Entrenched

Recursive output buffering is a great tool in web-oriented programming, but it can go _really_ wrong.

No matter how often you use UNIX tools, once in a while you get caught out trying to put everything together. This happened this morning while I was setting up a cronjob and it didn't work as expected.

Reddit made a bold move yesterday and released their source code under the CPAL open source license. I'm a fan of reddit's programming section and will be interested to see how this effects the long term success of reddit.

The Apple Store opens to the public tomorrow in Sydney and I had a chance to check it out today. The glass front is eye-catching and the layout inside is sparse and inviting. It has free Internet too, which is sure to be a hit with travelers looking to update their Facebook profiles.

Apple does very well at gearing everything in the store to making the customer feel comfortable about buying and using their products - something other computer retailers would do well to imitate. The retail trimming was definitely the standout thing from this morning's preview.

As we all know, the poor programmers that work on critical life support systems have very strict development methods with lots of reports and triple redundancy everywhere. This is how you know that the software in planes is probably not going to crash.

Sounds reassuring right?

Seriously. Locking is counterproductive to writing fast websites. Any process that meets a lock that is already locked, waits. It waits until it is free. And waiting means that the page being generated goes nowhere until the lock is free again. Locking is not good. Really. So stop using them.

I often think that camera phones are a useless gimmick and that I would be happier with a bit of extra battery life on my phone. Phone ads are always full of people taking pictures of life defining moments on their phone. They're all wrong.

If you are a software developer you probably use some kind of version control system like subversion, git, or maybe Bazaar, everyday at work. And if you aren't you should be.

When using version control there are some bad habits that need to be broken to get the most from it. One bad habit that really needs to be broken is the habit of commenting out dead code instead of deleting it.

I am always amazed at how rarely people actually profile their code. You can get some amazing insights into what's happening in your code with some simple profiling tools.

I've tried a number of techniques over the years to try and stop people from touching my screens, most of which have been unsuccessful. Why do people think it's ok to touch screens?