Archives for Computers

Feeling the pressure produces better code?

The other day I was in a conversation with some developer that was complaining about some feature. He claimed that it was too complex and that it had led to tons of bugs. In the middle of the conversation, the developer said that the feature had been so buggy that he ended up writing a [...]

Review: Dingoo (A320)

When I mentioned that I wanted an “open” portable gaming console that played PSP games, Enrique mentioned the Dingoo. Not that it actually plays PSP games, but it’s indeed an “open” console, cheap and with a number of “extras”. So I wondered if playing PSP games was so important for me. Not that it wouldn’t [...]

Slides for several talks now published

I had said that I was going to publish the slides for a couple of talks I had given over the last couple of months, and I just got around to actually do it, so here they are:

Software automated testing 123, an entry-level talk about software automated testing. Why you should be doing it (if [...]

Proprietary vs open: a new hope

There is something that has been bothering me for quite a long time now: while I realise that Sony is often evil and proprietary (I mean, come on, memory stick? the horrible, horrible PS2 memory “cards”? the draconian sharing terms for the online PS3 network?), there is something that attracts me to their products. I [...]

BCM4312 on Linux: easier than expected

Just a quick post to say that I was being stupid and it took me a couple of days of fighting, lockups and reading to realise that the driver for the wireless card in my new laptop is actually already packaged and it works like a charm.
The long(er) story:

I bought a laptop with that card, [...]

The search for a Linux music score editing program

Some time ago I had promised a friend I’d bring some drum exercises the next time I went back home. Of course, I forgot so I taught him the exercises I could remember and promised I’d write some of those exercises and send him by e-mail. Thus, I had to find some Linux program to [...]

Quality Assurance as a copilot

Those who know me professionally know that I care a lot about software quality assurance. I think it’s a mostly misunderstood field, and generally “the world” would be better off with more QA (and/or better QA). Of course, I’m always looking for more arguments to support my view :-D and the last one I found [...]

More work on widgets

As I had mentioned, I had been working on Opera widgets. Some time ago I had seen a great Javascript plotting library for jQuery called flot, and I really wanted to try it out in some “real world” project. As I was working on the World Loanmeter widget, which incidentally uses jQuery too, it was [...]

The ultimate TODO app redux

When writing yesterday about the Perl modules, I realised that I hadn’t written anything about the TODO application since “The ultimate TODO app”. Well, a lot has happened to it actually. I’m glad to announce that:

It does have a (lame) name now: Bubug (supposedly stands for “Barely Unconventional Bug Untracking Gizmo”. Whatever).
It has improved a [...]

My first contributions to CPAN

I have been using Perl for many years, but I had never uploaded anything to CPAN. That’s unfortunate, because I’ve probably written several programs or modules that could have been useful for other people. The point is, now I have. Not only that, but it was code I wrote at work, so if I’m not [...]