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Kurt Vonnegut & Destructive Testing

November 21, 2010 – 8:42 pm

I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut’s fantastic Breakfast of Champions at the moment. It’s the kind of book you can sail through, and reading it feels like unboxing a load of toys. About half way through (where I am now), he has one of the lead characters, a man called Dwayne, who is going crazy, tell a […]

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International JavaScript show ‘n’ tell @ Async

November 11, 2010 – 9:46 pm

The Full Frontal JavaScript conference is tomorrow, so this is a very international audience. A bit of a show ‘n’ tell tonight at the fortnightly Async JavaScript meetup, hosted at The Skiff in Brighton… notes below. Links for the talks ought to be added to the Async blog post (http://asyncjs.com/showntell3/) by the speakers. The next […]

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PaaS: A mid-2010 survey

August 24, 2010 – 4:46 pm

I’ve said in the past that I am a hands-off type of guy when it comes to servers. To avoid dealing with servers in any traditional sense, I have been keeping an eager eye on how things are going with server-side JavaScript, and the push-to-deploy type of application development (Heroku, Joyent Smart Platform). But there’s […]

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Employee effect on the world’s biggest companies

July 11, 2010 – 11:55 am

I was wondering on Saturday how you could reasonably compare a large company with a loose band of freelancers, where the word “employee” doesn’t operate. I dug out of Wikipedia some statistics on the world’s biggest companies, figuring that a reasonable comparison would be the amount of money made per employee. The data is likely […]

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Ready Steady Vote

May 6, 2010 – 9:28 am
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JavaScript in the cloud

May 4, 2010 – 8:41 pm

The idea of running JavaScript on the server has been around for a while now (think Jaxer back in 2008), but it recently got a big boost with the featuring of Node.js at JSConf in November 2009. Node.js found immediate fame by demonstrating blinding performance as a web server, and by building on the hotly hyped V8 JavaScript engine Google bundled […]

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Web designers

January 27, 2010 – 2:48 pm

(I was thrilled to read Asana.com’s description of a web designer, which inspired this post.) It’s not every industry where you can be a 30-year old and legitimately claim to have been working in the industry since it’s birth. The field of web design is one of these industries, and the nature of the job […]

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Testing local TiddlyWeb applications in virtual machines

January 15, 2010 – 2:19 pm

This is particular to VirtualBox, but I imagine the principles are the same for VMWare, Parallels and all those other virtual doohikies. I’ve been developing a TiddlyWeb application on a local server on my Mac. This is fine for when I want to test in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Webkit and others, but not so hot […]

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Why time booking isn’t just for grown-ups

November 26, 2009 – 11:27 am

According to the testimony of friends who work as lawyers, the worst part of the job (apart from putting paper into colour-coded files) is the hassle of accounting for every minute of every day. They do this so their practice can charge its outrageous fees to the right clients – it seems that anything not […]

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Maemo Summit 2009, Amsterdam – a bit of an open-source eye-opener

November 12, 2009 – 6:40 pm

Last month, Tager Communications (a customer) took me out to the Nokia-sponsored Maemo Summit in Amsterdam to help figure out whether Maemo could play a part in the national message Nokia’s marketing division puts out about its new N9xx series. The most striking thing about being a visitor at the summit was how large the […]

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