Up until now I’ve just used bits of paper for my TODO system. This has served me quite well, but the problem is that bits of paper are too easily lost or mislaid. So, after reading Minimally Awesome TODOs I wanted to set something similar up for my Ubuntu box. Minimally Awesome TODOs describes a [...]

I’ve just released XPathGen, a simple utility class for generating XPath paths that uniquely identify DOM Nodes in Java. For example: Document testDoc = createDocument( “<a>aa<b attr=’test’>b<!– comment –>c<c/></b>d</a>”); //Grab text node “aa” Node aa = testDoc.getDocumentElement().getFirstChild(); System.out.println(XPathGen.getXPath(aa)); //Should print “/node()[1]/node()[1]” I pulled this code out of diffxml and re-licensed it under the Apache licence, [...]

(or Lisp IDEs where for art thou revisited) A while ago I wrote a post berating the lack of full-blown IDEs available for the various Lisp languages (cue the sound of Emacs fanboys sharpening their knives in the background ;) ). To some degree I regret that post, as although its popularity proved it hit [...]

As part of the Enhanced Visual OGSA-DAI Workbench project, I’ve been asked to keep a developer’s blog. My latest article in this series is titled On Code Quality, where I investigate what it means to write good code.

After my last post about Lisp IDEs, I decided to use Clojure and the Counter-Clockwise Eclipse plug-in as I continued working my way through Land of Lisp. This turned out to be a good move, as the effort of porting to Clojure forced me to really understand how the games worked and highlighted a lot [...]

Lately, I’ve been trying to learn Lisp, working my way through the great “Land of Lisp” book by Conrad Barski. One of the first things Conrad tells you to do is to install CLISP, and explains a bit about the REPL. This is all well and good, but not a word is said about using a text-editor or [...]

Builders apprentices often get sent on pointless endeavours, such as going for “a long stand”, “tartan paint” or a “sky hook”. I think I saw the programming equivalent today – proving that a GUID is not unique. The poor programmer does get a bit much stick, but he has just tried to write a loop [...]

I’ve recently been learning Clojure, a form of Lisp that runs on the JVM.  There are already a lot of resources about Clojure on the internet, but they vary in depth and usefulness. Therefore, I’ve compiled a bit of an overview of the various resources, in the hope that it helps the new Clojure (and [...]

Permiere Pro has lately proven itself to be the singular worst piece of software I have ever had the misfortune to use. It has cost us far more time than it has saved, certainly several times its RRP in wasted hours. Normally I’m a software developer, but a project I was working on required me [...]

GridVoices have published my article “Cloud for Academia“, which takes a brief look at how various Cloud offerings could be used for HPC applications. UPDATE 4/11/2009: This article has now been syndicated (if that’s the right word!) on HPCWire.