personal

Re-learning to Program, “The Right Way”: Behavour-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development

2009-08-23

Development, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, Questions / Wanted, todo, writing

I act in cycles. I am inspired by and I work on something new, and that inspiration shifts around. I also have a tendancy to drop and pick up projects in cycles. In the past I’ve dropped ideas for long enough for all effort to become meaningless given enough time, but these days I’ve been careful to cycle back to earlier ideas to scrape off the cruft and re-launch the project.

When I re-launch a project, I often find myself bringing significant maturity to the table. I have new ideas and techniques, and I take a kind of sick pleasure in redoing much of my previous work. This isn’t just a programming thing.. it applies to anything that I’ve been working on.

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Always learning

2009-07-20

boot loaders, Linux, misadventures, personal, Unity Linux

Well, I got schooled with all kinds of bootloader and install issues I was having with Unity Linux 0.99-alpha2.

Boy did I get into trouble. I took three pages of notes before I finally managed to scrap 0.99-alpha2 and get 0.99-alpha1 working again.

It’s mostly a problem of my lack of understanding too. I’ll need to take another pass at the whole affair after reading some advice I got. I know how I’ll do things differently next time.

I hope to get into it later this week, although docs are a higher priority at this point since I’ve left things on auto-pilot for a while.. i.e. nobody was doing anything.

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I can’t write perfectly on the first try

2009-07-18

my writing, personal, WordPress, writing

Somehow my postings always have a couple of issues that I find after posting them. I always find myself editing and re-editing and re-re-editing a post to improve it, even though I scan it carefully a couple of times before the initial post. I guess I’m still a wiki user at heart.

My apologies to anyone who is subscribed via RSS, as they will probably be fed the original creation. =/

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Twitter’s opt-out is busted

2009-06-30

glances, misadventures, personal, Twitter

Twitter >

On an old and soon to be spam-ridden account, I received a spam from a Twitter “user” (advertiser). They invited me by email using a standard Twitter feature.

Within that email, Twitter provides an opt-out link. But that opt-out link doesn’t actually work.

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System archaeology

2009-06-16

archivism, dead, documentation, Linux, personal, projects, time management

Archivism >

Ok, I’ll admit it. I really like system archaeology.

It’s like some strange combination of a system administrator, grey hat cracker, security expert, information archivist, hacker, propeller-hat role. I don’t know how to explain it.

And I’ve been doing it on my own system.

For years.

Note that “digital folklore” (native web culture, etc) is not related.

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Absorbing thousands of old bookmarks

2009-06-16

archivism, dead, internet, personal, projects, time management

I’ve gone through a couple of primary browsers across a couple of different operating systems and operating system versions.

What’s even more unfortunate is that I’ve had multiple backups where there were different changes to different versions of things. Fortunately I’ve been semi-active on keeping my links lists up-to-date, otherwise I might have bookmarks from 1998 in Neoplanet from back in my 16-bit Windows days.

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Saying goodbye to my Oldschool GodBox

2009-06-04

dead, hardware, oldschool, personal

Oldschool > Oldschool Godbox >

I didn’t take proper pictures of all the parts I gave away. A couple of 486s, including one with a mixed ISA, PCI and VLB motherboard, with tweaked L2 cache. Heck, I even had a Gravis Ultrasound Plug and Play with a pair of 4MB SIMMs.

Lots of hard drives, a couple of cases, boxes of cards including some formerly-expensive modems.

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Growing up

2009-05-22

documentation, my writing, personal, reviews, writing

Reading earlier things I’ve written, I’m like some kind of half-drunk crotchety old man on a rocking chair on his front porch, shaking his fist and muttering at “those crazy kids”.

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Re-learning to program – Fixing my broken brain

2009-05-20

bash, hacking, HOWTO, my writing, personal, programming, shell scripting, writing

Holy shit. I was able to complete my largest and most complex shell script to date, autotest.sh. It was a nearly total rewrite of a series of scripts that act as an automated testing environment.

That sounds fancy, but it’s not. The basic idea is that as you edit, you save a lot. Well, I do. Now every time I save, the change is noticed and the script is run automatically. It even goes one step further, doing some debugging if your script fails to run.

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Why I will move away from WordPress, guaranteed

2009-05-15

BlogText, compiled website, documentation, my writing, personal, WordPress, writing

Blogging is an interesting concept. It’s something I’ve toyed with since before the term was coined.

It’s never seemed to be particularly useful to me. Each item is a kind of pointless bit of gossip whose usefulness is at first questionable and which becomes less and less valuable over time.

spiralofhope

All posts tagged personal

Re-learning to Program, “The Right Way”: Behavour-Driven Development and Test-Driven Development

Always learning

I can’t write perfectly on the first try

Twitter’s opt-out is busted

System archaeology

Absorbing thousands of old bookmarks

Saying goodbye to my Oldschool GodBox

Growing up

Re-learning to program – Fixing my broken brain

Why I will move away from WordPress, guaranteed

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