Category: life
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Machiavelli on software
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain…
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IT side-effects at the NHS
My mother has a a phrase – professional illness. It’s the moment that she (an environmental engineer) walks into a random building and promptly looks at the air ducts. I suffer from the same thing – only around tech. Before and after the birth of my daughter, I have had more chances than ever to…
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Alexandra
Born Wednesday the 8th of March. Mum and baby are back home and doing well.
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Understanding ActiveMQ Broker Networks
Networks of message brokers in ActiveMQ work quite differently to more familiar models such as that of physical networks. They are not any harder to understand or reason about but we need to have an appreciation as to what exactly each of the pieces in the puzzle do by themselves in order to understand them…
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Batching JMS messages for performance; not so fast
Recently an idea had crossed my radar around speeding up performance of messaging producers; batching messages into a single transaction. The idea being that there is overhead in the standard behaviour of a message bus that can be optimised out if you group messages into a single transaction. My initial thoughts about this were that…
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Give your DB the love it deserves
Pity the poor database. As critical to most apps as a foundation to a building. And as interesting as an accounting seminar at a nudist colony. Not sexy enough for the attentions of the senior dev, or considered to be “well understood”, DB work frequently end up getting handed off to the junior guys on…
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Goldilocks actors: not too many, not too few
After my last post on parallelism with Scala actors, I had a thought: when doing a calculation like this, am I actually making the most of my resources? If as in the Pi example, more cycles will generally lead to a better result, surely if I have a limited amount of time to get the…
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Better living through parallelism
Judging by the interest to my last actors post, I thought I’d throw up a piece of code that uses actors anonymously to parallelise a long running operation. Not every operation can be parallelised, most things we work on tend to be fairly sequential. However, sometimes if you can split up the work to perform…
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Why I dig Scala: Concurrency and the Dining Philosophers
I am occasionally asked what the big deal is about Scala. For me, to decide whether a programming language is worthwhile is dependent on two practical questions: does it aid comprehension, and does it reduce code. The two are not necessarily interchangeable. Terseness, after all, does nothing to aid comprehension. Scala scores points on both…
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Mezzo D9 Folding Bike Review
Update 24/02/12: It has been nearly two years since I put up this article, and it’s still one of the most visted posts on the site. In that time I have received a number of comments on and offline about it. I posted it originally because I felt that it was the best way to…