Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information [...]
I’ve just been reading this Forbes article called “The Rise of Developeronomics”. The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging [...]
Python’s IMAPv4 client library imaplib is a really light-weight wrapper over the IMAP4 protocol. As such, it isn’t that intuitive to use. The best reference I’ve found on it is a cheat-sheet over here.
I was browsing a list of tools and services for a lean startup a couple of days ago, when I noticed that many of tools implement a Kanban methodology. I had never heard of Kanban, so I took a quite trip over to Wikipedia.
I read the post “Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice” on the weekend. It is mostly aimed at permanent employees at companies, although I thought there were some useful takeaways for contractors as well. Below is my summary of the points that resonated with me:
I keep my finances in J Wiegley’s Ledger format, which means everything is in a flat text file, for easy editing. I recently decided to use Xero.com for both my company and personal accounts. Unfortunately, this means that I somehow needed to upload all my past transaction data. So I wrote a Python script to [...]
I’ve just started using Evernote to make a note of things I find interesting on the web and to capture ideas or random thoughts. So far I love it! What I wanted was an easy way to extract the notes and save them to my filesystem, where they become much more useful. Specifically I want [...]
There is an Emacs mode for working with Ruby on Rails (of course). The main project page can be found here. In order to get everything set up, I had to do the following:
Alecco Locco has summarized the SQLite presentation entitled A Lesson In Low-Defect Software at this URL: SQLite: A Lesson In Low-Defect Software. Now, I’m a big fan of SQLite, and this summary has pointed out a few things that I need to improve in my own development process – namely, more comments (apparently SQLite has [...]