Chris Norton

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Yesterday I attended the talk The Power of Procrastination by Jorge Cham, the creator of PHD comics. I am a big fan of the comics, despite the fact that I’m not a grad student/postgrad, and hearing Jorge’s talk it was great to listen to the guy who makes them.

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The Melbourne Anime Festival (Manifest) will be starting a fortnight from now, on Friday, September 14th. If you’re an otaku, or at least know what otaku means, then I heartily recommend coming along to this con. It’s held at Melbourne University so hopefully it should be easy to reach for most people living somewhere near the city. Most events, screenings, trading and general fun is to be had on the Saturday and Sunday but it’s good to come and get everything organised on Friday and see some of the early cosplay and screenings.

Go here for the events schedule.

Organising a repository takes on several forms. The most obvious, and important, is how you organise the directory structure and name your files. Secondly, you need to make sure all the metadata used by your VCS is organised and effective. Finally, you must have some sort of process in place to ensure that these things are kept tidy and manageable.

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Recently the 3rd year SE students have been asked to give presentations of their work in front of their peers. Last week we had five teams present and this week we will have the remaining four. Overall I was quite impressed with some of the presentations and I’d like to see the rest of the teams do as well. To that end, here are the top 5 things I think you can do to make sure your presentation is well received.

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Yesterday I had a brief chat with a student doing 4th year software engineering at my university. He had just given a presentation on the testing methods his team was using for their web application and he said something along the lines of “we’re doing lots of manual testing because there’s no way to test web software”. Not so! Here’s a short overview of some of the software and methods you can use to increase the amount of automated testing you’re doing on your web applications.

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Continuing on from Part 1 and Part 2 of the guide, this post will be about the topics of branching and tagging, two extremely powerful tools you can use when managing your repository. This guide will cover the topics from a Subversion-oriented point of view.

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