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Archive for the ‘programming’ Category

Boy scratches Python…

Posted in Python, education, programming, tagged , on July 5, 2008 | 3 Comments »

I’ve written before about Scratch, a teaching platform developed by MIT to introduce kids to the art of programming. My son has been playing around with Scratch for over a year and although he still enjoys it, he’s showing signs of needing to move to the next level, a ‘real’ programming language.  I decided that [...]

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xlAWS - 100,000 downloads?

Posted in AmazonAWS, Proto, S3, SQLite, SimpleDB, VBA, programming, xLite, xlAWS, tagged , on April 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Not sure, but this morning I received my monthly AWS bill, and it was double its usual amount! When I investigated the extra cost it was due to 133GBs of downloads from my www2.gobansaor.com bucket. This is the S3 bucket in which I store the xlAWS zip file, xlAWS being a “library-of-sorts” of [...]

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xlAWS - Excel VBA Code for accessing Amazon’s S3 and SimpleDB

Posted in AmazonAWS, S3, SimpleDB, VBA, excel, programming, tagged , , on February 22, 2008 | 4 Comments »

I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 service from within Excel for sometime now and as there are no libraries or examples for calling AWS services from VBA (or VB6) I had to roll my own. As with most things Excel, getting the job done always triumphs over elegance and industrial strength implementations, in other words [...]

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Zimki - the spirt lives on …

Posted in JavaScript, Ruby, Web2.0, news, programming, tagged , , , , , , on December 13, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Although Zimki is to shut down on Christmas Eve, the ideas behind the service live on. Two new offerings, Horuku and AppJet, offer variations on the idea of hosted application development/deployment.
AppJet, funded by Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator, is very similar to Zimki, being a server-side JavaScript platform. No details yet as to what [...]

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JavaFX - a GUI DSL

Posted in ETL, Java, JavaFX, JavaScript, Ruby, SQLite, Talend, VBA, excel, programming on May 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having mastered JavaScript (OK master is too strong a word - having become comfortable with both its syntax and usage patterns) my next port of call is JavaFX the recently announced Flash/Silverlight competitor. What led me to JavaFX Script was not its role in this Flash/AJAX alternative platform (which unless  Sun improves [...]

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JavaScript 101

Posted in JavaScript, education, programming on May 12, 2007 | 2 Comments »

In a previous post I explained why I had decided to improve my JavaScript skills. The problem was finding a decent reference book as the ones I had looked at where amongst the worst technical books I had ever encountered; then I found this series of lectures by Douglas Crawford. Not only are the [...]

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VBA & JavaScript - glue languages

Posted in JavaScript, Proto, excel, kettle, programming, tagged , on March 22, 2007 | 2 Comments »

What have Javascript and VBA in common? Not much on the surface and their respective user bases rarely if ever overlap. What they do share are their roles as the imperative (the-if-then-else-loop-etc) programming languages of the “I’m not a programmer” programmers, the great unwashed, the “normal” people out there who [...]

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Tables Vs. XML; the data lingua franca debate.

Posted in Proto, Web2.0, data, excel, programming, tagged on March 3, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Okay I’m exaggerating, there’s no debate, those using tables (mainly business-orientated techies/power-users) are blissfully unaware of the charms of XML; while those whose only answer to every data exchange problem is XML (or its Javascript cousin JSON) think tables are something people used to design HTML web sites before they discovered the delights of CSS [...]

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Inventory Management for Developers

Posted in programming, tagged on February 28, 2007 | No Comments »

The excellent Alistair Cockburn discuses why software development is remarkably like manufacturing and how we can learn from modern manufacturing theory to better structure our software delivery processes (or indeed any business process where the internal inventory item is the ‘yet-to-be-validated decision’).

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Want your kids to have the programming itch, then Scratch it!

Posted in Ruby, education, excel, programming on February 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »

Having looked in the past for a suitable introduction to programming for my 10 year old son I had come to the conclusion that the existing options (such as KPL) where too ‘wordy’ and not able to compete with the point and click powered online/gaming worlds that youngsters now inhabit. That was until [...]

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Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…

Posted in ETL, Proto, Web2.0, programming, tagged on February 9, 2007 | 3 Comments »

What have these three fantastic products in common?

Proto, an application for building “desktop mashups”;
Kettle, a visual ETL design tool;
Yahoo Pipes;

… you guessed it, pipes. The classic idea of the unix pipe has been given a new life in these three easy-to-use products, but this time the target audience is not the sysadmins and professional [...]

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Code Snippets Sold

Posted in news, programming on February 5, 2007 | No Comments »

I see Peter Cooper has sold the excellent Code Snippets site, congratulations Peter. This site and Google CodeSearch are a must-have in the toolbox of all lazy developers; a category in which I proudly place myself. If fact, I agree with Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, who believes the best programmers don’t really want [...]

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