"Test-driven development" is one of those things that causes hives among some programmers, who immediately stand up and plant the claim that it's worthless, peurile, deceptive, and generates awful code... never mind that others manage to use it effectively. I…
Year: 2015
I hope my sons understand: when someone compliments an undertaking of theirs, that the compliment more often than not reflects the effort they've invested, and not the results. I hope that they, too, respect the endeavor and not the response.…
"Essential Slick" is a book by Richard Dallaway and Jonathan Ferguson, published on underscore.io. It's designed to be a compact guide to Slick, a database-access library for Scala, and succeeds admirably in its goal, even in early-access form. The book…
I just had the most fun time ever with MySQL backing an instance of WordPress. I'm writing up what happened and how I "fixed" it - note the quotes - just so others are aware of it. Maybe someone has…
There's a lot of whining lately about how the rich are getting richer, how it's not fair, how dare they have stuff when we don't... how dare they have money and keep it! It got me thinking: what would I…
What things about someone would serve as simple signals as to whether you could empathize with them? What would your bellwethers be? A "bellwether" is a leading or primary indicator of something. It came up in conversation about the Lord…
OWL is a language used to describe ontologies - systems of knowledge. It's found primarily in the Semantic Web, which mostly means "hardly anywhere," and part of the problem is that using OWL is really pretty difficult. You can find…
SwiftKey is a swiping keyboard for Android, the one I like best. However, sometimes I want to remove predictions that I really don't want, in particular a prediction associated with an adult site's name (I used it to make sure…
Recently, Ted Neward posted a link on Facebook, "How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings," by Mark Manson. It's got some interesting points to it, the most crucial of which is that thoughts about gun control and mental…
Overall, I think I'm a fairly decent person, who's done some really stupid things. Almost every time that I've done something that hurts the people around me, it's been through lack of intent. That doesn't mean that my failures were…