Posts

A great essay on why programming is hard: It’s harder than you think. Right now you’re probably underestimating the amount of frustration and discomfort you’re about to experience, without realizing that by doing so you’re creating all sorts of subtle barriers to obtaining a deep understanding of programming. Language does matter I find this part extremely true: my first language is Java. Every programming language I’ve tried since has been through comparing it to Java. I’ve had criticism of each different language based on my assumptions. Scripting languages being prone to bad coding because they are not strictly typed, having to do tedious work with languages that require memory management (my time is too valuable!). ...

I spend a lot of my day in heavy development tools such as Eclipse1, but often for editing simple XML I just want a quick tool to make fast changes. If I use the CLI (or Linux) it’ll be Vim, if I’m on Mac it’ll be Textmate but on Windows it’s Notepad++. I haven’t found an editor on Windows as clean as Notepad++ (if you use a tool professionally, you get to know it’s quirks pretty fast) for editing text of any kind. ...

As I’ve mentioned before1, I regularly watch technology podcasts and I’ve had a subscription to sites like Lynda.com. Between those and Youtube, I’ve watched an awful lot of technology how-to videos and 90% of them are quite poor in terms of editing, sound and being coherent/properly scripted. Sometimes though it’s a joy to genuinely learn something new in a short, concise and to the point video. This haktip is right up there with being among the best: short, concise, to the point and about a utility that will be super-useful to me. In work I’m in an agile software development team and I spend a lot of time on the command line. I like the command line, but many don’t (personal preference I guess). As part of being agile, we produce a lot of video demos to stakeholders. Increasingly though the demos we produce are just as useful for the team - you can’t be every team member at once and this provides huge visibility to the team of progress. Our software is a Unix product, but we develop on Windows - so Camtasia is usually used - which is fine for GUI demos. This handy utility will be great to demo CLI stuff we do. ...

Ikea the TV Business? Who would have forseen the day. After looking at their video I must say I can see the reasons quite clearly: TV’s look awkward in almost everyones home. They don’t fit in our units, the cables are in awkward positions and you can never find the remote1. I’m a fan of all things cheap and Ikea I must confess, so I’ll be watching this development with great interest! ...

Our fifth slot on Athlone Community Radio. Aired the third Monday in March 2012 on ACR 88.4FM in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, Ireland. Topics Covered: iPad 3 Launch Netflix vs. Lovefilm Online TV: RTE Player, AERtv, 3Player, Filmon In this episode Patrick and Neil discuss the most popular streaming video on the market and the launch of the iPad 3. Subscribe: ...

Our fourth slot on Athlone Community Radio. Aired the third Monday in January 2012 on ACR 88.4FM in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, Ireland. Topics Covered: TuneIn Radio App Path App Twitter App Facebook App In this episode Patrick and Neil discuss the most popular apps on the market, across all major platforms. Subscribe: Download Link: 21st Feb 2012 - Tech Slot ...

I’ve only recently started cooking meals from scratch and it’s a worthwhile experience! By my side is an awesome cookbook produced by the Health Service Executive (HSE) and Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS). It’s generally all healthy food and every recipe indicates cost and portion size. It even has meals for one, meals for weaning babies, desserts, you name it! So what’s the cost of this fabulous book? I got it for free. They produce very limited quantities however, but it’s worth contacting MABS to see if you can get your hands on a copy. ...

Below is code for the start of a Twitter bot I am going to build in Java. It’s the most basic way of getting Oauth working (with any account, not just your developer account) and it shows your timeline and can update your status - that’s it for now. The neat thing is it uses Java’s awesome serialisation, so you only should have to authorise your twitter account once! What you will need: Twitter4j Libraries Oauth Consumer and Secret Key off twitter That is it! What the code does: Once only: ...

I’d love to own a 4K screen, the more lifelike the images the better it’ll be for movies. I’d imagine filesizes are 4x as large as HD also, which will be an issue that might kill off optical storage (and require better broadband). It’s a shame the author tried to compare it to 3D (which objectively is still a flop) but he mentions the issues in that technology (namely: field of vision). ...