I have a mortgage with Northern Rock, a UK bank which collapsed (triggering the first run on a UK bank) a couple of months after we got our mortgage. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and one of the (many) things that I lie in bed thinking about at 3am when I should be sleeping. [...]
Like most people, I have ideas pop into my head which seem like they’re ZOMGAWESOME and will make me eleventy million pounds. Also like most people, I don’t take any steps to realise almost all of those ideas. This year I want to try to realise more of them. While I’m pretty sure that none [...]
A warning, gentle reader: this post is filed in the category ‘swear-filled ranting’. When I say ‘swear-filled’, I don’t mean I say ‘gosh-darned’ a lot. My goal here is The Thick Of It-level swearing. This particular post is the result of First Scotrail deciding that trains don’t need to run on time or finish their [...]
At work we’ve been trying to do more comprehensive release testing, on the basis that it’s a Good Idea to make sure our stuff works. Part of this is testing the deploy process. Our software is installed into Linux appliance servers that are used specifically for this one purpose. One of our products works well [...]
This article was originally published at Witchvox. At times, Technopaganism can seem like an almost invisible niche of Paganism. Mainstream books and online resources nearly always have a very heavy pastoral or rural slant and it can be very difficult to find real examples of everyday Technopagan practices. To help counter this, I am going [...]
Witchvox, a more mainstream/general Paganism site, have just published an article I wrote about Twittermancy – Twittermancy and Open Sourcery. I’m not sure how well it’s going to go down with the more general Pagan crowd, and I really wish it wasn’t next to an article about ‘never again the burning times!!’, but I hope [...]
I’m going to start by proposing the following: Doing it right > doing it wrong > not doing it at all. I do firmly believe that in terms of software development, test-driven development (or ‘test-first’, or ‘behaviour-driven’ development, which all seem to be variations on a theme) is the right way to do it. You [...]
Many of the projects I’ve been working on aren’t terribly serious. Failcount couldn’t exactly be said to be the most important endeavour mankind has undertaken. If it’s used heavily within a group, I suppose it could have a worthwhile purpose, to see when people are overly stressed, but that’s kind of incidental. This last week, [...]
Ages ago I registered urbanpaganism.info, and set up a basic wiki for a community I’d set up for people who practice Paganism in urban environments and were fed up the usual hippy clap-trap advice like ‘grow plants in a window box’ and ‘visit the countryside’ when it came to experiencing Paganism in the city. It [...]
It’s been nearly five months since I confessed my dirty little secret and I thought it might be worth looking back to see how things worked out. The first thing to note is that while I did finish my project management system, I never ever use it. I think that Craig was right – judging [...]
