codeBrane Blog

What did I read this morning?

Alistair Young — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:02:51 +0000

While it’s quiet around 8am I like to catch up on my blogs to see what’s been happening out there but I also thought I’d give blogging about what I’ve read a go. See if any patterns emerge. Chief among them will be whether the pattern of writing about what I read will persist! So [...]

Adding error channels to the Matrix

Alistair Young — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:56:28 +0000

Time for a blog post methinks and good timing too as I’ve recently updated the Matrix provisioning system to support Invalid Message Channels in its routing engine. An invalid message is any message that can’t be processed for whatever reason including if the target system is down. This turns out to be quite convenient as [...]

.NET versioning hell

Alistair Young — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:09:41 +0000

As part of the porting matrix from Java to C# I’m installing .NET on a vmware Windows 7 image and seem to have inadvertently stumbled into a version bump mess. .NET is currently at 4.0 with 4.5 to be released soon but this is apparently an ‘in-place’ upgrade rather than a ‘side by side’ replacement. [...]

OS X Lion : the worst upgrade ever

Alistair Young — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:10:50 +0000

And so it rumbles on, this joke OS. 10.7 is what I give it out of a hundred. This time it’s the network not coming back after sleeping. According to this thread you can variously turn off/on wifi to get your wired connection back, invoke network in system preferences, or, get this, start a backup. [...]

OS X Lion : the jokemobile rumbles on

Alistair Young — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:30:04 +0000

This time it’s XCode. Refuses to install from the app store. None of that fancy leaping from the store into your dock with a progress bar to inform you it’s downloading. Nothing. It just sits there saying “Installing” then installs nothing. Thinking it had opened a wormhole in space and time to download its multi-gig [...]

Another OS X Lion annoyance : Safari last window

Alistair Young — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:41:10 +0000

This is so tedious, having to go through settings putting them back to the ‘default’ before OS X Lion stamped it’s iOS footprint all over them. This time it’s Safari opening with the last page viewed no matter what its settings are. You have to go into a completely unrelated area to sort this. This [...]

Running Selenium tests on a headless Bamboo

Alistair Young — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:03:31 +0000

With Selenium requiring a browser to run the tests, if you don’t have one installed you’ll get the error: sessionId should not be null; has this session been started yet? You’ll also get this error if you have a valid browser configured in the test code but not installed on the system. However the problem [...]

OS X Lion : are they having a laugh?

Alistair Young — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:55:50 +0000

Seriously, are they taking the mickey? I upgraded to OS X Lion and thought the browser had crashed. No way could I scroll down. Then I realised they’d decided my laptop was a phone and I had to scroll as if on the iPhone. Excuse me? Are they having a laugh? Apparently they call it [...]

How I manage my information workflow

Alistair Young — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:55:20 +0000

With more and more information coming my way, I decided to rationalise how I manage all that chatter and keep track of what needs doing and when. Now, being a software developer, I need to concentrate on designing systems and writing code, as well as keeping up to date with several fields and managing the [...]

Medieval software construction : putlogging

Alistair Young — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:47:31 +0000

It’s not as bad as it sounds! A putlog hole is an affordance in medieval construction that allows the structure to be built up. It has no real function other than to aid the construction of the building and is often filled in afterwards. The concept can be used in software construction too, especially if [...]