I saw this today and found it very interesting: Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky.
Archive for the ‘Computing and the Web’ Category
Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial by Joel Spolsky
Friday, September 17th, 2010“Writing Solid Code” Plus 17
Thursday, September 16th, 2010My house-move is coming up soon, and after a review of my technical books, I decided that some books simply had to be re-read. “Writing Solid Code - Microsoft’s Techniques for Developing Bug-Free C Programs” by Steve Maguire fell into this category. Originally published in 1993, it was a book I had strongly positive memories about.
DIY, Paint-Drips, and Code Refactoring
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010I’m moving soon! So, for various reasons, I am doing a whole load of painting-and-decorating to prepare to rent out my current flat. Today I was putting the final coat of enamel onto a radiator, and while doing this I was really noticing the remnants of old paint-drips that I had not quite sanded away in my preparation. Now, overall, I know the radiator will look a lot better tomorrow than it did a couple of days ago… but I still find those historic drips bothersome!
Moving to Windows 7 x64 for Developers
Monday, April 5th, 2010I recently purchased and installed a new boot SSD, and rather than worry about copying my installation, I decided to get Windows 7; and further; to move to 64 bit. I had actually previously purchased a 64 bit version of Vista, but been baffled by an issue with lack of support for VPN 64-bit software by Cisco, so I ended up overwriting it with a 32 bit install.
More Keys is More Secure. Right?
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
Last week, we had a heated discussion at work about encryption. We want to encrypt some data in our database, and I proposed that we go with a single private-key encryption mechanism (ignore which exact one for the moment), and my colleagues were pretty-much unanimously suggesting a ‘key per row’ approach. In this post I am going to attempt to explain the rough background, and why I felt their mechanism might not be best.
Boolean Expressions
Friday, March 5th, 2010The C# code-base I work on has hundreds of places where I have felt a boolean expression could have been used to simplify the code substantially.
Phantom Code
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
I’ve just worked on a little support problem that was quite interesting - although not in a good way - as unfortunately it demonstrates failures at so many stages of the specification and development process that I am quite disappointed to be associated with it. Associated, but not the cause of it, to be clear 
Why’s Ruby Guide Update
Monday, August 31st, 2009I’ve just updated Why’s Ruby Guide pdf to include Chapter 7’s images; go to the specific page with updates. Thanks to Andy Matuschak for pointing this out to me, and giving me a link to where the documents are still available on the internet
The Rounding Race - Rounding DateTimes to Dates at Midnight
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Yesterday I covered the implementation details of DateTime and SmallDateTime datatypes in SQL Server 2005. I approached the issue of testing dates to see if they fell on a particular date… but then stopped-short of some fairly useful (but arcane) stuff about rounding dates.
One Second to Midnight - DateTimes in Sql Server 2005
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
Today I am enthused to write about the DateTime and SmallDateTime datatypes in SQL Server 2005 (and possibly this also applies to 2008, although that has additional date and time types). I am driven to write this because I have seen a number of issues relating to their use in queries and one in particular that is a real annoyance to me - even if I have to admit that it is completely and utterly pedantic (most of the time).