http://www.kerrybuckley.org What's the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong? Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:04:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been a fan of the RailsEnvy guys (Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer) ever since their "Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails" spoof of the "I'm a Mac" ads, and have been listening to their podcast ever since. I even got a mention on it once. Well that's not strictly true ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/11/08/rails-22-envycast-review/ "Roger that Houston, I'm a PC." Yeah? and how's that working out for you? [tags]Microsoft, Windows, PC, Advert[/tags] http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/09/19/microsoft-ad/ I realise I'm a bit late to the party, but following the example of JP, psd, Eastmad and Casablanca, I thought I'd have a stab at the 25 words challenge. Not feeling sufficiently inspired to come up with anyhing original and profound, here's my attempt at boiling the principles of ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/07/22/agile-in-25-words/ [Update, 18/8/2008] If you've shared the branch with anyone else, or are pushing it to a clone of the repository, do not rebase, but use merge instead. From the man page: When you rebase a branch, you are changing its history in a way that will cause problems for anyone ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/06/18/avoiding-merge-commits-in-git/ I consider myself fortunate that the previous two projects I worked on (the BT Web21C Portal and Mojo) were Rails-based (actually it wan't just luck in the former case, as I had a part in selecting the framework). I love the expressiveness and flexibility of the Ruby language, the power ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/06/12/defending-ruby-and-rails-in-the-enterprise/ From Amy Hoy on Slash7: If svn is your sometimes catankerous but serviceable steed, git is like a chimera crossed with a unicorn with handy built-in saddle bags plus a sword. [tags]git, svn, quote, qotd, slash7[/tags] http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/04/25/git-quote-of-the-day/ Traditional approaches to motivation tend to fall into one of two camps: the carrot ("do this and you'll be rewarded") or the stick ("do this or you'll suffer the consequences"). I guess I'm fortunate to work for a company (and in a country) where by and large there isn't a culture ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/04/22/on-being-beaten-with-carrots/ Tim's second exercise (here's the first): Write a recursive function that calculates the value of Fibonacci numbers. These are your acceptance criteria: Calculating fib(250) must return 7896325826131730509282738943634332893686268675876375 The function must use recursion. No intermediary data structures, etc. The implementation must be written in pure python – no C extension modules, that's cheating. The function must ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/04/17/python-ii-fibonacci-sequence/ "It is an ex parrot. It has ceased to be." No, of course not. I'm talking about the other Python. Not the one with the silly walks, dead parrot and singing lumberjacks, but the one with the idiosyncratic approach to whitespace. One of the APIs available for the Web21C SDK is ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/04/14/first-stab-at-python/ Here's mine: ~ $ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head 232 git 82 cd 30 ls 20 sudo 18 rm 13 ./script/server 12 mate 11 rake 7 vi 7 ssh Probably slightly skewed by the fact that I was doing ... http://www.kerrybuckley.org/2008/04/11/whats-your-command-line-top-ten/