Reverse Grafitti

The Reverse Graffiti Project
http://youtube.com/v/5lX-2sP0JFw
An awesome concept; making graffiti by removing dirt.

(That, and I just wanted to try out posting a video to my blog from Youtube)

Running out of screen space, iPhone style

I’m trying to learn the quirks of developing web apps targeted at the iPhone, so I’m mucking around trying to learn how best to use the space available. Everything is going fine using the iPhone simulator (which is part of the SDK), but when i pull out my real iPhone, it looks like I’ve only got about 75% of the space!
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Migrated to WordPress

After running for several years with MT, I have changed to using WordPress. The main reason was that it’s one of the precondigured apps offered by my hosting provider, and I was sick to doing MT upgrades.

Everything seems to have come over okay but I apologize in advance for any quirky behaviour.
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Why atheism is not a religion

I was trawling through the comments to the lovely Laci’s recent Youtube posting on atheism not being a religion, and some of the counterpoints being raised where, um, dumb. Youtube’s limit of 500 character comment responses probably contributes to that a bit. Anyway, this kicked off a thought train in my head about my own rationale for atheism not being a religion.

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We apologised for the wrong thing

Today our Prime Minister made an important step in Australian history, by apologising to indigenous Australians for past injustices. However, I think the focus on the so-called Stolen Generation was wrong.

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RSpec, JRuby and Story Testing Java Code

I’ve long been interested in decent ways of expressing tests in a human-readable format. Not just any humans, but BAs and business reps in particular – the kind of people who will not be interested in slugging through piles of language syntax. I tried Fit sometime ago, and was impressed, but when I came back and revisited it recently, it looked a lot like the community had kind of faded away. Accordingly, I looked around at what else was available, and stumbled across RSpec Now, I want to test Java code, and RSpec is for Ruby (as the R kind of hints), but I was able to get this going under JRuby fairly easily. I couldn’t find any examples of other people doing that, so I thought I’d write it up.

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Hibernate Query (Lack Of) Caching

Hibernate has long had a feature known as “query caches” – you can run a query, cache the result, and thus avoid running it repeatedly. The only problem is that it doesn’t do what you think it does.

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… and sometimes they don’t.

I’ve spent most of the last year involved in an intensive project that really drained me – hence the lack of blogging. I want to blog in a positive fashion this year, so I’ll start by getting a lot of gripes off my chest. 🙂 Call it things that suck.

Here’s a short list, before I define what I mean by “suck”:

  • Maven2
  • EJB3 Persistence
  • Hibernate, caches, and the way they can kill your database.
  • Maven2 (it just sucks a lot!)
  • No Java 6 on the Mac
  • No “next/previous word” keyboard navigation in the Mac terminal
  • Mac Firefox, drop-down boxes, and tabbing

and I’m sure that there’s more that will come to me. Today, I’m doing Maven – the rest will come later.

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Sometimes, things just work…

9 months of intense development later, our first big integration project with Tourico Holidays, went live today, with an additional 1000-odd hotels appearing on our site (with more to come). A good example is Texas where we had only a few hotels outside of the major cities and we now have about 90 (plus more inside the major cities, of course).
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The rumours of Ruby’s death are greatly exaggerated…

Sheesh… it seems like every man and his dog is jumping on the latestTIOBE index figures showing a very> small dip in the popularity of Ruby. Talk about lies, damned lies, and statistics…

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