Disqus - Latest Comments for mikewoodhouse

Re: Loving What Is

mikewoodhouse — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 04:44:09 -0000

Of course, you could also give the book to your wife, and then she might not feel the need to offer that "suggestion"...

Re: Help wanted: making this book cover better

mikewoodhouse — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 09:11:42 -0000

For my $0.02 I'll join in on the side of the version without the red bits, which (to my jaundiced old eyes) looks cleaner and more contemporary.

Has anyone suggested a change to the other text? I would lose the "How To" - it leaves "Build A Better Network, Career & Life", which (IMHO) seems much more dynamic.

Re: A transformative time and things begin again

mikewoodhouse — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 05:47:23 -0000

Looks like it was just the boost you needed at exactly the right time. I'm so pleased for you - looking forward to seeing what happens as you take these ideas out to play...

Re: Take charge or stay the same

mikewoodhouse — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 05:42:06 -0000

I think there's some good material there. If you make the effort to incorporate it into your game, of course (but that's true of everything). Some of what they say should reinforce aspects you already have: purposeful practise, for example. I'm about 75% through and at Chapter XV, which seems to be about applying simple meditation techniques to improve, well, something. ;-)

It's a good alternative read to the more quantitative or technically specific books I read -I have Broadie's "Every Shot Counts" lined up next, which has lots of numerical tables that I can't wait to get into.

Re: Take charge or stay the same

mikewoodhouse — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 07:15:10 -0000

By coincidence I'm reading Nilsson & Marriott's "Every Shot Must Have a Purpose" right now. I certainly agree with a lot of the ideas (although I could stand to see less UNNECESSARY CAPITALISATION). I've always been fairly good at "letting go" of a disappointing shot (frankly, I've always needed to be!) but there's a lot more in there that I think would be of benefit. Looking forward to reading how the course goes.

Re: How should I vote on HS2?

mikewoodhouse — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:55:04 -0000

The manifesto was written more than two and a half years ago and could hardly be said to have been the basis for a resounding election victory. At best, I'd say the electorate gave it a "meh". In any case, a lot of wheels have rolled down the track since then.

Unless there's a clear and compelling economic case that can be made for going ahead, I'd vote "no".

While Crossrail is a somewhat different fish-kettle (the bill was passed in 2005 and construction started a year before the last election) I'd love to know whether there was any justification that still holds economic water.

Re: National Club Golfer | Features | In discussion: The 3/4 handicap difference rule in matchplay

mikewoodhouse — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 08:37:28 -0000

We'd expect a working handicap system to put players on, by and large, a level playing field. I'd like to know what proportion of matches are won by low and high handicappers under full and 3/4 systems? Let's see some data, then we can judge more objectively.

Re: Proving Your Worth as a Self-Taught Developer

mikewoodhouse — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:42:38 -0000

I didn't (still don't, come to think) have any formal computing qualifications - not much available in the 70s - and I left (OK, was invited to leave) University after a year. I did once apply for a "must have a 2.1" job - after an insane amount of testing, interviewing and general shenanigans they offered it to me. I turned it down, by the way. These days I mostly hire guys with PhDs...

Re: There is no such thing as a good field programmer

mikewoodhouse — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:49:09 -0000

"More importantly, when I saw it it was in the process of getting better, not worse."

A crucial attribute. One of my major concerns with the (in-house IT-implemented) system I'm saddled with interfacing to is that it hasn't got better at changing after four years of continuous change. Hasn't got (much) worse, which is a sort of plus, but by now it should have got really good at changing and it hasn't.

How often do developers hear users saying

“God, the developers are idiots. The other day one said…” ?

Not as often as it happens, I'll bet. And these days I'm on the users' side (but then these days I'm one of 'em)

Re: Instagram has new camera competitor on iPhone, gets me back to blogging

mikewoodhouse — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:17:45 -0000

Cool. There was (probably still is) a feature of Fujifilm digital cameras that would let you start shooting (continuous shots, this was pre-video) ahead of the instant you hoped to capture and would save the 5 (I think) shots up to the point you took your finger off the button. Before my kids dropped it and we upgraded to DSLR this was a surprisingly useful feature and we used it a lot. OI wonder if the GLMPS guys have translated & updated this idea for video/smartphone or came up with it independently? Just curious, it doesn't matter a jot which.

Re: Announcing Entity Framework Migrations (Fantasy Version)

mikewoodhouse — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:50:45 -0000

The PostgreSQL thing would work, I guess, if (a) EF has something like ActiveRecord's adapter concept, where platform-specific stuff gets extracted/abstracted and (b) someone writes one... But otherwise, this does look rather spiffy.

