Entries Tagged 'Software' ↓

Recently I’ve been thinking about how productive I was at school compared to the current day. I am still amazed at the amount of different subjects I was juggling back during my GCSEs, carrying a backpack crammed with a bunch of textbooks and file blocks. Somehow I still managed to study, play computer games, play Gaelic and football for for 3 different teams and still find time for some telly (and the odd date!). Ok maybe I didn’t study as much as I should have but I still did well enough. Continue reading →

VMware Tools improves performance, mouse control and enables copy/paste between host and guest OSes.  If you create your own VM using VMWare workstation (see here for instructions) you should install the Tools. You can get the official guide from VMware here but it is missing a few points so I thought I would share them here: Continue reading →

Lately I have had a lot of stuff on my mind and it is driving me slightly crazy. There are so many different things I want to do and I have so little time to share between them. So each night, I sit down and try to decide what do to that night, by the time I get round to deciding, its bed time. Whats a guy to do?!

What things I hear you cry? Well its quite a diverse list ranging from expanding my knowledge portfolio (thanks prag prog!), working on my current list of projects, fleshing out some of the ideas I have for new projects, getting myself fit, DIY work round the house, learning to play the guitar, my new hobby of amateur photography, gaming and spending quality time with the family. I am also considering touting for little bit of freelance work to supplement my craving for all things gadgety (Anyone need a part-time coder??).

Somehow I need to organise my thoughts and start to manage my time effectively. If I don’t, I will never get anything done!

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 →

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 →

Soon after graduating and starting work for my first IT company, I realised that we, as software developers, are typecast. Our future careers are defined by what language we use, development tools we are given, the software we develop and even the type of company we happen to work for. The next job will probably use the same sort of skills, and so on. Before you know it, years have passed and you are stuck in a rut using the same skills as when you started out. Continue reading →