The Digital Tumbleweed

Fixing Mistakes - Some Thoughts On TDD/Rot/Debt

ncampbell — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:26:17 +0000

Software development is always a good way to realize that you’re human. I’m sure there are other professions that give you this feeling as well, but my experience is limited to the software development field so I’ll talk about it from that light. There are really two ways to go on this subject. I could [...]

Beaker - Yet Another Web Server

ncampbell — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:28:14 +0000

In the pursuit of learning a new language I picked up Programming in Scala. I had fumbled around the Scala examples and read some of their documents like Scala by Example. I did replicate one of their examples by implementing a Quick Sort. I don’t feel it’s sufficient to know the language by taking an [...]

Foreplay and Programming Languages

ncampbell — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:08:49 +0000

Programmers will tell you that you should learn a new programming language every year. I’m not going to tell you otherwise. In fact I agree with this. Here’s why, I believe that a language is just a tool to get your job done. More over, Python is not how you program, Python is a means [...]

Implementing Java Interfaces from Javascript with Rhino

ncampbell — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:42:23 +0000

Rhino is a fairly awesome tool. You get the full capabilities of writing Javascript, plus the availability of the Java ecosystem. However, there is another awesome feature that I didn’t know about until a few months ago when I read Todd Ditchendorf’s post about thread synchronization in JS. You can actually implement Java interfaces from [...]

Git: Tying a Remote Branch to an Existing Local Branch

ncampbell — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:03:49 +0000

As I was cleaning up my code directory and forking projects to have personal dev branches up on Github, I ran into a problem. I needed to tie a remote branch that I had created to an already existing branch. So, I had branch already in my list of local branches. I did one of these: git [...]

JSConf 2009 - Where were you?

ncampbell — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:07:02 +0000

To say that JSConf 2009 was a whirlwind isn’t giving it’s creators enough credit. A few ways I’d describe it are action packed, intimate, and collaborative. From talking with Chris Williams, that was the goal. The Overview Obviously, as the people who were at my talk noticed, I’m not an artist. But, this gives you a bit [...]

WoW: Versioning Your Addons

ncampbell — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:13:11 +0000

If any of you are like me, you play World of Warcraft and love your mods. I try new mods all the time in the attempt to better my UI. I tend to look at it as a constant work-in-progress. So, I’m trying to find mods that best fulfill the needs I have in the [...]

Scratching An Itch

ncampbell — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:48:52 +0000

A couple friends an I were talking a few weeks ago about building applications. There are a handful of reasons for creating websites or web apps. The topic of discussion that day was about applications that do something you need and not just about the ideas, but about finishing those projects. To say that creating applications [...]

New Host, New Posts, and the Inbetween.

ncampbell — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:34:11 +0000

Any of you who recently came to the site may have seen a “Godaddy” landing page. I’ve recently moved my hosting to Slicehost and am managing the domain with Godaddy. It’s cheap and has an easy to use control panel. I was tired of managing my domains with a number of different services. Thus the [...]

Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet! I’m Hunting Bugs.

ncampbell — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:48:47 +0000

There comes a point in every project, when stuff blows up. This could be your code, someone elses code, or could be a mix of the two. The traditional method to finding problems is a mix of guesswork and print lines. Ultimately that is crap. Better debugging methods exist. Bugs are going to find [...]