Blog
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Careful with those member variables, Eugene
OOP (Object oriented programming,) or just OO, is a wonderful way of programming. I'm quite happy to say that since I'll be honest and say I didn't really get it properly until 2 or 3 years ago. Sure, I've been programming with Java and C# since 1998, but that doesn't really mean I was doing OO all that time. A lot of people use Java or C# to write 'object procedural' or 'class oriented' programming. If you understand OO, you probably know already what I'm talking about, and if you don't.... well I'll try and explain.
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Sun X4500 - Taking the phrase 'disk space is cheap' to the next level
I love it when big old-school technology companies do something that surprises me. Sun's new X4500 server does just that. It takes 48 (yes, 48) standard hard disks and puts them in a 4U server. With the 500GB hard disks available today that's 24 terabytes in one server. That's a frak load of disk space. To put it another way, in a 48 U rack (and the mother of all air conditioning units) that's ... umm my head can't cope ... 288 TB ... What comes after 'Terra'? When 1TB disks come out later this year, 1 rack will be over half way there.
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3 shells of Agile
As an agile software consultant, I've now been involved with quite a few clients who are either trying out, or transitioning to, agile methods to deliver software within their organization. Some of the following types of questions are frequently raised:
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Buildix - a complete SCM strategy in a free box
Buildix is a Linux distribution with a bundled source control server, issue tracker and continuous integration. In short, its a complete development server in a box, which requires almost no configuration. Even better its completely free since it uses only open-source software. And even better than that there's a free VMWare virtual appliance (which will work with the free VMWare Server) so you can try it out with almost zero barrier to entry (apart from the download time and about half an hour to try it out.)
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July 7th - 1 year on
Today is the first anniversary of the London Bombings. As I blogged a year ago I was on one of the trains that was bombed, and being involved with this event has unsurprisingly had quite an effect on me and my family.
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A peace-sign
I'm British, working in America, for a German company, and part of my team is in Russia. I reckon if I told someone 20 years ago that this might happen in 20 year's time, I'd probably have been thrown in a loony bin.
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Finally I get to use C# 2 closures
For the last couple of months I've been using .NET 2 for the first time. There are a bunch of great new language features in there, generics being the most obvious (and implemented properly in .NET rather than the hack in Java), but another biggy is anonymous delegates.
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You know you're starting to turn american when...
... you're walking down the street, see the number '256', and in your head you vocalise it as 'two fifty-six'. It's a long and slippery slope...
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Farewell Top of the Pops
It was with some sadness today that I read that the BBC's weekly music show, Top of the Pops, is to end its run of 42 years.
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Picasa Web - Now I'm glad I didn't bother with Flickr
For a while now I've been a little envious of people using Flickr to have fancy photo galleries online. I've almost used it a couple of times, but for me the whole idea of using a web site to manage pictures just didn't work. I've used Picasa as my photo library and I wasn't prepared to move away from a desktop-based client to handle my (more than 1GB worth of) digital photos.