I got to thinking about SuperIO and how it could be used as a swiss army chainsaw to open files, whereever they might be on the net. From there, my fevered mind got to thinking about cat and how the two could be used together. That said, I present ucat — a universal cat, if …
Tag Archive: programming
Sep 02
A language a year
The Pragmatic Programmers have proposed that developers learn a language a year. I agree that it’s very important to keep abreast of changes in IT and that by learning new languages we can keep our minds sharp and bring new ways of doing things into old languages. However, I have to wonder if this learning …
Aug 27
Programming philosophy in the oddest of places
Today’s thought for the day from A Word A Day is: Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. -Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592) This struck me as being very much the idea behind defensive programming. Because we don’t know what sort of events life will throw at a programme, we need for it …
Aug 26
Sometimes More is Just Enough
In the quest for simplicity and maintainability, sometimes we need to add components. It seems counter intuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it’s true. As an example, I once came across a project which had multiple queries, each of which contained over 40 lines of SQL code. I don’t know about you, but 40 lines of code …
Aug 26
Why my code is broken….. (break my code redux)
Yesterday, I posted an article entitled Break my code, please, wherein I posted a very fragile piece of code, with the challenge to find ways in which to break it. What follows is a discussion of the code and why it is bad/fragile/easily broken…..
Aug 25
Break my code, please
There’s a number of things we can should take into account when writing code — boundary cases, etc., that can make or break a programme. Yes, testing is important, but I think that developing good defensive programming practices is even more important. That said; I present the following, fragile, code. Just about every line has …
Aug 22
Ruby’s ObjectSpace: Subclasses
One of the (imho) lesser used pieces of the Ruby language is ObjectSpace. In this article I’ll show one of the things you can do with it — get all the subclasses of a class.
Aug 20
Oooh Shiny! Magpies don’t know what’s just enough!
I’ve done it. I’ve been guilty of ooh shiny development. You know, those projects where you use the latest and greatest library, tool, or infrastructure not because it’s the best thing to do but because it’s the cool thing to do.
Aug 19
Computer Books which have made me who I am….
We all have our favorite books, the ones which we won’t let them pry away from our fingers until they’re cold. Those books which have shaped us, molded us, made us. The ones for which we’ve bought the first, second, third, and fourth editions. And not just because you’ve “gotta catch them all”, but because …
Aug 15
Just Enough Programming: The missing cornerstone
I was just speaking with a coworker about JEP. In the course of our conversation I realized that in my list of the foundations of JEP, I had left off what is perhaps the most important one of all — Pragmatism. If I were to sum up and explain JEP in one word it would …
