I had been expecting to do some development work on my Android project over the holidays, but I ended up taking a break from programming altogether. I made some little notebooks at my kitchen table instead. I needed a break,…
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…
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…
Font scaling in a messy business and LibGDX is no exception. It can take a lot of effort to get a crisp rendering. There are a number of strategies for getting the result you want, and utilities like Hiero are…
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
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…
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…
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…
I just finished a project using Talend ODI to push around mountains of XML and am pleased to say it is well-suited to this kind of grunt work. The learning curve was steeper than I had expected, and it has…
My team has inherited a very messy process for posting safety alerts production. It started out innocently enough but has grown over the years, spreading through the organization like a fungus. For sake of argument I call it a process,…