Symbolic Forest : software

Video killed the documentation star

Despite its popularity, video is really not the best way for a lot of people to learn things

Published at 4:43 pm on September 1st, 2024

Filed under: Geekery, Technology. Linkery.

Recently I added Aria Salvatrice to the list of links over in the menu, because I’m always looking to find new interesting regular reads, especially ones that use old-fashioned blogging. In this case, I found myself reading one of its posts which I absolutely found myself nodding along to. It was: Video Tutorials Considered Harmful, about how videos are a much worse venue for learning a technical topic than written documentation.

Keyword noise: documentation, video, learning, coding, software, software development.

Modern technology

Or, keeping the site up to date

Published at 7:23 pm on March 14th, 2024

Filed under: Geekery, Meta.

Well, hello there! This site has been on something of a hiatus since last summer, for one reason and another. There’s plenty to write about, there’s plenty going on, but somehow I’ve always been too busy, too distracted, too many other things going on to sit down and want to write a blog post. Moreover, there are more technical reasons that I’ve felt I needed to get resolved too.

Know your limits!

Or remember that computers are still not boxes of infinite resource, whatever you might think

Published at 4:03 pm on October 15th, 2022

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

Sometimes, given that I often work with people who are twenty years or so younger than me, I feel old. I mean, the archives of this blog go back over twenty years now: these are serious, intelligent colleagues, and when I started writing my first blog posts they were likely still toddlers.

Keyword noise: software, software development, resources, coding.

Going through things one by one

Or, a coding exercise

Published at 4:12 pm on June 25th, 2022

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

One of my flaws is that as soon as I’m familiar with something, I assume it must be common knowledge. I love tutoring and mentoring people, but I’m bad at pitching exactly where their level might be, and in working out what they might not have come across before. Particularly, in my career, software development is one of those skills where beyond a certain base level nearly all your knowledge is picked up through osmosis and experience, rather than through formal training. Sometimes, when I’m reviewing my team’s code I come across things that surprise me a little. That’s where this post comes from, really: a few months back I spotted something in a review and realised it wouldn’t work.

Keyword noise: coding, software, .NET, .NET Framework, computing, C#, development.

Teaching an image to think

Computers work in unexpected ways

Published at 5:45 pm on December 20th, 2021

Filed under: Geekery, Technology, Linkery.

Following on from yesterday’s post about log4j: another security article fascinated me in the last week, too. You might have already seen it, because it was widely shared on Twitter and computer people everywhere were amazed and aghast at its engineering and its possibilities. The log4j vulnerability is a relatively pedestrian one by comparison, using something that is an entirely documented and public feature of the library. This, on the other hand, is a completely different animal.

Keyword noise: programming, software, security, hackers.

Some logical relief

In which we discuss a topical flaw

Published at 8:34 am on December 19th, 2021

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

In many ways I lead a charmed life and hold a wide range of privileges in my hand. Not least, this week just gone, the fact that I’m a software developer who generally works with the .NET software stack. More specifically, I am not a software developer who works with Java. Java developers have not, generally speaking, been having a good week.

Keyword noise: programming, software, security, hackers, E Shrdlu.

Hello, Operator

In which we consider switching OS

Published at 6:34 pm on May 27th, 2010

Filed under: Geekery, Technology.

Right, that’s enough of politics. For now, at least, until something else pops up and ires me.

Legal news

In which Microsoft are on the good side for once

Published at 8:38 am on February 23rd, 2007

Filed under: Geekery, Political, Technology.

Legal news of the week: Microsoft has lost a patent infringement case brought by Alcatel, the company that owns the rights to the MP3. That is, they don’t own the file format itself, but they own the patent on understanding what they mean.

Keyword noise: Alcatel, audio, donations, file formats, Microsoft, MP3, music, software, software patent, UKIP.

On sucking

In which we discuss some design flaws in Lotus Notes

Published at 12:52 pm on September 13th, 2006

Filed under: Geekery, Linkery, Technology.

Spent quite a while last night reading Lotus Notes Sucks^***, a collection of reasons why, as you could probably guess, Lotus Notes sucks. I have to use the thing at work every day, and it is indeed truly awful; but I didn’t really like the site. It lists 80-something superficial bad things about Lotus Notes, without listing any of the truly awful things about it.

Keyword noise: computing, databases, email, Lotus Notes, software.