Aug 15, 2007 · 6 minute read
Tips
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. Directory Structure and File Naming Your directory structure is very important as it makes finding things easier and makes managing your code base much simpler.
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Aug 13, 2007 · 4 minute read
Tips
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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Aug 12, 2007 · 1 minute read
The login page has been changed to better reflect the theme for the site, rather than using the default WordPress one. I found a nice plugin that takes care of the changes in a way that doesn't require re-editing files after a system upgrade. You can find the plugin at the Binary Moon blog.
Aug 10, 2007 · 3 minute read
Reviews
The Myth is the latest Jackie Chan action-adventure flick set in both modern and ancient China and India. Typical for a Jackie Chan film it features quite a few ridiculous, and often hilarious, fight scenes featuring stunts from the man himself. Overall the movie isn't as good as his old works such as Project A, Drunken Master or Police Story but it's still fairly entertaining. The plot is quite contrived, as you might expect, but in places it's just downright stupid.
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Aug 9, 2007 · 2 minute read
News
Quite possibly one of the most convenient "new" computer technologies, USB disks are gradually starting to replace pretty much all other forms of file transfer for me. It's quicker to put some files on a disk to take to uni than to send them via email (seriously slow upload speeds). It's more convenient, and cheaper, to put anime series and the like on my iPod (30GB) rather than burning a bunch of DVDs.
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Aug 7, 2007 · 2 minute read
After writing down some of the things I wanted to achieve for the future of this blog (for my 50th post) I decided I should probably make a start on them! I'd already modified WordPress to make the "more" link (the link on the front page that says "Read more of this entry") link to the simple page URL and not to an anchor that occurs after the opening paragraph. For my next mod I thought I should continue in this vein and alter the RSS (and Atom) feeds to include the full post text, rather than an excerpt.
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Aug 6, 2007 · 1 minute read
News
Another update after only 11 days. This one is again a point release, to version 2.2.2. Ah well, updates fix bugs (however minor) and are quick and painless. I just had to make sure that the custom changes I've made to the core WordPress files were added back in after the update. This is really easy using Subversion's diff function and then applying that as a patch to the updated file.
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Aug 5, 2007 · 8 minute read
Reviews
I've had a MySpace account for a while now, although I only just started using it because I found out a few of my friends were on there. Facebook, on the other hand, is something I've known about for a while now but I never bothered to sign up until a couple days ago when a friend sent me an invite. I've had a chance to play around with both of them for a bit now, although not in any in-depth fashion, so I thought I'd go through my thoughts on each.
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Aug 3, 2007 · 4 minute read
General
A while back I saw a post (a very old post) on the Inmatrix forums where someone ask whether or not there would ever be a Linux version of Zoom Player. The answer was basically "nobody with Linux wants to pay for software, so it will be a lot of development with little or no income". This got me thinking as to whether or not this is true. Whilst I don't have the zeitgeist for the entire Linux community I'm willing to bet that this is not true.
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Aug 3, 2007 · 5 minute read
Tips
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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