Homemade Bookcloth

Homemade Bookcloth

Bookcloth is lovely but hard to find exactly what you want. Making your own is easy, and opens up a whole world of textiles for use your bookbinding projects. Here is the procedure I have been using. Materials: Fabric Rice…

Lancaster B II Footage

Here is some colour footage of Lancaster B IIs from 426 squadron. Unlike other marks, the B II was fitted with radial Hercules VI engines. These engines were popular with crews because they offered a smaller target from below than…

Presenation on Jenkins

Presenation on Jenkins

Here is a Prezi presentation I made to explain Jenkins and the advantages of using it for process automation. The audience was mostly non-technical. Jenkins CI: What it Is, What it Does, and Why it Matters

Programming Post

In this post I will discuss a simple programming problem which I have solved. Writing it allows me to pad out my blog. I’ll write about how the super-cool project I’m working on was nearly derailed by the problem. I…

Cuban Flag

Cuban Cue Chalk Challenge

I spent some of the holidays at a resort in Veradero, Cuba. I collected about 50 pounds of seashells and spent a lot of time doing nothing at all. One afternoon, I saw a an example of the legendary Cuban…

Technical Resolutions for 2014

Technical Resolutions for 2014

I can proudly report 2013 was a sterling success. I met a whopping 16% of my technical objectives. Some may scoff at this success rate, but I can guarantee 2013 will end on schedule at 23:59, December 31st. For this…

Lancaster OW-R

Lancaster OW-R

On the night of 22/23 March 1944, RAF Bomber Command sent approximately 6324 airmen into action for its second large raid on Frankfurt. 816 aircraft took part: 12 Mosquito pathfinders, 180 Halifaxes, and 720 Lancasters. A total of 180 men…

Velocity Component for Talend ODI

Velocity Component for Talend ODI

Talend ODI is my new favourite toy. I recently inherited a Spring Batch project for running a complex chain of XML processing, but decided to put it down after I became frustrated with the amount of work required to make changes….

Highlights from the Java Trials of 2035

Java was outlawed after an on-line hockey pool suffered a gravitational collapse and formed a black hole. It was formed by the mass of RAM needed to run the application exceeding the Chandrasekhar limit. Java programmers went into hiding or…

Abject-Oriented Analysis

The craft of programming is easy to start, but very difficult to master. It’s a long road, littered with the detritus of failed projects, and deep ditches of obsolescence on either side.  On we plod. We all have stories of…