Apple’s iPad is perfectly suitable as your only computer. I know the sales pitch for the Apple iPad to be a third device, but I think that’s just shortsighted. What would your average family really need to do that the iPad cannot do? Play intricate games? Well, don’t discount the iPad’s hardware, but evenso the [...]
It’s a fairly common programming maxim that you should not let your methods grow too large. If that happens, the maxim generally suggests you split up your behemoth method by spinning off parts of it into their own ‘helper’ methods. I agree to the maxim, but I never really liked the solution. Helper methods are [...]
I posted this on the java posse googlegroup about 5 minutes after Mark Reinhold’s talk on jigsaw at devoxx ’09. I’m consolidating it here on my blog after some requests to do so.
The blogosphere is rapidly heating up with dismay and sometimes outright anger at the bungling of the Python 3000 release. I walked into the #django IRC channel and I got my head bitten off for asking which version of python I should use for django. (After the channel cooled down some, I was able to [...]
Tagged programming, pythonVery technical programming post about having a ‘no value’ concept in statically typed languages. Specifically: the difficulty of representing this in a static typing system. Quick intro: Right now most static languages either have a concept called ‘null’, which means no value, and every object reference can point to null, such as Java or C#, [...]
Tagged fan, java, programmingSimon Willison held a talk showing off a cavalcade of security hacks that have plagued major sites in the recent past, along with the ways to ensure you don’t suffer from the same problems. One particular attack, or rather, the solution to it, piqued my interest: Cross Site Request Forgery, a.k.a. CSRF, a.k.a. seasurf. Simon suggested [...]
Tagged csrf, hacking, securityThere’s a lot of progress going on integrating Script.aculo.us and YUI-EXT (which are both effects and widget libraries for web pages, targetted at writing vanilla javascript) into GWT – the combination java to javascript compiler and widget/effects library by Google. One of the strengths of GWT is that, due to java’s explicit static typing (I’ve [...]
A lot of java apps (in particular Lombok, the single thread webserver I’ve been working on, but there are lots of apps where this can help) employ queues and separate threads to handle the stuff inside them. One of the problems with this is utterly pointless stack traces. The stack trace is simply of the [...]
This guy gets it – a generic rant against the notion that less characters must be better programming. It’s got enough humour to keep you reading, too.
A way to sanely do IO and imperative work in Haskell, and a way to sanely do complex modelling in java, in one convenient marriage.