HTML5 I thought I would try embedding an applet in an HTML5 page. Which I could easily do. Then I made the applet record a sound and then replay it. To do this the applet needs to be signed. So no problem, I used a self signed certificate, loaded my applet and everything just worked. Sweet.

JavaScript notes: a Firebug puzzle

2011-03-25T10:39:00.003+11:00

There it stood, written before me on the page "Globals created with var (those created in the program outside of any function) cannot be deleted."1 Yet in Firebug var a = 10; delete a; console.log("this is a: " + a); consistently returned: ReferenceError: a is not defined (Fool!)2 How could this be happening? If I reworked the code and ran it as a script in a web page, it gave me "this is a:

What am I doing?

2011-03-23T12:15:00.000+11:00

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }h1 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }h1.western { font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; }h1.cjk { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 16pt; }h1.ctl { font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; font-size: 16pt; } Good question! This entry is not going to be the answer to a deeply philosophical question. It's just a simple description of what's happening my life at

Paulo's Postulate

2011-03-22T11:22:00.000+11:00

What happens when computers stop shrinking? - Salon.com Who cares? At this rate by 2020 the IP lawyers will have strangled the whole software scene. Any slow down on the hardware will struggle to match the slow down that the patent lawyers and music/movie industries will have brought to the table :-(

Our Xmas holiday...

2011-01-14T09:29:00.002+11:00

Terry and I have just returned from a step back in time – we went to the golden beaches, idyllic lakes and extensive wild forests of our youth. We spent our holiday in a place named Wallaga Lake. A lagoon on the southern New South Wales coast. Trying to see the most of this large country, we chose to travel inland on the way there, and to return along the coast. The first leg of our journey was

Bunnings - a tiny problem?

2010-10-31T21:11:00.001+11:00

On Thursday evening, steam pouring out of my ears, I sent the following to Bunnings via their web site: I have just returned from wasting an hour and a half of my life at the Northlands Bunning store: I wanted to buy the timber to build a retaining wall and have it delivered to my house. The person manning the timber yard avoided me as though I had the plague. When I eventually managed to

Apple, Java and me. Proprietary bites, again

2010-10-27T22:16:00.000+11:00

As a software developer who currently makes a living from Java development, I follow Java related news quite keenly. The last few months have been quite interesting, in the old curse kind of way. Apples decision to "deprecate" their Java implementation is the one news item that will have the most impact on my future directions. It is one of those defining decisions that will be looked back on

A Kinfull question

2010-08-29T16:17:00.002+10:00

By now it is common knowledge that Microsoft have killed their Kin mobile phone. The information that emerged in dribs and drabs made fascinating reading. We learned of a company not only riven by internal rivalries, but also that doesn't seem to know how to develop software. Which is odd, as by most measures I reckon they are the most successful software company in the world to date. I attended

Apple's new iPhone terms...

2010-04-12T20:37:00.001+10:00

As someone who has had to live with Adobe's poor support of OS2 way back when, and subsequently on Linux & Macs, I am somewhat sympathetic to the point of view that Adobe made a tactical error way back when.

Yes, James has left the building. So what?

2010-04-11T21:46:00.000+10:00

So James Gosling has left Oracle. Go Figure. I am not sure that this move has actually got any real meaning for Java. For over a year now the language just seems to have been drifting. The move to rich HTML clients tells me that the underlying premise of write once, run anywhere, is still sound, but that Java, the language, and even the JVM platform, has been stagnating. Sort of neglected by

Bye bye Stora...

2010-04-06T21:03:00.000+10:00

As promised, I took the Netgear Stora back - and the folks at Officeworks were wonderful. A full refund and an apology for my wasted time. Plus an invitation to consider some of their other fine NAS devices :-).

#Netgear, #Stora & me - #Fail

2010-04-05T18:53:00.000+10:00

I have been needing to set up some centralised storage for my family for a while now. But we run a mix of computers, mostly Linux, with one Mac laptop, so I have held off doing anything about it. I confess - I have always liked Netgear equipment - their visual design looks clean, and their stuff I have bought has just worked - reliably. So when I saw a Netgear Stora on the shop shelves, and read