Blog
The mythical man-month
The mythical man-month by Frederick Brooks is a now ancient classic on project management, with a focus on programming & systems development. It has excellent advice on the subject which is mostly very relevant today. Some of the main lessons I took away from this book are: Time estimates & planning Time estimates in software […]
Traceroute: bad.horse
I’d not used the traceroute program before. The quickest description you can find for it is “a network diagnostic tool”. To understand how it works requires a brief understanding on the way the internet works. When you type in a web address to your browser, the computer sends a request to a “name server” which […]
That 300ms lag on mobile
Fastclick.js An easy-win to improve UX responsiveness in mobile browsers Fastclick.js | https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick In mobile browsers, there is a perceptible 300ms delay between tapping and the click event firing. This is to allow for double-tapping and lends non-native apps a sluggish feel. The financial times developed a solution to this problem, fastclick.js. This javascript places […]
Haskell & Functional Programming
To quote from Ju Gonçalves’ excellent article on Medium (https://medium.com/@jugoncalves/functional-programming-should-be-your-1-priority-for-2015-47dd4641d6b9), Functional programming should be your top priority right now. This is a sentiment echoed in Michael Church’s answer to the question “what do software developers wish they’d known in their 20s” (http://www.quora.com/What-do-software-developers-age-30-and-over-know-now-that-they-wish-they-had-known-in-their-20s/answer/Michael-O-Church), namely that “functional programming [is] worth learning for the long term”. Why Functional […]
Howto: Make changes to DropDownList items values & display text.
Visual Basic (VB.net) & ASP.net For a recent project I am dynamically binding a DropdDownList to a datasource (in this instance, a DataTable returned from SQL Server). The user needed to see a series of formatted strings (the index column) in the DropDownList but I couldn’t find anything on how to do this. The index […]
Node.js: server side JavaScript
Node.js is a good web framework, especially when looking to build hugely-scalable applications that require little computation resources (think chat app or stock tracking for an entire stock exchange). Node.js is a server side scripting platform in the JavaScript language. Learning it is also a good way to brush up on vanilla JavaScript. You’ll become much better at […]
PGP & Public Keys
I have recently been learning about asymmetric key encryption over at the Open University (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-to-cyber-security) and have been motivated to experiment with using the PGP encryption standard to send and receive emails. If you wish to send me an encrypted message, please use my public key to do so: —–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—– […]
The Mandelbrot Fractal
Introduction I have just finished CS50x, Harvard’s online computer science offering. For my final project, I implemented a zoomable rendering of the Mandelbrot fractal, in Javascript, using the HTML5 canvas element. The github repository is accessible at github.com/a2wd/mandelbrot A live demonstration can be found at the attached github page, a2wd.github.io/mandelbrot Research Fractals are fascinating […]