Touch Typing Part 1
So, this the the first blog post I can claim to have touch typed. I realised about a week ago that while I was typing I was spending a large amount of time looking at the keyboard. So I decided I would...
View ArticleTouch Typing Part 2
Well, week 2 of learning to touch type is over. I'm in the region of 50 wpm. Which is almost where I wanted to be (just 10 wpm short). I've spent most of this week trying to improve accuracy, I can...
View ArticleDojos and Katas
I recently got back from a very successful Socrates 2011 (Software craftsmanship and testing camp) where I spent just over 2 days hanging around with a bunch of smart people and spent the whole time...
View ArticlePython Shelving
I discovered the cool shelve module earlier. Sometimes it's nice to be able to store python objects using the pickle module. The shelve module builds on this by providing a dictionary that you can put...
View ArticleSoftware Craftsmanship & The Second Chasm
I've just been reading William Pietri's post Agile's second chasm in which he discusses why ideas, such as agile get watered down as they get taken up by the mainstream. I think there's some stuff hear...
View ArticleChicken Scheme on OS X 10.7 (Lion)
I'm making another attempt at going through SICP doing all of the exercises. I've decided that chicken scheme is going to be the way I will do it. But to get it going on Lion there are some hoops to...
View Article10 Io one liners to impress your friends
It's been ages since I've done anything with the Io language. But after seeing this spate of 10 [language] one liners to impress your friends in Davide Varvello's post I thought I would spend the...
View ArticleThe Sieve of Eratosthenes in Python
Whilst working on the 10 Io one liners to impress your friends post I felt I needed to turn to python to complete number 10 - the Sieve of Eratosthenes. My intention was to understand it in python as...
View ArticleHeroku and Ubuntu
So, I've just spent an hour or two trying to make a new heroku app on my ubuntu machine, and I was getting nowhere. $git push heroku masterAgent admitted failure to sign using the key.Permission denied...
View ArticleString equality, identity and interning in Python
In a list of things I should have already known comes this. The difference between using 'is' and == on strings in Python. Let's look at two strings. One unicode (u"unicode string") and one not "not...
View Article2011: A Retrospective
What goals did I set myself last year?1) Publish a blog entry or video that explains monads, teach someone atwork how to use them.I've not done this, I think I understand monads, but I'm looking for...
View ArticleUnder: A new Idiom from the J language
Thanks to this post I've started the year discovering a language I never knew existed - and a cool little feature in it.Imagine you have a function called gg(5) #returns 10Now imagine you have another...
View ArticleNeoBlog - My Neo4j Challenge Entry
It's been an interesting start to the year. Towards the end of January I purchased a copy of Seven Databases in Seven weeks to give myself a boost in the world of nosql databases. Within a week I had...
View ArticleWilliams Compression
Now April is with us I thought It's about time I shared an idea for a new compression scheme I've been thinking about. In short, it converts all files into ~16 bytes of data. Here's how it works:for...
View ArticleNoClassDefFoundError: scala/ScalaObject
I thought I'd start the weekend by trying to call scala code from a java project in eclipse.I wanted to try it without having to compile the scala code to a jar first. The whole exercise was very...
View ArticleSynchronized (promise) queues in Clojure
I've mentioned to a few people at work recently that my favourite built in library in python is the queue. The reasons being that the idea is simple, the interface is simple, and you can do all sorts...
View ArticleAnother clojure macro tutorial (that no one should follow)
Disclaimer: This post shows you something you can do with macros. Not something you should do.I like python.You define functionsdef something(x, y): return x + yAnd you can document functions def...
View ArticleClojure, Vim and the delay sending to screen
So, long story short: I'm use vim for writing clojure (and everything else for that matter)If you're following the setup How I develop Clojure with Vim on the :wq blog then you might encounter a...
View ArticleRunning juju locally on 12.04 (or getting over agent-status pending)
I've just tried following the instructions here to get juju running locally on my brand new Ubuntu 12.04 (desktop) system.No matter what I tried my wordpress and mysql charms seemed stuck in...
View Articlego(ing) under
Lots of people like go and this year I began to find it unavoidable - I'm even ending the year with go being the main language that helps pay my bills! One of the things that go lets you do is pass...
View ArticleUsing vim's path to speed up your Go project
If you're working on a project in Go, and you're using vim, then you really need to check out path::help path Here's a very quick tour. Add this to you .vimrc: set path +=/your/projects/gopath/src/**...
View ArticleUsing go to unmarshal json lists with multiple types
Everyday I seem to be writing go code to parse a json string, and this problem seems to come up often enough for me to write about it. Thanks to adg and asoko on #go-nuts for their suggestions. The...
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Some useful development patterns via the raspberry pi & minecraft
Programming minecraft on the raspberry pi is not just fun, it's also a great chance to learn some of the cool things that can be done from the linux command line. We're going to look at two problems:...
View ArticleDeploying a development machine with juju
I've just been reading Stavros' blog post about provisioning and deploying virtual machines using ansible: An example of provisioning and deployment with Ansible. It's worth a read, I've recently come...
View ArticleWhy I'm happy to live without generics in go (for now)
I was at GoSF last month (9th May) when Andrew Gerrand gave his talk on go 1.1. At the end of the talk a couple of questions came up on the subject of generics. You can see them on this video at...
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