Software, technology, startups and video games

I like to encourage programming best-practices where possible. I also would like to encourage discussion about what is good programming practice. What might seem obvious to some may be completely new to others. I also find that there is very little in the way of advice on how best to program, especially for our more inexperienced comrades. Besides, you are never to old to learn.

As such, I am going to start by offering small pieces of advice, mostly related to Java but much can be considered good practice for any programming language. You may find that you disagree with what I have to say. If so, great!! Feel free to share your opinions.

The first topic of discussion are comments. This might seem like a very trivial topic but I can assure you it is one of the most important for programmers but is sadly the most often abused. Continue reading →

Well if you have been following my tweets recently, you will know that I have decided to move on to pastures new after nearly 3 years working for one of the largest financial services companies in the world. Having been off for a few days now I’ve had a chance to reflect on my experiences and what I have learned from it.

When I joined, I hoped that being at the technical sharp end of the high-pressure trading market would provide me with valuable experience. I wanted to learn what it took to build large scale, n-tiered, fault-tolerant and highly performant software. I thought I would be building software to strict specification and detailed designs as part of a water-tight software development methodology. I also was led to believe that I would be working with other teams, identifying common funtionality and building reusable services and common infrastructure. I also wanted to help in setting up an brand new technology centre. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as I had hoped. Read on to find out why. Continue reading →

I had my first crack at the latest in the Grand Theft Auto range today on the XBOX 360 and the one thing that struck me was the adult nature of the game. We all have a pretty good idea of what to expect from this francise by now, sex, violence and crime but this game takes a step further. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of these people that believe that violence in games is to blame for the worlds troubles, in fact I thoroughly enjoy violent games and have done since I started gaming. But at one point, after I mowed down a bunch of people sitting on park benches and walking along the street as I tried to escape the police in my stolen car, I did feel a tad uncomfortable. Then when I got out of the car and noticed the blood splattered on my dinted bumper, I felt a bit guilty. It all seemed a bit too realistic. Add to that non-stop references to “titties” and threesomes and you have got a game you certainly wouldn’t want your kids playing.

That being said, it does look like a lot of fun, the city looks fantastic and really seems to be alive. The first car I stole was a pimped out Range Rover (I hope it wasn’t Wayne Rooney’s!) and was great fun to drive. After beating a guy to the ground, stomping on him and then driving over him, I eventually tried to hijack a cop car but got shot from point blank range. Its a great way to take out my Mario Kart Wii frustrations

So the first all-English European Champion’s League final will see Man Utd face Chelsea in Moscow on the 21st May.  Both clubs are sitting on equal points in the English Premier League with 2 games to play.  Its going to be a fantastic climax to a great season. 

PS. If you don’t speak Russian, the title says: Come on the Reds!

OK I know there really is only one answer to this question…

The real question is how to backup in a secure, robust and efficient manner? But I have to admit that I don’t have a great backup strategy at present. None to be exact. I do keep a copy of some data on my external HDD but it is really an ad hoc manual process.  It wasn’t really that big an issue as there was nothing I couldn’t live without on my PC.  Now however there are a few things that have changed my mind:

1. I now have GBs of priceless photographs/video stored on my PC/External HDD as well as my music collection.
2. I have recently replaced my aging pc with a 1TB RAID 0 disk array. This means my data is more vunerable with 2x the risk of disk failure. Also, HDDs are said to be more likely to fail early if defected or last for a long period of time. So I am on shaky ground at the moment.
3. I have already had a couple of scares where it looked like my RAID had died and I thought I had lost everything. I don’t want to go through that again!

I have been thinking about getting a good backup strategy for a while. I will write an update soon detailing my options. In the mean time, I would love to hear some suggestions/requirements etc…

Well United had one hand on the Premiership title. If only we had beaten Blackburn! In fairness, they were really up for it and I was happy to come away with a point in the end. So what does this mean for the title? It means United have a three point lead with 9 points to play for, including Chelsea (our nearest challengers) next away from home. In reality though, the fact that United have a superior goal difference means United can lose to Chelsea, win our last two games and still pick up the title, but lets not go there!  Hopefully we can get away with at least a draw on Sunday to make it really tough for Chelsea. As Middlesborough and Blackburn have shown, the matches against the so called lesser teams aren’t always a forgon conclusion. So we are going to be on the edge of our seats right until the last day. Continue reading →

I got my first taste of Mario Kart for the Wii today. I was never the greatest of Nintendo/Mario fans growing up but I am embracing them with my beloved Wii. I didn’t get a great deal of time with it but enough to test out the Wiimote steering wheel. I wasn’t sure if I’d like having to use gestures to control the steering, mainly as I would have to hold the wheel rather than use the traditional fixed steering wheel. But I have to say it worked perfectly. Really good and accurate steering and it was a lot of fun in two player. I would have to recommend the official “Wii Wheel” over Game’s 3rd party wheel as it has a bit more weight and a button cover over the B button making it easier to access. Other than that though it does look like every other Mario Kart in existence. Let’s hope Nintendo have added a bit more than a snazzy new control mechanism…

Well I always thought it was going to be a tough game at home to Arsenal, especially after them being kicked out of Europe by Liverpool in midweek. When we went 1-0 down thanks to an obvious handball I thought it wasn’t going to be our day.
Continue reading →

As we settle into the high-definition era of console gaming, we can bask in the warn glow of our 40″+  LCD TVs (even warmer glow of plasma TVs) and the crisp 710p/1080i/1080p graphics appearing before our eyes, safe in the knowledge that it just doesn’t get any better. Or does it… Continue reading →

Many web applications are hosted on Linux servers, making it difficult for those who are developing their applications on MS Windows (I know, shame on us!).  It can be a bit tricky and cumbersome to maintain two different environments for development and production.

There is a simple alternative, Virtualisation (or Virtualization :-)). Developers can set up a virtual machine running the same OS and software that their production server is using.  This reduces the likelihood of a configuration conflict and simplifies development and testing.

The following steps explain how I setup a Ubuntu JeOS VM to run a Django web application on Apache/mod-python. I am not saying its the best way (I’m not an expert) but it works fine for me. Feel free to offer any suggestions as to how I could improve this setup. (BTW thanks to Gareth for helping me set this up). Continue reading →