Tech Posts

I've been thinking a lot about ego lately, and how it applies to software development. Writing software – like any other human endeavor – is influenced by the need to be recognized and hopefully praised for our work. I am no different; it is most likely ego that drives me to release open source software and to refine it even when there is no direct benefit to be had for that work. In this respect, ego is beneficial as it compels me to writer better code, but in the context of a day-job work, ego is a liability. continue reading…

The new Django blog system I have been working on is virtually finished, I'm just testing it at the moment. Now I know that by writing my own blog system I will miss out on all the capabilities of a full featured and mature system, such as Wordpress; but my new system -- which I call Django Techblog -- has a few features that Wordpress doesn't, but more importantly, it works just the way I want it to.

One of those new features is the ability to insert syntax highlighted code in to comments, which is very useful for a techy blog! I've created a post on the beta site, and I'd like to invite you to pop over and test the commenting system. I'll delete the comments when I'm satisfied it is working nicely and I can replace www.willmcgugan.com. So feel free to play about with it...

Django has pretty good support for caching, which is one of the easiest ways of speeding up a web application. The default is to cache for ten minutes, which means that if you get multiple requests for a page within a ten minute window then Django can serve up a stored copy of the page without hitting the database or rendering the HTML. The caching period can be set per-page and fragments of pages can be cached rather than the whole, but the system rests on the fact that it doesn't matter if the content doesn't change for a period of time. continue reading…

I use my laptop for instant messaging and picking up my email while I'm working. It's not quite as good as having dual monitors but it means I can easily work and chat / refer to emails without having to shuffle windows about. Occasionally I need to transfer something from the laptop to my main machine - which can be a pain because I have to minimize windows, find the file, drag it on to a shortcut then find it on the other desktop. What I want is to be able to access the clipboard on the laptop from my main work PC, so that all I would have to do to copy a file from my laptop would be to copy it to the clipboard then press, say Shift+Ctrl+V on the other machine to suck it over the network. And I want it to work with text, urls and anything else that can be copied to the clipboard. And I want it to be free. :-)

A recent post on reddit.com sparked a debate on the following snippet of C code.

The denizens of reddit have been musing over the the output of the code; is it 13 or 14? It can be either depending on the compiler used - or something else entirely - as the result is undefined, which another denizen noted. Sometimes I wonder if the C language was designed purely to provide challenging job interview questions.

Even though I was a C/C++ programmer for a lot longer than I have been a Python programmer, the entire concept of a valid language construct being undefined is offensive to me. Seriously. It's like month old milk; makes me screw my face up and turn away in disgust. In contrast, Python smells like a mixture of freshly cut grass and new car smell. continue reading…