On my badly broken Linux desktop, the Gimp is missing its
file-saving plug-ins, so it cannot save files except in a format
I cannot use. XPaint does not exist, for some reason. The
venerable bitmap program does work, but can only
produce X11 bitmap files (which are black and white only). How
then to produce colour icons for my Picky Picky Game mock-ups?
Much to my surprise, Scott Adams has published three Dilbert strips on Extreme Programming (main site) of all things. (I fear the above Dilbert links will not work beyond this month, since they only keep a subset of the Dilbert corpus on their site). This is kind of bizarre—are mainstream readers really expected to have any understanding of the XP methodology? If humour often depends on confounding our expectations, doesn’t the audience need some expectations that may be confounded? Hmmm?
I have added a rudimentary subject-tagging scheme to the system
I use to publish these web pages. Not Faceted Metadata, not Topic Maps, just subject
elements in the style of the
Dublin Core. My ‘database’ of entries are just
files on disc, and they can now have dc:subject
elements using topic names from an ad-hoc taxonomy (that is a
fancy way of saying I just make up the topic names as
I go alonmg). The
Tcl script that generates subjects.html scans all the files for
such elements and builds up its database of links in-memory. It
then writes all the index pages automatically.
Only entries I have taken the time to tag with subjects will be included, of course.
I really lost it at work today. Why am I so frustrated? Well, one of the things that upsets me is when stupid software makes simple things hard. For example, when I find myself spending an entire fucking afternoon trying to copy data from point A to point B.
Web servers started as a solution to getting information from other sites. Then it became convenient to use HTML and HTTP on one's local-area network, and for some reason we had to call that idea an 'intranet' to make people pay attention. Sometimes it is useful to run a mini-server on the same computer as your desktop application; in this note I'll discuss this idea in the context of an application written to Microsoft's .Net platform, since that's what we use at work. Read more
I am beginning to get a sinking feeling whenever I hear yet another person demonstrating how they can ‘just slap some controls on a form’ to make an almost-working app in minutes, and concluding ‘and all without writing a single line of code’! Read more
I believe in Test-Driven Development but had somehow had never gotten around to using mock objects until a few months ago. They’re super-useful when testing classes that write to files or query remote databases or what-have-you, or when the rest of your system is big and hairy and setting up tests takes ridiculously more work than the test itself. Read more
I volunteer at a charity bookshop one afternoon a week, and this has given me opportunity to consider how physical medium affects the efficiency of sorting algorithms. Read more