magpiebrain

Graffiti On The Portobello Road

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:34:17 +0000

Graffiti On The Portobello Road

Strictly Not To Be Open The Magazine With Plastic Cover...

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:34:17 +0000

Strictly Not To Be Open The Magazine With Plastic Cover Otherwise Liable To Charges…

That’s not a camera - now this, us a camera!: Nikon FM3a...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:12:33 +0100

That’s not a camera - now this, us a camera!:

Nikon FM3a with attached MD-12 motor drive.

Nikon FM3A with MD-12 Motor drive

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:12:29 +0100

Nikon FM3A with MD-12 Motor drive

Speaking at qcon San Francisco

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:18:58 +0100

I’ll be speaking at qcon San Francisco on the 20th of November. Navigating The Rapids: Real-world Lessons in Adopting Agile will be a typically rambling affair, drawing on a multitude of war stories from the many projects I’ve work on at ThoughtWorks. Qcon is an invite only conference, so thanks go to Steve Freeman for inviting me to talk as part of his Technical Skills For Agile Development track.

A Build Radiator for CCTray Feeds

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:46:48 +0100

I spend most of my time working in team areas with other devs, as part of a team who check in frequently and who always use a Continuous Integration tool. When the build is broken, it’s a problem. Typically, a big problem - it should be the top priority of any team to fix a broken build.

The problem is that all of the tools out there provide web interfaces that work well on a desktop, but are rubbish as an information radiators. Information radiators sit in the corner of the room, often several meters away.

Big Visible Wall is a scala webserver which displays the status of one or more cctray feeds. It uses an embedded jetty server. Consider it a software appliance. cctray feeds are supported by multiple different tools, so it seemed like a good choice. It’s been tested with Cruise and Hudson, but should work with anything that serves up cctray.

Grab the distro and let me know if it works for you.

The Lego XP Game at Skillsmatter

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:19:57 +0100

This is truly awful. A while back I did a run though of the Lego XP Game for Skillsmatter. I developed the game a few years ago with colleagues help by way of a training excercise. The game isn’t awful - I actually enjoy running it, and I get a kick knowing how many of my coworkers have run the game for internal and external purposes.

No - the thing that is awful - truly, mind-bendingly awful - is that someone filmed it. More specifically, they filmed me.

Just try to bear in mind three things:

I forgot I was supposed to run the session until that morning
As a result of 1. above, I didn’t have enough lego
I look better in person¹

Anyway, all 80-odd glorius minutes are on the Skillsmatter website.

Typically I run the game over a 2 1/2 - 3 hour period, so this session was rather truncated. So be kind :-)

¹ - OK, that might be a lie

Using Scala pattern matching to implement a URL handler

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:37:00 +0100

I’ve been playing around with using Scala’s pattern matching support to create a URL handler for use with an embedded Jetty server. This little code snippet creates a Jetty handler that can not only match URLs, but even extract parts of the URL and pass it into the block

protected class SomeHandler extends AbstractHandler {
  override def handle(target: String, request: HttpServletRequest, response: HttpServletResponse) = {
    response.setContentType("text/html");
    val HomePage = "/"
    val StaticResources = new Regex("""/static/(.*)""")
   
    target match {
      case HomePage => {
        ok(response, "Hello!")
      } 
   
      case StaticResources(resource) => {
        ok(response, "You asked for resource " + resource)       
      }
	
      case _ => {           
        notFound(response, "Not Found")       
      }     
    }     
    (request.asInstanceOf[Request]).setHandled(true);     
  }   
}

The ok, notFound methods simply write the String out to the response stream with the right HTTP code.

The StaticResources regex pulls out everything after the /static/ root. It would be easy to imagine some kind of regex which pulled out the year, month and day from a URL - for example:

val EntriesOnDay = new Regex("""/posts/(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)""")
...

target match {
  case EntriesOnDay(year, month, day) => {
    // use year, month, day etc to pull back posts or whatever
  }
}

Finally, mercurial push working over https on my own VPS. Now to write some code…

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:35:54 +0100

Finally, mercurial push working over https on my own VPS. Now to write some code…

I have just recieved an IOU from the state of Califonia. Some people claim the govenment owes them...

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:59:18 +0100

I have just recieved an IOU from the state of Califonia. Some people claim the govenment owes them money - in my case it’s true.

Getting my own mercurial repo up and running next on the list.

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:58:40 +0100

Getting my own mercurial repo up and running next on the list.

Upgrading my slice at slicehost was a dream. Updating gutsy to hardy on the command line more...

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:58:40 +0100

Upgrading my slice at slicehost was a dream. Updating gutsy to hardy on the command line more painful than expected.

Film stash: About two-thirds of my current film stash....

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:33:45 +0100

Film stash:

About two-thirds of my current film stash. I’ve developed a colour scheme for the 35mm - red for slide film, green for colour negative, yellow for B&W.

Not in shot - ten rolls of 120 & 200 Velvia 50. As you can tell, I like my velvia :-).

I’m working through the 35mm at quite a decent rate due to my new FM3a - but I should really start making a dent in all that 120…

Rather myopic AP piece on McNamara makes no mention of his work for the world bank. Bad journalism....

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:14:24 +0100

Rather myopic AP piece on McNamara makes no mention of his work for the world bank. Bad journalism. http://bit.ly/ACfU3

Hmm - I’d love it if #tweetie had built in bit.ly support…

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:14:24 +0100

Hmm - I’d love it if #tweetie had built in bit.ly support…

Robert S Mcnamara has died. How am I just finding out about this now?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:14:24 +0100

Robert S Mcnamara has died. How am I just finding out about this now?

O2 broadband now up and running. As efficient as it should be. Great communication from O2 - very...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:18:54 +0100

O2 broadband now up and running. As efficient as it should be. Great communication from O2 - very impressed.

Well, setting up SMTP is a bit of a faff - they should realise most people already have an email...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:18:48 +0100

Well, setting up SMTP is a bit of a faff - they should realise most people already have an email account and make SMTP config more obvious

Given the leading topic, one suspects we may be seeing the end of the trending topics. Crowd...

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:46:37 +0100

Given the leading topic, one suspects we may be seeing the end of the trending topics. Crowd sourcing only works when crowds are smart.

Currently experiencing the guilty pleasure that is watching The Waterboy. No, it isn’t Punch...

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:46:37 +0100

Currently experiencing the guilty pleasure that is watching The Waterboy. No, it isn’t Punch Drunk Love but Kathy Bates rocks