Category Archives: Software

Following a link from a colleague on passionate programming the other day I came across this set of so-called code kata from Dave Thomas, one of the authors of the famous book The Pragmatic Programmer. The idea of Dave’s set … Continue reading →

Some time ago I followed a link from the ever-diverting Hacker News rss feed to an article by Matt Bishop on robust programming. It’s a great article: clear, concise, and so obviously right.

How do you know when you’ve got a really good idea? Apart from all the usual indications of brilliance, I think truly great ideas announce themselves over time by popping up in different places. Look, for example, at the design … Continue reading →

GMail is probably the best free email service there is, and mutt is almost certainly the best MUA. And whilst IMAP might have some drawbacks as a mail-access protocol, it arguably sucks less than POP. As such, it’s nice to … Continue reading →

A contractor friend of mine, working remotely on our project, visited the office this week. It was interesting to ask him about the atmosphere is in the lab from the perspective of someone relatively isolated from the day to day … Continue reading →

A Computer Science student has recently joined my team at work. He is going to be with us for three or four months as a part of a year in industry for his degree. As you might imagine, there have … Continue reading →

In doing some research into file locking in Linux I recently stumbled upon Jeremy Allison’s interesting essay A Tale of Two Standards. In it he explores the history of the POSIX and Win32 standards and examines the successes and failures … Continue reading →

Last month I wrote an article for LWN on embedded Linux distributions and tools. I was happy to see a number of insightful, on-topic comments on the article after it was published. Inevitably, however, these comments did point out several … Continue reading →

I used to work with an engineer whose responsibilities included the maintenance of the Linux kernel we used in our products. A large part of this job was keeping tabs on the changes we received from our silicon vendor to … Continue reading →

It is evening, and the windows are beginning to tarnish as the daylight retreats over an unseen horizon. People are finishing up for the day, getting into their cars and onto trains, going home to their families. Yet in an … Continue reading →