Posted in General, workfriendly on Jun 27th, 2006 2 Comments »
Have been pondering Malcolm and JP’s posts re: Paul Graham’s “What business can learn from opensource”
Having thought about it it’s pretty obvious that the employer/employee thing doesn’t scale very efficiently. The whole structure is top down and fundamentally limits innovators at the bottom (i.e. most of the workforce) both in their motivations and in what […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp on Jun 26th, 2006 2 Comments »
I was surprised to find that lisp had a more powerful way of dealing with errors than exceptions (which I had previously assumed were state-of-the-art in program error handling).
Lisp conditions are similar to exceptions, except that the condition handler is able, if desired, to resume execution to the erroring function by invoking one of any […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp on Jun 26th, 2006 No Comments »
I’ve been working through the Seibel book and I’m quite keen to draw comparisons with other languages (especially python+java), since that’s what first attracted me to learn more in the first place. I thought it would be better to blog as I went along (while I’m motivated) rather than when I’d got to the end […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming on Jun 23rd, 2006 3 Comments »
Found this really handy yesterday. It’s a c binary that wraps your script and checks a lockfile before running it.
e.g. to run ‘myscript’ if it’s not currently running:
lockrun –lockfile=/tmp/mylockfile — myscript
The cool thing is that it uses flock to implement the lockfile, so the lock is automatically free’d when the process dies. (hence the reason […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming on Jun 21st, 2006 2 Comments »
Found this gem of a book while browsing del.icio.us/popular/. I not sure if compsci books are getting easier to read or if I’m just getting better at reading them. Either way, this one looks fantastic.
N.B. I used to think that making books free for download would reduce the income you’d get from them, but since […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, REST, xml on Jun 21st, 2006 No Comments »
This post hits the nail on the head. I’ve been blathering on about some of this stuff at work* for a while: Don’t tie your protocol to your programming language, protocol is the most important thing in a distributed system, make data as simple/flexible/loosely-coupled as possible, don’t constrain yourself with schemas. Now I’ve got something […]
Posted in Python, workfriendly, programming, ruby, lisp on Jun 21st, 2006 7 Comments »
I started programming seriously when I was at school. I became seduced by the idea of writing games and ended up learning 6502 and then ARM assembler. I sort of skipped the typically-british BBC BASIC introduction because I was impatient and had read in my Dad’s computer magazines that real games didn’t get written in […]
Posted in Semantic Web on Jun 18th, 2006 3 Comments »
I’ve been thinking a bit about scaling triplestores recently. My mysql based tagtriples store is working well at work but is ultimately limited by the amount of memory you can cram into a single machine. I’ve recently become seduced by the idea of putting all the bank’s data (world’s data?) into one massive triplestore, and […]
