It just threw up this playlist for me on the iPhone – it seems my own personal DJ has finally arrived: Beast Of Burden – Rolling Stones Idioteque – Radiohead (live) Born Under A Bad Sign – Jimi Hendrix I Got Mine – The Black Keys It’s Hard To Be a Saint In the City – Bruce Springsteen & The [...]

I’ve been neglecting things here at Magpiebrain Towers since my move to San Francisco. Blame the sunshine, a demanding new client, or just a relapse of extreme apathy. Whatever the cause, it seems that my inattention has been rewarded. Simon sent me an email the other day, wondering where the blog had gone. I brought up [...]

I’ve been neglecting things here at Magpiebrain Towers since my move to San Francisco. Blame the sunshine, a demanding new client, or just a relapse of extreme apathy. Whatever the cause, it seems that my inattention has been rewarded. Simon sent me an email the other day, wondering where the blog had gone. I brought up [...]

That’s not a camera - now this, us a camera!: Nikon FM3a with attached MD-12 motor drive.

That’s not a camera - now this, us a camera!: Nikon FM3a with attached MD-12 motor drive.

Nikon FM3A with MD-12 Motor drive

Nikon FM3A with MD-12 Motor drive

I’ll be speaking at qcon San Francisco on the 20th of November. Navigating The Rapids: Real-world Lessons in Adopting Agile will be a typically rambling affair, drawing on a multitude of war stories from the many projects I’ve work on at ThoughtWorks. Qcon is an invite only conference, so thanks go to Steve Freeman for inviting me to talk as...

I’ll be speaking at qcon San Francisco on the 20th of November. Navigating The Rapids: Real-world Lessons in Adopting Agile will be a typically rambling affair, drawing on a multitude of war stories from the many projects I’ve work on at ThoughtWorks. Qcon is an invite only conference, so thanks go to Steve Freeman for inviting me to talk as...

I spend most of my time working in team areas with other devs, as part of a team who check in frequently and who always use a Continuous Integration tool. When the build is broken, it’s a problem. Typically, a big problem - it should be the top priority of any team to fix a broken build. The problem is that all of the tools out there provide...

I spend most of my time working in team areas with other devs, as part of a team who check in frequently and who always use a Continuous Integration tool. When the build is broken, it’s a problem. Typically, a big problem - it should be the top priority of any team to fix a broken build. The problem is that all of the tools out there provide...

This is truly awful. A while back I did a run though of the Lego XP Game for Skillsmatter. I developed the game a few years ago with colleagues help by way of a training excercise. The game isn’t awful - I actually enjoy running it, and I get a kick knowing how many of my coworkers have run the game for internal and external purposes. No - the...

This is truly awful. A while back I did a run though of the Lego XP Game for Skillsmatter. I developed the game a few years ago with colleagues help by way of a training excercise. The game isn’t awful - I actually enjoy running it, and I get a kick knowing how many of my coworkers have run the game for internal and external purposes. No - the...

I’ve been playing around with using Scala’s pattern matching support to create a URL handler for use with an embedded Jetty server. This little code snippet creates a Jetty handler that can not only match URLs, but even extract parts of the URL and pass it into the block protected class MutableHandler extends AbstractHandler { override def...

I’ve been playing around with using Scala’s pattern matching support to create a URL handler for use with an embedded Jetty server. This little code snippet creates a Jetty handler that can not only match URLs, but even extract parts of the URL and pass it into the block protected class MutableHandler extends AbstractHandler { override def...