Wildfalcon

Thinking and developing in everything – by Laurie Young

Tag archive for ‘Computing’

  • Personal content, for just your friends.

    12 December 07 • Comments

    Have you ever wanted to share something personal with just a few, or even just one close friend. Its really not easy. I’m not talking about an idea, something you can just ring up and tell them. I’m thinking of videos (though the idea extends to photos, or music, or any thing like that). Because [...]

  • Rapid Prototyping for Java using JRuby: A Presentation

    30 July 07 • Comments

    On Thursday 30th of August I will be presenting a talk as part of the LRUG BOF (Birds of a Feather) session at NFJS, No Fluff Just Stuff. It will be my first time presenting outside of an academic conference and I am really looking forward to it. I’m going to be talking about how [...]

  • Using JRuby to rapidly prototype changes in a Java codebase

    23 July 07 • Comments

    Today, as an exercise, I coded up a simple piece of java and ruby integration, via JRuby.
    The task I set myself was simple. Start with a java only application, and then use JRuby to rapidly prototype adding a new feature to it. I used my favourite sample application: A library with three entities, books, borrowers [...]

  • Stuff your Java model into your Rails project

    10 June 07 • Comments

    The upcoming, and now recent, release of JRuby 1.0, along with some conversations with various friends has left me thinking a lot recently about how to integrate a Java project with a Ruby (on Rails) project. If you have an existing domain model written in Java then the reasons you might want to do this [...]

  • Sometimes Models Make Reality

    23 January 07 • Comments

    Ok, so it’s important that we understand that there is a distinction between the models, or paradigms that scientists use and the real world. But when I first started to think about these things I got a bit confused. What about computers? Computer people always say “that’s not possible” without any hint that there is [...]

  • Checking that it is true that true is true should not be hard!

    4 January 07 • Comments

    I spent most of the last day or so playing with testing in ruby on rails. It should be pretty easy, after all rails has testing built in, right? Well that’s what I thought, and I was right, but only to a point.
    Starting off with a simple example

    class ItemTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
    def test_truth
    assert true
    end
    end

    Not much to [...]

  • Can we trust logic – revisited

    10 October 06 • Comments

    A few days ago (well, more than a few days ago, but some technical problems got in the way since I wrote this post) I wrote about how logic cannot be conclusively shown to be correct. I mentioned that the argument is explained better in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I knew it was actually [...]

  • Agile Enjoyment

    6 July 06 • Comments

    As most of the people I talk to on a day to day basis are probably fed-up of hearing about, i’m very keen on this whole  Agile Programming thing thats doing the rounds at the moment. I think it has some problems, mainly when it comes to developing usable software, but on the whole, its [...]

  • Photographic websites

    20 February 06 • Comments

    Photography and websites; sometimes they mix well, but so many of the photography web sites I have seen out there just don’t work. They look ugly, or flat, or are just somehow lacking. As both a photographer and sometimes web developer, this is something I have had running about in my head for ages now. [...]

  • Online Communities

    9 January 06 • Comments

    I have been thinking quite a bit recently about online communities. Not just the technology that allows them, but what exactly is their role. No doubt this has been inspired by my recent work on Paso, a replacement web based online community tool for IVDA.
    My friend James pointed me in the direction of Joel Spolsky, [...]