Well. That was a bit longer than expected. I've finally retrieved the slime-covered remnants of my blog, attached bolts to its neck and re-animated it with lightning. For something that I took down for "a few weeks" while I changed hosting providers, it ended up lying pretty much dead in a ditch for nearly 3 … Continue reading A dark and hideous thing re-emerges →

My partner, Jamm Farstrider, has started blogging! Check out her elegant prose (and learn a thing or two about art) at http://sallysomebody.blogspot.com/.

This is my flight from hell story (long posting!): after being delayed 11 days by the volcanic disruption, I finally got on a flight from Sydney to London via Bangkok. The flight from Sydney to Bangkok flew OK, but movie system wasn't working - not great with 2 kids (luckily they mostly slept). We stopped … Continue reading Airline Story →

Today I met one of the managers of the development team I work with in India. I was chuffed to learn some people call me "The Guru" over there. The manager went on to mention the etymology the word:  'Guru' is composed of the syllables 'gu' and 'ru', the former signifying 'darkness', and the latter … Continue reading The Meaning of Guru →

I've wrote about this before, but singletons really are evil. It's worth repeating, as I'm finding out that the message hasn't really reached a lot of people yet. I've been helping out with interviewing candidates for a senior developer/technical lead/technical architect role at my current client. To my dismay, there is a very consistent problem … Continue reading Singletons are Evil 2: the Rant →

I dropped into Liz Keogh's discussion Introduction to Behaviour Driven Development last night. It was an engaging talk, and I managed to scrawl down a page full of notes, which probably shows more about my incoherent thought process than BDD (click to embiggen): There was much more to the discussion, and I suggest you go … Continue reading Introduction to BDD →

Here's a summary of a series of emails and phone conversations I had with my old dedicated hosting provider. You should get a sense of why I don't do business with them any more. Worst Hosting Company (WHC): we are going to move your dedicated host to a new location in 1 months' time, and … Continue reading Worst Hosting Company Award… →

I found the XTC meetup to be a fascinating event. There were a few familiar faces I remembered from previous years, and quite a few new ones. There was a palpable buzz in the room, which got quite crowded as more people turned up. I had a long chat with a guy who develops the … Continue reading JNarrate, JBehave and Pixies →

It's actually been a couple of years since I last went to the eXtreme Tuesday Club, but I think it's time to poke my nose into the meeting tonight. It's been 10 years since the very first meeting.

This came out last week, but I didn't have time to comment on it. Anthonio Cangiano did some benchmarking tests of various flavours of Ruby. In this benchmarking run, he was comparing the speed of Ruby based upon the compiler used to build Ruby. Previously, Ruby had been compiled using Visual C++ 6.0 (a 10 … Continue reading Benchmarking Ruby →