Here is a panorama of Walchensee in the German Alps (taken from the top of Jochberg).
Apr
23
Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum
Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum is now 30 years old.
I have fond memories of playing Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on this machine, as well as writing out computer programs from magazines. This little box of circuits is probably what launched my interest in computing and inspired me to learn how to do programming.
Notice that the chiclet keyboard has come back into fashion, albeit without the rubbery keys that would sometimes get stuck, or just wouldn’t respond.
Look how things have changed over 30 years and imagine where we’ll be in 30 years time.
Anyway, enough reminiscing… happy birthday!
Apr
18
RESTful API Design
It seems that everybody loves REST and many people are quick to espouse the virtues of this light weight form of web services. Implementing a good RESTful API isn’t, however, always as easy as it seems and there are many issues such as paging or supporting multiple versions of your API that can stump the avid developer. This is an excellent video explaining pragmatic solutions to these and other problems when designing your own RESTful interface.
Mar
22
The Vice Guide To North Korea
With the death of Kim Jong Il being in the news recently, I was reminded of a really interesting documentary that I saw a while ago. Being quite uneducated about North Korea at the time and hearing people such as Christopher Hitchens describing it as being like a “1984 state”, I was interested to find out more about it so I started looking for information about it on the Internet.
I stumbled upon the “Vice Guide to North Korea”, an incredible look into North Korean society that was, quite simply, beyond anything that I could have imagined.
Mar
22
Regex Performance in D Programming Language
Note: The problem described in this post was for DMD v2.054 and it no longer occurs with the more recent DMD v2.058 (see below for details or view the discussion at the D Forums).
I am currently working on a Ruby project that uses a lot of regexes on large volumes of text. It is currently running too slowly, so I decided to try to optimise it by implementing the regex matching code in the D programming language. D has given me a lot of joy (compared to C or C++) by making things like string (with Unicode) handling a breeze without taking the performance hit of supposed “productivity” languages. I painstakingly reimplemented my Ruby functions in D expecting a huge performance boost (actually I expected an order of magnitude performance jump) but instead I was shocked to see that Ruby outperformed my D code by a significant margin. The Ruby implementation was finished after 80 seconds, whereas the D program required around 280 seconds using the exact same regexes and the exact same input.
Mar
18
The Renaissance of Indy Gaming
In the olden days you could pick up a tape cassette containing a Spectrum or Amstrad game for a few pounds (yes, I’m British). At this time, the gaming industry was in its infancy and the business side of the game was highly underdeveloped. Games were written by a single (or a very small group) in squalid conditions and these programmers were like rock stars, or mad scientists working alone in their lab (complete with the associated lightning and electrical apparatus). Some games turned out to be “smash hits” (Monty Mole, Manic Miner, Dynamite Dan to name a few), others were of very poor quality but hey, that’s the price you pay for experimenting. How things have changed!
Feb
22
The Rise of Social Shopping
As more shoppers move to the Internet for their bargain hunting, we’re left (certainly in England) with quite a bit of vacant high street property. Many stores, even big chains, simply aren’t able to price their products competitively enough to compete with on-line stores that don’t pay inner city rents.
Once the shoppers are on-line, a wealth of information becomes available that helps the prospective buyer make their decisions. Price search engines help to find the best deals without the user even having to move from their seat (let alone hike around town). There are countless sites hosting professional and consumer reviews and opinions to help buyers find the potential pit falls of their chosen product. Other web sites help users find new and interesting products that the shopper perhaps did not even know about.
Dec
15
Ikea’s Thin Client Woes
Lots of people tout the benefits of web applications over old fashioned fat clients or desktop applications. Yes, I agree that it solves the problem of rolling out software upgrades and requires little or no installation effort because the user just needs a web browser. People do tend to ignore the disadvantages of thin clients however. With the advent of software as a service it might be worth looking at those disadvantages before jumping on the bandwagon.
Read the rest of this entry »
Dec
15
Ubuntu Upgrade Breaks Screen Resolution
I had a couple of problems recently upgrading Ubuntu. I temporarily bricked my laptop after pressing the upgrade Ubuntu distribution button in Hardy Heron (8.04). It cost me quite a few hours or time and caused quite a bit of stress to get it fixed. Since then I’ve avoided pressing the same button on my desktop (same Ubuntu version) until I really have a lot of time to kill.
My Firefox was hopelessly out of date on my desktop so I thought I would upgrade the installed packages. Thinking that this would be less risky than a full blown distro upgrade I pressed ahead. I’ve just spent an hour fixing my graphics settings after my graphics card driver stopped working (or something like that) and I thought I should share the solution because I’m sure others will have the same problem.
