I do not like debugging. I prefer good logging. The log4j manual quotes Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike from their “truly excellent book” The Practice of Programming: As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is ...

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I am a long time Java programmer. It was what I used to write my final year project at university, and it was my first, second and third jobs. That third job lasted more than a decade and, alongside a huge amount of other things, I got to deliver a number of projects in both PHP and Ruby. PHP was interesting and I’d happily work in it again, but Ruby was fun. Terse, expre...

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“Code” is the name of Microsoft’s new lightweight code editor. It’s been out since April but it seemed like this project was a good opportunity to use it properly. It has a command palette much like the one in

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Warnings and apologies: 6am introspection ahead! In Dan Hon’s latest newsletter he briefly mentions the academic theory of some of the work at ETech in the past (compared to some of the advertorial at O’Reilly Solid). I hav...

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I realised some while ago that I have the theme from Precinct 13 living deep in my subconscious, but it was only today, when Hip Hop On Precinct 13 came on the radio that I realised it was because the previous owner of the Commodore 64 I had as a kid was big into the demoscene

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I fundamentally don’t understand SQL JOIN clauses. That’s not to say I can’t read and parse them, I just don’t understand them well enough to be able to write them and be confident of exactly what’s happening. In my brain, this means I fail some kind of test. I think that being able to naturally understand and write JOIN clauses is pr...

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Well, after making my last brave post, I realised that FeedOnFeeds natively supports the dc:subject element and stores it in its database already. Hurray. Or not, really. Because what it actually supports is a single dc:subject per feed item, which it just drops straight into a text field. If you have multiple subjects per item, say:

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They say you can hold seven plus or minus two pieces of information in your mind. I can’t remember how to open files in Java. (via langreiter.com) Something similar happened to me last night. I couldn’t remember how to get command-line user input. Oh sure, System.in came into it somewhere, an...

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