2011-09-20

Dependency Management Rant

It is spectacularly amazing to me how many seasoned software engineers adopt the ostrich method of dealing with dependency management: pretend it’s not a problem.

Maybe it’s because I help run a software quality assurance company that I’m so sensitive to this issue – or maybe I’ve drifted into that job because I understand that being a good software engineer has very little to do with how impressive your code looks. I don’t know. Suffice to say that I’ve run into a huge variety of problems in my career that all were caused by bad dependency management, or a complete lack thereof.

Read the rest of this entry »

17:50 | Filed under: programming | 2 Comments »
2011-09-16

Java Multiple Inheritance Rant

I know, I know, it’s a tired old subject. But when you’ve got to work with a crippled language like Java, sometimes tired old subjects rear their ugly heads again, and you need to rant a little.

Here’s a very simple, very concrete example of why Java’s policy not to include multiple inheritance in the language sucks donkey balls, and the “we use interfaces instead of multiple inheritance” excuse shows how lame it is:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:54 | Filed under: programming | No Comments »
2011-09-15

Speak Out With Your Geek Out

There’s been a minor shitstorm on parts of the blogosphere recently about someone writing an article about dating someone who turned out to be a massive geek. I don’t recall details, and in many ways don’t care very much.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out

But it’s prompted the Speak Out With Your Geek Out mini-campaign which you can participate in by, well, blogging about geeky stuff this week. Which I am. Therefore I must be participating now.

I suppose the campaign aims at demonstrating that geeks can be nice, and shouldn’t be discriminated against just because they’re geeky. I’m not sure if that’s the case. The campaign appears to be a bit less well defined than that, and I think I approve.

Regular readers might note that unlike my usual posts, I don’t seem to have a firm goal in mind when writing this, and am not trying to steer readers towards that. That’s because in some ways, I’m a bit confused as to why I am participating in this, exactly.

Read the rest of this entry »

19:08 | Filed under: life, philosophy | 2 Comments »
2011-08-30

Deus Ex: Ho-hum Revelations

This post contains a mild spoiler for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. If you care about this sort of thing, don’t read below the cut. I’ll try to keep things as devoid of detail as possible anyway, so you might want to risk it.

Read the rest of this entry »

11:25 | Filed under: gaming | No Comments »
2011-08-09

Kindle as Comic Book Reader

When I was telling him about my new Kindle, a friend of mine immediately asked whether the device made a good comic book reader. The answer is, not really. It’s ok, but far from perfect.

The good news is that the Kindle does read some specific digital comic book format, but not all of them by far. From there on, it’s mostly bad news.

Read the rest of this entry »

16:07 | Filed under: comics, life, software | No Comments »