APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: May 2013
An entirely unwarranted comparison between software engineering and astronomy
Back in the early days of astronomy, the problem of the stars that wander from fixed positions in the sky needed solving. Many astronomers, not the first of which was Ptolemy, proposed that these “planetai” could be modeled as following … Continue reading
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Short Objective-C on the server update
It’s been over a year since I looked at GNUstepWeb as a server platform for Objective-C development. I’ve recently had time to dig in a bit more, send the project some patches, and get the platform to a state on … Continue reading
Posted in UNIX, WebObjects
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On protocols that aren’t
There’s a common assumption when dealing with Objective-C protocols or Java interfaces (or abstract classes, I suppose): that you’re abstracting away the implementation of an object leaving just its interface. “Oh, don’t mind how I quack, all you need to … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
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I do the stupid so you don’t have to
So you want to use bc for some hexadecimal maths. You set the input base: ibase=16 and the output base: obase=16 Oops! I just set it to output in base 22. I’d already set it to think numbers were input … Continue reading
Posted in UNIX
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Meta-writing
Barely 4,000 years ago, documents were written on heavy, clay tablets. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of fiction, was written on 11 such tablets with a 12th added later. There was only one thing you … Continue reading
Posted in books, documentation, Talk
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Shell scripts and Xcode
Back in 2009 at the first NSConf, Scotty asked some of the speakers for an Xcode Quick Tip. I’m still using mine today. When your target needs a “Run Shell Script” build phase, don’t write the script into the box … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, tool-support
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APPropriate Behaviour is complete!
APPropriate Behaviour, the book on things programmers do that aren’t programming, is now complete! The final chapter – a philosophy of software making – has been added, concluding the book. Just because it’s complete, doesn’t mean it’s finished: as my … Continue reading
When single responsibility isn’t possible
This posted was motivated by Rob Rix’s bug report on NSObject, “Split NSObject protocol into logical sub-protocols”. He notes that NSObject provides multiple responsibilities[*]: hashing, equality checking, sending messages, introspecting and so on. What that bug report didn’t look at … Continue reading
Posted in Foundation, Java, ruby
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More security processes go wrong
I just signed a piece of card so that I could take a picture of it, clean it up and attach it to a document, pretending that I’d printed the document out, signed it, and scanned it back in. I … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, Vulnerability
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Could effortless lecturers make everything seem too easy?
From the British Psychological Society blog: Engaging lecturers can breed overconfidence. The students who’d seen the smooth lecturer thought they would do much better than did the students who saw the awkward lecturer, consistent with the idea that a fluent … Continue reading
Posted in psychology, Talk
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