ur-ban.com - richard hart: category

Recently it would seem that everyone is jumping ship from Textmate and making a move to Emacs. Seeing as Peepcode just released their Emacs screencast, I thought I might as well have a look. I’ve used Emacs quite a bit as it’s my preferred *nix editor over Vim, but I’ve never bothered really learning any [...]

I could tell you how I still continually fight the demons that encourage me to rush instead of following a disciplined course. I could tell you about all the tests I don’t write. I could tell you about the constant allure of shortcuts and my imperfection at avoiding them. I could tell you how often [...]

TDD is hard, seriously hard. Perhaps that’s a bit of an overstatement, but for me, after years of “skill neglect”, it’s been a real struggle to pick up and get right.
The problem isn’t writing the tests, it’s writing code that’s testable. I’ve dabbled a bit with unit testing in the past but never really got [...]

It’s amazing how easy it is to be a programmer/developer/code monkey without having to do it properly. I got my first programming job when I was 17, a whole ten years ago, and now after recently reading Clean Code and Refactoring to Patterns, I can’t help but wonder what the hell I’ve been doing all [...]

The migration over to Slicehost is now complete and I’m extremely happy so far. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, but the feeling of impending doom I got when presented with a fresh install of Gentoo was quickly overcome. Apache + PHP + MySQL took virtual no time to install (once [...]

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One [...]

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
NSMutableString [...]

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
Not only does John Gruber nail it when it comes to the essence of what being ‘iPhone like’ is about, he echoes the essence of what good piece of software is about. [...]

So in October I spent a grand total of 327 hours infront of a computer. 43% of the whole month or the equivalent of nearly two straight weeks. The dip on Oct 13th was when I installed Ubuntu

I’m not talking about being a Domain Specific Language, I’m talking about being a Domain Specific Loser. These are they people who don’t go to the trouble, and it is trouble, of broadening their skills and learning new things. They are the people who don’t care about anything that doesn’t have anything to do with [...]

This is a follow up to my previous post about investing in your own IT. The more I think about the more I keep coming back to the thought that it’s not about investing in IT, it’s really about investing in your people. After all, without your people you’re nothing. Yes, without your people you [...]

Dear Ubuntu 8.04,
Please don’t be mad. It’s not you, it’s me. Maybe I’m just too fussy. While other’s can live with your rough edges, it’s just too painful for me to deal with. Maybe it’s just the ugly fonts, maybe it’s the fact that links sent to me in Pigdin won’t open when clicked and [...]

You can’t get a little bit pregnant. - Lou Mannheim
There’s a story about a manager that said his team was doing scrum/xp. When pressed as to the details of what that meant, the manager replied that they were doing ‘no documentation’. Scrum is the in project management methodology of the moment. Quality? Scrum! Clear deliverables? [...]

This stupidly caught me out and a proper D’oh moment followed. I had bad been converting a couple of parameter calls as such:
def myString = someString ? someString : “”
def myInteger = someInteger ? someInteger.toInteger() : 0
def myBoolean = someBoolean ? someBoolean.toBoolean() : true
To something more [...]

It took me longer then I expected it to, to find out how to revert a single file using git. Git revert is not it, that’s for creating a commit to undo the changes of another commit. Maybe git reset? No, that resets the current HEAD, not a specific file, it would seem. Turns out [...]