malvasia bianca

In the spirit of “every long e-mail I send somewhere should be shamelessly recycled on my blog”, I present some random thoughts on testing. Why do we release products with defects that we weren’t aware of? This is a sign of flaws in our testing; two possible causes are: We don’t know what to test […]

I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.) An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL. Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama… For no particular reason, a random bit […]

We’re writing an IDL compiler at work, to generate C++ code from a file containing a list of attributes. We’re doing this in TCL, which turns out to be surprisingly easy and fun: just define some procedures that correspond to the syntax of your language, eval the contents of the file, and you’re off and […]

Pretty sand pictures: (Via Backreaction, which has links to more.) Those are some big crystals. Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. You’re probably already all aware of Why’s […]

I’m hiring again. If you live in the S.F. Bay Area, are a good programmer, and want to be the first kid on your block to stream out 320Gbps of video data, please let me know. (You can also submit a resume via the above link.)

I’ve now written my first AJAX code: if you go to a random web page in my book/game database, you should be presented with a list of blog posts that refer to that item. At least assuming that I haven’t accidentally used functionality that your favorite browser doesn’t support, which I hear is easy to […]

From 37 Signals’ Getting Real: People often spend too much time up front trying to solve problems they don’t even have yet. Don’t. Heck, we launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers! Since the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a 30-day gap to figure it out. We used that time […]

From Kent Beck’s Implementation Patterns (p. 20): Once a set of implementation patterns has become habitual, I program faster and with fewer distracting thoughts. When I began writing my first set of implementation patterns (The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Prentice Hall 1996) I thought I was a proficient programmer. To encourage myself to focus on […]

I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to each other in some […]

xkcd: One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.) Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.) I don’t have much to say about […]

I’ve finally finished converting dbcdb from Java to Ruby. I’ve been using the Ruby version of the tool to write the database for about four months, but I’d still been using the Java version to write the web pages. Nothing too deep going on here; I was actually done with everything but the indexes as […]

And now to some actual content from Agile Open California. As I mentioned before, I hosted a session called I Don’t Like Pair Programming, since the topic had been on my mind after our team meeting the previous week. The title isn’t really accurate: I usually enjoy pair programming when I’m doing it, but my […]

Deterministic and probabilistic software product management. Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn. Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to […]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something. As I mentioned […]

Ninja Town. I love the character names. A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.) Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I […]

For the last several months, Miranda has been repeatedly talking about ideas that she has for a computer game. I idly encouraged her without thinking too much about it; recently, however, she’s been actually filling up notebooks with designs for the game, so it looked like time to start getting serious. She doesn’t show any […]

On the XP mailing list, somebody recently pointed out that never changing IDEs is a sign that you’re in a rut. Which is true; I love Emacs, but I love it less with more recent languages, so why not learn a bit more about what’s out there? Tim Bray recently posted about how well the […]

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going. Still, it’s taken […]

Ayse Sercan’s thesis work sounds really cool. I’m just linking to this list of Ruby techniques so that I’ll be able to find it a year from now when I’m in a position to better use it. More good stuff from Karl on copyright. Rice paddy art. Echochrome looks like an Escher video game. Quite […]

My HTML output class is now at what I expect to be a reasonably stable state. It’s not by any means a perfect solution for the world’s HTML needs, but it can generate the output that I want without much excess typing, which is all that matters. Actually, it divided into two classes this morning. […]