John Topley’s Weblog

When you think of places associated with high-tech, you likely think of Silicon Valley, Japan or maybe Korea. If you subscribe to national stereotypes then let’s be honest here, you probably don’t think of Australia as being a hotbed of technological innovation. Yet thirty years ago the land of searing desert heat, koalas, kangaroos and really blokey blokes guzzling Fosters introduced to the world an electronic musical instrument that would change music and the music industry forever.

One of the trends we've seen on the Web this year has been the proliferation of URL shortening services, to the extent that TinyURL is no longer the default choice. This growth has been driven by the popularity of Twitter with its enforced 140 character message limit and by seamless integration with mobile device Twitter clients such as Tweetie. However, questions over the longevity of these services and the permanence of the links they serve has also led to a new trend of hosting your own. As it seems to be all the rage I thought it would be a fun little exercise to write one for this blog using Sinatra.

In case you haven’t heard, Stack Overflow is a free programming Q & A site from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood that was born out of frustration with the existing sites in this genre. Stack Overflow has been going just over a year and during October and November Joel and Jeff have teamed up with Carsonified to embark on a world tour, with the aim of exposing developers to a diverse range of topics. Think of it as a sort of tasting menu for software developers.

As today sees the launch of Windows 7, I thought it would be interesting to write some thoughts on Microsoft’s latest blockbuster from the perspective of a so-called switcher. Although I use Windows XP in my day job, I've used Macs exclusively at home for the past three years. Nevertheless, I've been a Windows user for four times as long as that, having first used it in the distant days when you started Windows by typing “win” at the C: prompt.

Now that my new blog is live I needed a way to take daily back-ups of the MySQL database to a remote server for safekeeping. Writing a custom Rake task is perfect for this purpose.

This is a post that I've been waiting to write for a long time. I have spent what at times has seemed like forever developing a new blog application in my spare time to run my website on.

My name’s John Topley and I have a little secret that I want to share with you today. No, not that one. The fact is that I’m addicted to buying computer books, to the extent that I often buy them but never finish them. I could spend days in the Computing section of one of the big bookshops in Charing Cross Road.

A fortnight ago I flew to Edinburgh to attend Scotland on Rails. In spite of his best efforts, I managed to persuade my friend John Conners to come along too, so that he could find out why I’ve been nagging him to take a look at Ruby on Rails for years. Although John’s an experienced software developer with C++ and .NET under his belt, I thought he might find it interesting to learn more about a dynamic and purer OO language such as Ruby.

I've been writing Java code on and off for about nine years now. I started out writing simple Java applications as part of an Open University course and for the past few years I've been employed professionally to write user interface code using Apache Struts for an internal enterprise Java application that weighs in with about one million lines of code.

With the new year comes a new commitment from me to start practising Test-Driven Development (TDD) for my Rails’ projects. Up until this point I’ve usually put off writing tests until towards the end of my projects, which obviously doesn’t lead to some of the benefits that TDD brings, such as increased confidence during refactoring or a cleaner model API design.