We recently tried an experiment in selling stuff on the internet. It was a bit of a departure from our normal area of expertise, so it was definitely heavy on the ‘experiment’. I’ll say it right at the start: it was a complete and unmitigated failure, but not in the way I was expecting at [...]
I gave a talk about Adhearsion, the Ruby VoIP framework that interfaces with Asterisk, to ScotRUG. You can see the video on Vimeo. The talk wasn’t too well-prepared, in particular I hadn’t tested to see if Asterisk was working properly on my netbook. Of course, it wasn’t, and so I couldn’t do a demo. The [...]
Apple launched the iPad and it was pretty much exactly what everyone was expecting. Depending on what model you buy it’s either a giant iPod touch or a giant iPhone, and I agree with Fraser Speirs – it’s the future of general-purpose computing devices. And that makes me so sad. I touched on the reason [...]
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 [...]
