Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

TaskFreak hacking part 2: date format

Monday, September 7th, 2009

My TaskFreak hacking goes on. In Sweden we often use ISO 8601 format for dates (year-month-day), but TaskFreak does not offer this out of the box. Most date formatting comes from the DATE FORMATS section in include/config.php but even after changing these date formats I still don't get all dates displayed ...

Hire me for my mind!

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Ward Cunningham tweeted a link to an ad for an Agile Ruby Developer at AboutUs, Inc. Out of curiosity I took a look and it sounds like a fantastic opportunity for someone! What I liked most about the job ad was the last part: We’re hiring you for your mind. Please showcase ...

Good at programming, bad at communicating

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I can't remember how I originally found the link (was it in someone's tweet?) but I managed to find it again in order to share it here. The message may seem silly in retrospect, but I think it was enlightening. The article is called Sometimes, The Better You Program, The ...

Permute an array in PHP

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I wrote this function recently when I could not find it in the PHP function list. Please provide any optimizations you discover! function permute($array) { $results = array(); if (count($array) == 1) { $results[] = $array; } else { for ...

Amount of type checks in Java

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Martin Fowler writes about DynamicTypeCheck: Recently some of our developers ran into the accusation that with a dynamic language like ruby you use so many dynamic type checks that you end up effectively writing your own type system. So they thought, since we've written a ...

Recommended reading: “Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism”

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Brian Marick has created a site for AR⊗TA, short for Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. I do not expect that a movement with a name like that will catch on in "the enterprise" but it seems like a good reaction to software development processes that are called agile but ...

SourceForge replaces part of its platform with hosted applications

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

As project administrator for a couple of SourceForge projects I recently received an e-mail about the upcoming deprecation of multiple applications that are part of the SourceForge platform: The following applications are due to be deprecated, replaced by high-quality Open Source applications we have in our Hosted Apps offering: TaskManager will be replaced ...

The C++ cut is the deepest

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

When you hear me speaking about C++,  you probably notice the passion. I might expose a similar passion when I pinpoint some of Java's weaknesses. Maybe I do sound like "Dick" in the article Java is Slow! at The Daily WTF? From GW-BASIC on my first computer I went through QBasic, ...

Network printer power-on when needed

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

My FreeBSD server is now equipped with a TellStick for control of 433.92 Mhz wireless remote switches. Our home is not (yet :-) fully controlled by remote switches but we have a few of them now. One of the features I wanted was to control some lights but for ...

Looking at Scala and Groovy

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

When people and companies realize what a dead end Java has gotten into, I want to be prepared for the alternatives. Java will become the dinosaur language like COBOL, but it will not be replaced by a single programming language but with a mix of languages. Several of these languages ...