I rediscovered the joys of using Java’s built in command line debugger, jdb, today.  I’d gotten so used to using the graphical debugger in Eclipse that I’d forgotten all about jdb, but lately Eclipse has been choking on debugging projects with many maven dependencies for me.  I really needed a low-tech, high-reliability solution for debugging [...]

Last week, I wrote a quick-and-dirty GUI application to help my wife count down the years, months, days, hours and seconds until the end of her professional training.  I’m posting the source code, licensed according to the Apache License 2.0.  This is trivial stuff, and I coded in the most lazy fashion possible (no unit [...]

I had a minor realization today about what Mark Bernstein was talking about in his blog posts about NeoVictorian Computing (which I mentioned earlier).  I had emotionally connected to what he was saying about how the software industry should return to an ethos of craft and artisanship, and how software should not try to hide [...]

I’ve been reading my way through The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto over the last couple of weeks (very well-written, by the way) and having read up through Chapter 7, I’m about at the point now where I’m ready to do something useful with the language.  I figure now is a [...]