March 9th, 2010
I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog recently due to being busy doing things I can’t talk about. My port of Mac software to WPF can’t be discussed until the company concerned announces their Windows version. It has been an interesting exercise in legacy code and some of the fringe cases you encounter when writing an emulator for Quickdraw!
I’ve also effectively retired from consulting, taking up a full-time job at Gemcom Software. I’m very limited about what I can talk about there, thankfully there’s an internal blog on which I can vent my need to think out loud. Based on the public job postings, I can say I’m working with WPF, C#, C++ and back in Python land (so much for all the time spent learning Ruby!).
My involvement in the REALbasic community is going to shrink considerably as I’m focussed on other languages and frameworks. I’ll still put some odd time into projects like rbKarel (although it’s mature and works) and further porting of OOFILE to RBRW but that’s about it. It will be interesting to see how hard it is to delve back into RB if I’m living in Visual Studio and C++ and C#.
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November 18th, 2009
Musing today whilst discussing various XAML coolness (I really love binding properties), I wonder how long it will be before it is possible to just include little bits of Ruby or Python script as a ValueConverter or other tiny algorithm. It’s entirely possible that WPF 4 already supports this and I’ve been too busy to notice. That starts sounding awfully like a Rails view written in XAML!
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October 5th, 2009
I was watching an interesting video on Computing Strategy in the Cloud Era, by Lew Moorman, CSO of Rackspace, speaking at the Glue conference.
In the Questions section at the end he talked about lock-in and mentioned the new generation databases such as SimpleDB as representing lock-in because they aren’t standardised.
I did some quick skimming and found an interesting debunking article on these key-value databases.
The enthusiastic response to these databases makes me wonder, apart from the obvious Google must be right attitude, if a sloppy view of the world as a soup of key-value pairs is actually an inherently comfortable way for many people to think about data? Is it appealing because this is a level of complexity we can think with more naturally?
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September 18th, 2009
I created this diagram (mainly by hand) for a client last year but don’t have permission to post a non-obfuscated version. As I’ve been talking recently on Stack Overflow about using GraphViz for casually tracking logic, I wanted a good sample. It is an accounting application and this shows how different buttons and menu options take you to other screens.
The image below was created by sizing a preview to fit at a non-readable text level and then taking a snapshot. The original PDF is 72KB and allows you to cleanly zoom in to see the flow.
Clicking the image will let you see a larger version but still obfuscated.
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Tags: Dot, UI, Visualization
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September 13th, 2009
I needed some of the core cross-platform graphics bits from OOFILE working in Visual Studio 2008 so paid it some long-needed attention and started putting some projects along with the source. There is now a project to build the Sample Reports application, along with a couple of very minor source changes to make it compile with VS2008.
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Tags: VisualStudio2008
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August 31st, 2009
My punishment for lying down reading on the Powerbook 12″ – Charley jumped on my chest and managed to snag a claw on the left shift key, flipping it neatly off the keyboard.
I was very lucky in that no tabs were broken and found a great guide to fitting keys but thought a few points might help someone else squinting at the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Keyboards, Powerbook PPC
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August 25th, 2009
Just reading a very interesting article on REST and CRUD idioms
I chipped in with a couple of points. I skimmed the article initially and it made me think a lot more about the web services we’re working with and the implications of PUT as an update – do we want to have an empty element as the way to specify that a PUT clears part of the content?
I found another good discussion whilst trying to clarify my own thinking and see if there is a consensus on how to do partial updates.
Tags: REST, SOA, WebServices
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August 12th, 2009
I’ve recently started using git for a project with a local client who has Perforce in their office. The move to git was driven by a desire to have version control whilst away from my office’s file-system-based svn repository and by a minor disaster with the svn directories clashing with Perforce.
I am more impressed with git than I expected to be.
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Tags: git, GitX, Perforce, version control
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August 4th, 2009
My father, Pip Dent, died of cancer last Wednesday. The funeral will be down at Harvey this Thursday 6th August with refreshments being served afterwards at the Rotary meeting rooms (actually the local Masonic lodge).
I haven’t blogged about it so far because I didn’t know what to say. I spent a very sad day yesterday with my brother Alastair, who has flown over from the UK, talking to the minister and picking out photos for the service. Mum’s chemo for her leukemia has resulted in her being hospitalised for a few days although she’s responding well and will at least be at the funeral.
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July 9th, 2009
Tags: Censorship
Posted in Life | No Comments »