Big Dave’s Blog
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Media Server Fun
Back when I moved into my current house, I took the opportunity to setup a media server. In my old place, there really wasn’t a good place to set one up, so I would dig out a CD or two (out of 1000+) each time I wanted to hear something. As you might expect, that…
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John Harrison and the Longitude Problem
It’s been a while since I read Longitude by Dava Sobel, but I happened to catch another documentary on the story recently. It reminded me again about this amazing story of science and perseverance. As an engineer, I can’t help but admire John Harrison for his scientific method. It’s also a description of an iterative…
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Software: Utility vs. Joy
How many software packages do you use that give you joy? How about simple utility? How about both? My guess is there are far fewer that provide joy and even fewer that provide both. I have dozens of applications that provide utility only. For example, I use OmniFocus and EverNote constantly. Both apps have become…
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Software Lifespan
How long should our software last? I’m sure that there are software packages out there that were built decades ago, but I’m talking about packages still being actively updated and sold. Personally, I figure if I get 5-7 years out of system before a major refactor of some part of it, then I’m doing great.…
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YAGNI and the Crystal Ball of Software Architecture
YAGNI and the Crystal Ball How often have you been involved in a project, and someone starts a statement with “It would be really cool if … ?” The second I hear that, I find myself evaluating what comes next with high degree of skepticism. First of all, it usually would be “really cool,” but…
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Using Thinking Sphinx
I recently had an instance where I wanted to add full-text search to an application. I’ve used Lucene, Solr, and a few others in past lives, but this time I wanted something just as functional but a little more lightweight. After looking around I settled on Sphinx, and so far it’s worked great. By itself,…
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Apollo 11 – Could we do it again?
July 16, 2009 marks the 40 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. Four days later, July 20, the Eagle landed on surface of the moon. It all started with the famous speech by President Kennedy. It’s still one of my favorite presidential quotes. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and…
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Government honours veterans of Bletchley Park at last
Government honours veterans of Bletchley Park at last – V3.co.uk – formerly vnunet.com The surviving staff from Bletchley Park will finally(!!) be recognized, nearly 70 years later. Their work was thought to have shortened the war by 2 years and saved millions of lives, but until the 1970’s they weren’t even allowed to reveal what…
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Checkout Hoptoad by thoughtbot, inc.
I’ve been using Hoptoad for about two months now, and I’m sold. Hoptoad is a product by thoughbot, inc. Previously, I’ve always used the excellent exception_notification plugin. The exception_notification plugin is easy to use, and it works great. However, there are a couple of problems with it. You could flood your inbox if there is…