12th May 2009, 09:42 pm
Today, we moved our code base from Subversion (SVN) to Mercurial. Subversion is a well known central repository based system, whereas Mercurial is one of the newer Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). Why the move? Firstly, and most importantly, Mercurial makes dealing with branching and merging so simple, as this is the underpinning of the how it works i.e. everything is a branch. I have never met anybody who likes branching in SVN. Secondly, we tend to work in a distributed fashion, and the workflow better fits our working environment. A further bonus was that NetBeans, which is our primary development IDE has built in support for it.
Continue reading ‘Mercurial Rising’ »
27th March 2009, 03:20 pm
I spend my live working in software solutions consultancy and every now and again it’s a real pleasure to come across something that really exceeds expectations and Stack Overflow is one of them. In its simplest form it is a question and answer website dedicated to computer programming – nothing especially unique about that, however this site succeeds where so many others fail.
Continue reading ‘Stack Overflow’ »
15th December 2008, 10:39 pm
I recently wanted to implement a set of user permissions e.g. Can Edit, Can Print etc. in a Java application I’m writing. These permissions will need to be saved into a database and file. It is exceptionally unlikely that there will ever be more than 32 (but lets say 64) different permission types.
Continue reading ‘Encapsulation overkill’ »
28th November 2008, 10:46 am
MI or Management Information is becoming an increasingly important requirement for many systems being implemented today. It is the information generated and presented by many MI solutions, that are used by businesses to drive both their daily business decisions and longer term financial planning.
Continue reading ‘MI End Goal’ »
20th November 2008, 09:28 am
Last night I noticed a small screen flicker on my MacBook (white 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo). After looking it up on the internet I have found that a number of others have suffered from this problem. Issues go back a number of years. The problem has been associated with: a back light, an inverter and a battery software update [or lack of] (that I have read about). Of course the machine is just out of warranty by less than a month – isn’t that always the way 
Continue reading ‘MacBook Screen Flicker’ »
9th October 2008, 12:00 pm
Perhaps in the current climate of financial meltdown, more talk of debt is not what you want to hear, however, it is probably more relevant now, as businesses need help saving money and planning for the longer term.
Continue reading ‘Technical Debt’ »
22nd September 2008, 09:11 pm
Actually they seem to be selling a great deal more than that. I’ve been reading the recent (not so recent) news of Apple’s sales figures. See:
Continue reading ‘An Apple a day?’ »
26th August 2008, 09:07 pm
There are a whole host of thoughts and processes on what you need to do to get things done. Indeed there is a great book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. If you aren’t too busy getting things done, perhaps you may have time to read it. Along there same lines is the brilliant blog of Merlin Mann’s www.43folders.com. (For a distraction, check out his Inbox Zero talk.)
Continue reading ‘Getting things done – with words’ »
18th August 2008, 12:46 pm
Source control, revision control, version control, call it what you will, but at least use it! For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is roughly a process in software development whereby changes to source code, documents, applications etc. are tracked over time, in such a way that it is possible to reliably reconstruct any previous or current version. For a bit more of a comprehensive explanation have a look at Wikipedia’s Revision Control article. This blog is really is a cry from the heart to those people in software development not using it to start using it for code management. If you do use it and you are using a conventional centralised system, then take two minutes to read about distributed revision control – it may not be relevant to you today, but its worth knowing about.
Continue reading ‘Source Control – use it please!’ »
6th July 2008, 07:32 pm
Centos 5 as a LAMP Server in a Low Memory Situation
The results
Lets get right to the point! I’ve setup a working VPS Centos 5 LAMP server in 128MB of memory and it hasn’t gone into swap yet. It typically runs in just over 100Mb of memory and performs really well. So I thought I’d share the process of setting it up in our blog.
Continue reading ‘Setup of a Linux Web Server in 128Mb of Memory’ »