Re: Build a virtual bookshelf of free Ruby and Rails books

mikewoodhouse — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:45:37 -0000

Also possibly of interest: an introduction and a much larger tome from the same author:

http://www.sapphiresteel.co...
http://www.sapphiresteel.co...

Re: The Reasons I Like Ruby

mikewoodhouse — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:29:00 -0000

Nice effort at deflecting the language-war. Of course, it failed to some extent but it could have been so much worse...

One of the best things about my current job is that I'm able to stay within my comfortable Win/Office/Oracle/C# environment but still get to use Ruby a lot - for me, it's a disproportionately large amount of the daily fun.

AFAIK, RVM is very *nix-oriented - for Windows there's pik (http://wiki.github.com/vert... although I don't have any significant experiences to relate on that right now.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free!

mikewoodhouse — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:11:13 -0000

I'm delighted that it's all there in the open now. The dead-tree version still lives near the top of my desk-top book-pile, indicating its regular dipped-into status.

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 4

mikewoodhouse — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:54:26 -0000

Um. Returns nil does it? That does rather limit the usefulness. I suppose if one were to write the temp file, rewind and read it for some purpose (an example of which currently escapes me) then that could all be accomplished in a block. Maybe some multi-pass activity performed on a very large input file? I'm struggling here.

I forgot the appendix - I should have checked more carefully. I'll review it tomorrow (the book's on my desk in the City) although thinking about it, my main beef was that the documentation, while adequate for most tasks, doesn't help much with complex options and converters - I had a torrid time figuring out how to make it all work with a non-trivial case.

Yes, one can always read the source code, and in an ideal world with no time pressure I'd happily sit and figure it out from there. But the real ("enterprise") world doesn't always offer that luxury. Maybe it's more of a library-writing/documentation issue. Or maybe I should write up my experiences...

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Ruby Tuesdays: RBP Chapter 4

mikewoodhouse — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:06:37 -0000

A good chapter, this one. Lots of relevant stuff even for relative entry-level Ruby developers.

I find named groups in 1.9 a real help in making regular expressions more comprehensible without having to using EXTENDED to expand them across multiple lines for readability (something I seem mostly to fail to get right anyway). Sadly, I don't get to use them at work, where I'm constrained to 1.8.6.

It seems that a lot of people confuse \A and \Z with ^ and $ - probably because most of the time they're effectively the same. It makes finding the problem, when it eventually comes, that much harder. I still bear the scars.

I had apparently forgotten the tempfile section since reading the chapter a while back - it's something I should bear in mind; there are imes my code could be less clumsy if I used it. http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/... seems to be telling me that using #open instead of #new could in some cases allow the #close to become superfluous by working in a block. Looking at the example given more closely shows me that it won't work in this case because we need temp.path after the temp file is closed, but might it be worth a footnote to mention that there's a block form?

I know CSV (FasterCSV in 1.8) gets a mention later in the book, but I wonder if, as perhaps the simplest common "structured" text file form, an example of the fun possible might be worth including? Of course, next most common is probably XML or HTML and that way lies madness, so perhaps not. I'm probably biased because I invested an intense period writing a hefty custom converter for re-normalising a denormalised CSV database extract (~700K lines per night). I think it was probably the first time I ever typed "lambda".

Re: Ruby Best Practices - RBP is useless without you

mikewoodhouse — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:46:41 -0000

I'd suggest that the material in Chapters 2&3 is rather more challenging than the first instalment. Or at least, we all test (or know we should be testing), those who are likely to be interested in a book titled "Ruby Best Practices", anway. API design and dynamic toolkittery are, to my mind, at the next level of Ruby mastery - those of us who are more consumers than creators of libraries probably don't think about these techniques so much (and are possibly just a little intimidated?).

None of which is to suggest that the content isn't valuable - it is, hugely, since we need to have awareness of what's possible when (if) we get to that stage.

Now that hypothesis will be soundly rejected if Ch.4 doesn't generate some discussion - there must be more of us who deal with text files than API design, surely?

And, looking at the dead-tree version of the book sitting next to me, I'm suddenly struck by the question - why a green crab and not a prawn?

Re: Ruby Best Practices - Muppet Labs closing for now

mikewoodhouse — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:52:37 -0000

Struct? Sounds good. Don't forget OpenStruct - I'm very fond of how it lets me be even lazier!

Re: Bamboo Blog - Taking the Stage

mikewoodhouse — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:40:42 -0000

I thought it went pretty well - the glass of water was unexpected entertainment (from where I sat, YMMHV) and the mic thing was fun for every speaker in that room. I thought the point about training the user to tell you his real problem, rather than the "solution" he thinks you can deliver was well-made: my approach has been to acquire some plausible degree of business domain knowledge (over about 25 years) that lets me show the user he can talk to me in his language. Sometimes works.