My Microsoft Band finally arrived yesterday morning, so obviously I put it straight on (after a charge of course). Here is a chronicle of first impressions. Setup Out of the box, setup was really easy. Simply following the instructions on the band and the phone made it simple. I paired it with my Windows Phone (a Lumia …

It was another great year being involved in the Global Day of Coderetreat for 2015. This was my first year hosting, and it was great fun planning the exercises and running the day. With 16 people turning up, we had a nice mix of student developers, junior developers from various different Software Consultancies around …

It’s that time of year again for Programmers the world over to gather together and practice their art. Yes, It’s the 2015 Global Day of Code Retreat on Saturday 14th November, and once again I have found myself involved. 4 years ago I attended my first GDCR in Wellington and it was great fun. Now, having …

A builder came around the other day to fix the shelf under the sink. We had a leaking tap that over time had been dripping down onto the shelf and the boards had ended up in an awful state. From my perspective, we just simply needed to rip it out and put a new one in. Luckily, the builder was an expert and explained to …

There is this concept that has been floating around for a while which says you should treat your servers as cattle, not pets. I came across another version of this analogy that I wanted to post, since it doesn’t seem to have been recorded anywhere but has been mentioned in presentations. But before I get to that, …

There is a ‘great’ quote in Software development about indirection that goes like this: Any problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. David Wheeler The follow up to this, of course, is to end it with the following: …except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Kevlin …

Its a pretty common rule of thumb to avoid monoliths and write more small classes. Think about the solid principles. Single responsibility per class. This implies less in it. Smaller. Open for extension closed for modification. Take out the things that will change. Smaller. Liskov substitution principle says …

It may not be simple, it may not be easy, but git is not scary. Now, I’ve been using git for less than a year now, professionally. I had dabbled in git personal projects for the year before that. My primary Source control had mostly been TFS (Team Foundation Server), and I had been exposed to subversion on a …

It feels like everywhere I turn (in my circles anyway), people are talking about Ports and Adapters, and I thought I would jump on the bandwagon. You may have also heard this architecture called Onion Architecture, or Hexagonal Architecture. All of these are essentially the same idea, under a different name. Brief …

The other day we were talking about problems we (as a room of developers) had been having with NuGet, inter-package dependencies, and were quick to relate them back to DLL Hell. But I had this slight epiphany from another comment, where it was observed that our X.Common package had ‘helper code’ for …

So I really should have posted something sooner, but I’ve been so busy with other things. Anyway, Change should soon be coming, I have a whole backlog of things i need to post about, and I’ve started using Twitter, which should result in this post being tweeted about due to a new plugin (fingers crossed). …

I had someone ask me the other day where he could go to see silverlight in action, what sites are using silverlight, so I did a bit of searching, and found that it’s not that easy to find really. So here is my attempt to create such a list. Feel free to add anything I miss by posting comments. Bing maps I …

 Over the last week, Wellington has been taken over by shop front Mannequin displays. For those of you who missed it, it consisted …

I’ve just started to experiment with silverlight, well, silverlight 2 to be exact. Its an interesting combination of C# and xml markup, but i like it none-the-less. So far if made a series of buttons that change elements on the screen, nothing special, but am keen to get stuck into something more substantial. …

This weekend I was lucky enough to participate in Global Game Jam 2009 in the Dunedin, New Zealand Team. For those of you who don’t know what Game Jam is, it’s a 48-hour game building competition run in multiple centers around the world simultaneously. Dunedin entered three teams and successfully made 3 …

Ive had my mythbox up and running for about a month now, and its working perfectly. Here are a few wee changes i had to make from the default xfce mythbuntu 8.10 I had to make. Mythwelcome I have my mythbox set up to autologin and run with the remote, without a keyboard and mouse. for this reason i needed it to have …

It has come to the end of another university year and I’m ready to once again start being a bit more regular with my blog posts. It also means i have more free time to start working on some projects of my own. The plan for this summer is to get a server running, to do samba/nfs file sharing and ldap …

Since June 11, the hype surrounding the new 3G IPhone has slowly grown to mega proportions worldwide as people got excited about its release, announced to hit stores July 11. With less than a week to go until its release, i felt it was time i added my two cents on the matter. Here in little old New Zealand, so far from …

It seems that Microsoft have already set their sites on the next generation web browser war, and this time they aim to win. It’s predecessor IE7 was released in late 2006, and was a sore dissapointment to some, but was also seen as a step in the right direction by others in the web development community. This all …

About a month back I finally had enough cash to buy myself an xbox 360. I even managed to get three games with it which was a bonus, since it would be a while before I could afford more. Viva Pinata, Forza Motorsport 2 and Assassin’s Creed were the three games I got with it, and within a week I also had a copy of …