Hug a developer

I found a new blog to read the other day and this post brought back memories of when I visited the opticians earlier this year for a new pair of specs. I’d been down to Glasgow, to the GFT, to be filmed for a Gaelic astronomy program, Reul-Chuirt (Star Trek), where I was talking about the beginnings of astronomy and how to get started as an amateur. Anyway, I’d ended up leaving my specs in the GFT and no-one could find them, so I had to arrange a quick visit to the opticians. Luckily I was going to be down in Glasgow the following week on the way to a wee break in the borders, so I decided to pop in then. (more…)

I’ve been playing around with LibraryThing (you can see my library here) and thought I’d add some books, see if I can find some friends out there in the ether. I started by adding Ruby Cookbook, which is shared by 173 users. So I upped the ante with Compiler Design in C, which 38 others have. Then I moved to Windows 95 Programming in C and C++ which only 4 people share and finished with Advanced Windows 95 Programming in C and C++, which only I have! It seems that more people are interested in compiler design than windows programming!

I’ve had a Twitter account for ages now but I’ve never got round to using it, mainly coz it’s a hassle to use. I have to keep a separate browser window open in which to twit. However, I’ve now installed TwitBin on Firefox which gives me an instant link to Twitter in the sidebar. I can see this being really handy in meetings and conferences as a thought stream, from which I can cobble together a more complete blog post after the event. I’ve also added the Twitter gizmo to the sidebar of the blog, soze you can watch what I’m up to, if I’m in the mood for twttering. (more…)

I was adding some metadata unit tests to the Guanxi IdP and suddenly came across a very weird peculiarity. It’s perhaps a bit long winded but the following is similar to the test hierarchy I’ve been using. I start off with a base class that holds a lot of initialisation stuff:

public abstract class TestBase {
  protected static String testString = null;

  @BeforeClass
  public static void init() {
    testString = "TEST";
  }
}

(more…)

Microsoft seem to be looking into their crystal ball, to see what they can come up with to replace Windows. I have fond memories of developing for Windows, from 3.11 up to 2000, before I went “open source” with Java and unix. The name Microsoft have chosen for the next generation project is “Midori”. Unfortunately, that’s also the name of Big Innes’s favourite drink in Still Game. His missus has banned him from drinking it as it sends him pure mad radio rental! (mental). Is Microsoft envisaging the scenario below, in its future battles against open source, the internet and virtualisation? Perhaps they see these distributed technologies as the “neds” and themselves as Big Innes, out of his skull on Midori!