I’m currently on a quest for a desktop environment that is lean enough to run on my MSI Wind netbook, but scales up nicely to a multi-monitor desktop environment. Now I’ve sucessfully installed Ubuntu on the netbook but haven’t really taken the next step on getting it running the various programming environments I’m used to working with. Currently I’m stuck in a world of a heavyweight IDE (eclipse) that really doesn’t scale well to the small screen of the netbook.
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posted on the July 8th, 2009 1 Comment »
A visit to Ajaxian revealed that two interesting javascript libraries have hit various stages of pre-production release statuses:
scripty2 alpha
Scripty2 is the next incarnation of the ever popular script.aculo.us javascript library. Some pretty nifty demos show off the capabilities of the library, so one to watch.
YUI 3.0.0 Beta 1
jQuery will probably remain my favourite javascript library, YUI is definitely worthy of anyone’s attention.
So, get out there download some new kit and get mashing.
posted on the June 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Google’s App Engine has some scheduled maintenance pretty soon (June 10th (Wednesday) at 4 PM Pacific Time). During this time, both datastore writes and the memcache will be disabled. Now, I have no problem with this – all systems need to have maintenance completed on them, and in general some of this maintenance will involve service disruption.
What I do have a problem with is the suggested way of dealing with the outage. In the scheduled maintenance announcement instructions are given on how a CapabilityDisabledError exception can be intercepted and gracefully dealt with (example code from the announcement below):
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posted on the June 10th, 2009 1 Comment »
I’m a big fan of DabbleDb. It’s a slick product and simple enough that anyone should be able to dive in there and start building an online database. For those of you who are interested DabbleDb supports both free and paid plans for their service, with the only conditions on a free plan is that the data is made publicly available on a Creative Commons licence.
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posted on the May 28th, 2009 No Comments »
Tonight I have had a win. It’s a small win, but a win nonetheless. I have uploaded a small application which is making use of my new GAE tools library. The purpose behind this library is to make application development in the google appengine even more enjoyable. At this stage a python version of the library has been released, and I don’t currently have plans to build a java equivalent as I’m finding quite a pleasant language to develop in (not a language I have coded much in before).
The GAE tools library started it’s life with me calling it “Twawler” or basically a twitter search wrapper, but it grew to include other functions inside the library the meant it deserved a more generic name. The high level functions are are described below:
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posted on the May 20th, 2009 No Comments »
Really struggling at the moment to make a choice between whether to go with Java or Python in the GAE. Either seem like a pretty solid choice from the reading I’ve done, and I’m comfortable with but not deeply skilled in either language. My great fear is (being distractable and all) is that I will start to implement a project in one, and then realise I really should have been working with the other.
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posted on the May 3rd, 2009 No Comments »
Guillermo Rauch of devthought has very recently released a new version of his excellent textboxlist control, and this time he has built a version for jQuery in addition to mootools. This is definitely worth a look.
If you are looking to build an application that uses tagging, then this control will make your application feel very slick indeed. So without further delay, head over to his project and demo pages. I encountered a few issues with IE7 (which I’m sure will be resolved very soon) but it worked fantastically in Firefox.
posted on the April 23rd, 2009 No Comments »
For anyone who is investigating using Google’s AppEngine at the moment, would be well aware that whilst it is pretty amazing (as I indicated in a previous post) it does have it’s limitations.
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posted on the March 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »
Well John Resig has demonstrated his thought leadership in the javascript development space again. Confronted with the problem of ensuring his jQuery library maintains compatibility with all the combinations of browsers, HTML compliance modes, other js libraries, etc, etc. he has come up with an innovative solution: TestSwarm.
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posted on the March 21st, 2009 No Comments »
I’ve been asking myself a question lately:
“What is it that makes some programmers more effective than others? Not quicker, not more technically elegant or advanced, just more effective.”
I think it all comes down to balance – having a mix of skills that make you accessible to the business world whilst keeping a foot planted firmly in the realm of software development. In a lot of large corporations these days the need for this balance is reduced (well at least it seems to be), as the analyst programmer has been broken apart into two distinct entities; that of the business analyst and the applications developer. However, the company in which I work this is not the case, and my team of developers is engaged (through myself) directly by the business to design and deliver software solutions – be they large or small.
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posted on the February 18th, 2009 No Comments »
