2014-06-13 Testing Conditional GET Please ignore : just testing Conditional GET on my prototype feed reader. PS. that worked for a new post, now testing for a changed post – this one again. Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2014-05-30 With data, someone might need it “You aren’t gonna need it” (acronym: YAGNI) is a principle of extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. XP co-founder Ron Jeffries has written: “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.” but Engineer for serendipity. I reckon the way through these is to... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-11-24 Streams and Dreams Recently I’ve been trying to look at the tech with fresh eyes, I have a strong sense that there are gamechanging things on the horizon (again), but then by definition unexpected innovations are hard to predict (again). But it is possible but chuck Monte Carlo noodles in the dark and see which stick. Yeah, mixing metaphors is kinda where I’m... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-11-14 Fad or Evolution? It can be difficult to tell the difference between things that are truly novel and/or offer genuine improvement and those which are just somehow different but popular. Web tech is a conveyor belt of things that could fall into either category. Recently I’ve encountered a few good examples. In each case there’s no shortage of proponents explaining the benefits of the... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-11-07 On top of spaghetti… As a bit of variety from working on the server side of Seki I’ve been looking at a bit of client code. One thing I want to be able to do is create outlines, very much like Workflowy (I’ve been using that for a while now, very handy). It is part of a bigger picture, more on that later, but... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-11-03 Carving Castanets As suggested by Frances, over the last week or so I carved some castanets. Here is/are the finished article(s) together with most of the tools I used. (I typed this up as I went along, so the tense is all over the place.) Aside from a little gouge work with a mallet on the workbench, I did everything on this... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-10-30 Webcarver! I just signed up for app.net, yet another social sort of thing. It looks like their main selling point is 3rd party apps built on their social core. It has the usual kind of profile page and quickly bunging something in there for my description I serendipitously munged “Web developer” and “woodcarver” into “Webcarver”. Yay, perfect! “Carving is the act... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-10-30 A *Useful* HTTP Proxy Server in 66 Lines of node.js Code Here : Proxy.js See also : DummyServer.js It runs from the command line and has no dependencies other than node.js (I was tempted to add handling via command.js but that can wait). Node is a Javascript engine based on V8, the one behind Google Chrome. It’s available for most OSes and is an easy install. It’s in the Ubuntu repository... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-10-20 Seki Update tl;dr : three steps forward, two steps back What? Seki is my current pet project, a work-in-progress. Depending on perspective and level of optimism it’s either a node.js replacement for my previous blogging engine, a piece of Linked Data middleware or a Semantic Web application framework. The one possibly novel aspect is that it uses a potentially remote SPARQL store (yes,... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
2013-10-12 Hello World! (up there) You know how in The Ring you discover how the nightmares are coming from the point of view of the bottom of a well? That’s how this feels, using WordPress after having got used to having my own host , fine bit of kit, but… hosted in a way that I can’t mess with every little bit of everything. Steven... Categories Uncategorized Comments: 0
