February 2012
2 posts
Digestion
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of consensus on adding security to web services. For example, here are two ways advertised for Rack (the Ruby framework on which Sinatra is built):
Rack::Auth::Basic implements HTTP Basic Authentication, as per RFC 2617.
Initialize with the Rack application that you want protecting, and a block that checks if a username and password pair are valid.
...
Perceptions
Been doing some boilerplate REST code, using the excellent Sinatra on Ruby/Linux and WCF on Windows.
I did the Ruby stuff first and it seems really straightforward (once you have read the source code for the framework, because, like all open source stuff, the documentation is useless), and I’m quite impressed that I don’t need to create acres of object hierarchies just to generate...
January 2012
1 post
Raspberry Blown
The Raspberry Pi becomes more of a joke every day. Today they offer some rather limp excuses for why they can’t manufacture it in the UK.
TL;DR: it boils down to (a) UK manufacturers wanted to be paid for their work (b) the Government wants us to pay tax (c) all this eats into our margin.
Margin?! They are a charity so why does their margin matter? As a charity they get buckets of tax...
December 2011
3 posts
“Informally, the programs were called “ropes” because of the durable...”
– Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
Railings
Some private reactions to my dismissal of the Raspberry Pi involved the simplicity of setting up development environments in Linux.
The most hyped business development framework on that platform at the moment has to be Ruby on Rails. There are a lot of issues with its philosophy, but in general it is quite a good framework, if you ignore its database generation and employ a professional to...
No pi for me
The Raspberry Pi is just wrong on so many levels.
The BBC micro (which appears to be its inspiration) was not a cheap, entry-level computer. It was the most expensive micro on the market. This is more like the Sinclair MK14 and I predict that it will sell in around the same numbers.
The computer fraternity always bemoan the fact that ICT (Government Orwell-speak for computing) as taught in...
November 2011
3 posts
Windows Phone 7
My wife has just got the new Nokia Lumia 800. It is a really nice looking phone, to my eyes the only one that actually looks smarter than the iPhone, and Windows Phone 7 is a really slick system. But unfortunately there is a lot of functionality missing.
Firstly, you can’t transfer stuff to or from it with Bluetooth. That’s pathetic - even the old 6310i could do that.
You...
12-factor →
A lot of this is good sense for any application, and a lot of it is the stuff I’ve been advocating and implementing (where permitted) for years. I’m interested in the idea of environment variables instead of config files. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the ‘config not checked in’ idea, and I’ve suffered from the flaws, but I’m still not sure env vars...
Restoring the MacBook
What they don’t tell you (this is Lion by the way, I never tried this with Snow Leopard):
When you restore from a Time Machine backup to a brand new drive, it doesn’t recreate the recovery partition. And then you can’t recreate the recovery partition. So unless you did a USB key recovery image beforehand (I did (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848)), you will never be able to...
October 2011
3 posts
The Mythical Man-Month →
You wouldn’t think anything new could be said about this classic work. But I particularly liked this bullet point:
System architects once were the people who said “no” to features to maintain design consistency and coherency. Now architects are the people who buy and bring in external frameworks and technologies (killing any chance of consistency or coherency). Kind of like the Fahrenheit...
Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011
Dennis Ritchie has died. He was one of the inventors of Unix and C. Without those, there would be no Mac OS X and no iPhone App development tools (well not in Obj-C anyway).
I suspect the mainstream media will not be quite all over this.
I’d just like to say that his book on the C programming language is one of the few old programming books I’ve hung on to. Because it’s so...
Why your ideas won't work →
September 2011
4 posts
TDD is hocus →
Too right. I have never bothered with these automated tests, nearly everyone I see using them turns them off during development and then hands a junior programmer the job of getting them back up-to-date. They do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the code, they just create busy-work for third-rate programmers who can’t be trusted with writing second-level forms.
HP in decline →
Cringely, who predicted in February that Apotheker would be fired, explains the HP slow motion car crash.
http://xkcd.com/949/ →
33 Lessons For Software Industry Novices →
I could simplify this.
Keep your gob shut until you’ve worked out who to trust
Don’t write lists of things for other people to do