Personal

Gadget Envy

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 15 May 2010 - 8:00am

So, here I am, suffering gadget envy. Half the team at work has iPhones - the things seem to be like some kind of disease. Every time I turn around someone else has one.

Google's new Language

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 - 8:44pm

So, Google's got a new language - "Go" which seems pretty cool.

Except, I'm pretty sure it's a prank.

After all, what would the next release of "Go" be called, but "Go2".

And as we've all known for years, that's considered harmful.

I blogged about that!

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 - 1:00pm

Reading Digg today, I stumbled across How Apple's Magic Mouse works, a breakdown (tear-apart) of Apple's new Magic Mouse, showing the sensors it uses to support Multitouch.

I was immediately stuck with the thought "I blogged about that!" - just over a year ago, in October 2008, I suggested creating a multi-touch mouse to combine the benefits of regular mousing with the dexterity of multi-touch.

Behaviour Driven Development

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 - 7:59pm

Attended a great Wellington User Group presentation last night, delivered by Owen Evans on the subject of Behaviour Driven Development.

Really made at lot of the stuff I've read over the last couple of years jell together into something at least semi-coherent. Looking forward to trying this stuff out for my self - and hoping to come across as competent at my own upcoming presentation!

Article - Nobody wants my Code

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 - 6:48pm

Just posted a new article entitled "Nobody wants my code". Feedback encouraged.

Review of TechEd New Zealand 2009

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 19 Sep 2009 - 8:17pm

I've written up a review of TechEd 2009, covering many of the sessions I attended an my thoughts on each. It's necessarily brief, but I hope you'll find it informative.

TechEd New Zealand next week

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 8 Sep 2009 - 7:20pm

Looking forward to attending TechEd next week - a chance to see some of the new stuff and to learn a bunch.

Hopefully there'll be a lot that I haven't heard of, but I suspect only snippets will be truly new. Stay tuned - I'm intending to blog my thoughts on a few sessions.

Oh, and #tenz9 for the search engines. ;-)

Irony

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 - 10:34am

A friend of mine got the following notification from his teams defect tracking tool the other day ...

The Defect "Transaction was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim" has been edited by another user and cannot be saved.

Delicious.

Monitoring by Ear

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 18 Jul 2009 - 10:39pm

When I was much younger, programming on my Amstrad CPC 6128, I found I was sometimes able to "debug" my programs by turning the volume up to maximum.

The Butler Did It

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 1 Mar 2009 - 12:39pm

While reading a recent post by Jeff Attwood, entitled “Paying down your Technical Debt”, I came to the realisation that the causes of the death of Compudigm weren’t the ones I thought.

There are probably a thousand theories about what caused Compudigms eventual demise – there’s probably evidence for many of them.

A Nice Round Number

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 21 Dec 2008 - 2:23pm

So I'm browsing around on StackOverflow.com and I see this question:

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The top rated answer was this one:

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Am I the only person that thinks this answer should have exactly 256 votes?

I was tempted to vote it down to make it closer ...

New Zealand TechEd 2008

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 13 Sep 2008 - 11:03pm
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I was lucky enough to attend this years TechEd, in Auckland. My intention was to blog a review of the event as soon as I returned to Wellington, but my head was spinning so much (a combination of information overload and illness) that I decided to give things a week to settle down. So, without further ado, here are my highlights from TechEd New Zealand, 2008 ...

Software Development Meme

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 19 Jul 2008 - 12:25pm

So, I've been tagged by John with the Software Development meme.

How old were you when you started programming?

I was eleven years old when my parents purchased my first computer - a Sinclair Research ZX81. If I remember correctly, the ZX81 machines were on special because the successor, the ZX Spectrum, had made it to New Zealand's distant shores.

The end of Delphi?

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 13 May 2008 - 10:35am

I was a happy Borland customer for many years – starting with Turbo Pascal 2.0 for CP/M and all the way through to Delphi 2005. I would still be a Delphi specialist, if the realities of the job market were different.

My Vista Experience? It Rocks!

Submitted by Bevan on Fri, 9 May 2008 - 7:54pm

I've been working for a couple of weeks on a somewhat lengthy post summarising my experiences with Windows Vista, but Ed Bott has beaten me to the punch with a very well written post.

My experience with Vista hasn't been totally smooth - but the problems have been relatively minor.

User Access Control pops up only occasionally - when installing new software or when an existing product self upgrades. I don't use any applications that misbehave and provoke a UAC storm (*).

Future Trends

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 7 May 2008 - 7:57pm

Relatively speaking, I guess that Christopher Diggins is a more prominent blogger than I - but from where I'm sitting his recent post on The Future of Programming Languages is almost laughable.

Making predictions that are ten years out is pretty difficult, but I'd suggest that you shouldn't start by listing trends and ideas that have already happened.

The End of an Era

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 10 Apr 2008 - 4:56pm
My Business Card

I saw the news in the technology section of the newspaper this week that Compudigm is no more.

Back in the days when I was a Delphi specialist, not a C# one, I spent a couple of years working for Compudigm as a developer.

I learnt a lot at Compudigm about, well, a lot of things - working with smart people has a way of helping you get smarter yourself.