07 Jul 2010
This weekend I brought Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii.
I greatly enjoyed the first one, and it’s one of the few games that me and my girlfriend can play together.
It’s a pretty easy game to pick up, but for this one Nintendo included a tutorial DVD. Two questions
immediately spring to mind here. Firstly, what can you do with a DVD that you can’t do with an in-game,
interactive, tutorial. Secondly, why is this a DVD that you can’t play on the Wii?
Let me just say that again.
Why is this a DVD that you can’t play on the Wii?
To watch the tutorial you need to turn off your Wii, turn on your DVD player, watch the DVD, and then go back
to your Wii. I’d love to know how Nintendo came to this decision, because it drastically slow you down your
first experience of playing the game, and those that are mostly likely to want to watch the video are those
who will struggle to switch over to the DVD player.
Come on Nintendo, you can do better than this.
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30 Jun 2010
At work we recently set up Buildbot to replace an in-house continuous
integration tool that never really took off. I’ve used Buildbot before, in a hobby capacity, but using it my
day job has really brought home to me how important not only testing is, but testing continuously.
Buildbot is pretty simple to explain. Every time you make a commit to your source control system this triggers
buildbot to run a series of steps over your code. What these steps are is totally configurable by you.
Typically though, you’ll configure it to check out your code, compile it and run unit tests.
I’m a big fan of test driven and issue driven development. With these two methodologies when you want to make
a change you record the issue in your bug tracking software, then write a test that detects the deficiency in
your code. Once you’ve done that you can start actually making the change that you wanted to make in the first
place. By writing down the issue you’re forced into thinking about the change that you want to make, and
creating the test ensures that you know when it’s complete.
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24 Jun 2010
Rock star turned physicist Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw have written a book with a deceptively simple title,
Why Does e=mc2
?.
With a title like that you might expect that the book will be along the same lines as the New Scientist books
How To Make A Tornado
and Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?.
Instead though, you get a book that takes you on a in-depth journey through deriving the equation from first
principles* and on to the many things that it implies.
As you might expect for a book from two physicists it is a fairly specific book, focusing on entirely on the
equation and the mathematics and physics that surround it. If you’re looking for a history of the equation and
the Einstein then this is not the book for you. That’s not to say that it’s not well written, or not
accessible because it is both of those things. The jovial nature of the writing and understandable metaphors
really help you to follow the progress of the book, especially when four dimensional space-time is being
discussed.
This book is well written, informative and entertaining. If you’ve ever wanted to know why e=mc2
and you’ve got a basic understanding of maths then “Why Does e=mc2
?” will answer all your questions and more.
- Well, from an fairly basic set of set of assumptions.
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16 Jun 2010
In a previous post I discussed what you want from an automatic
deployment system. In this post I’ll discuss how use to solve the repeatability and scalability requirements
that I set out.
Fabric is a tool which lets you write scripts to automate repetitive tasks. So far, so bash like. What sets
Fabric apart is the tools it gives you to run commands on remote servers. Fabric allows
you to run the same commands on multiple machines, and to move files between the hosts easily.
To get started with Fabric you’ll need to install it, but a simple sudo easy_install fabric should be enough
to get you up and running. The Fabric website has excellent documentation, including a
tutorial, but before I discuss how to integrate Fabric with
your Django deployment process, lets go over the basics.
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02 Jun 2010
This weekend, the day after the iPad was released in the UK, I went into an Apple store and had a play with
an iPad for a few minutes. My first reaction was surprise was that I was able to get access to an iPad so
quickly. When I tried the same for the iPhone I had to give up as it was taking too long to queue. That’s
probably down to the time of day rather than the popularity of the device though.
Much has been made of the iPad being a jumped up iPod Touch, and when the iPad was announced I was
disappointed that it didn’t run Mac OS X. Having played with the device though I’m inclined to think that it
was a good move. When they release the upcoming version 4 operating system with its background processing
capabilities most criticisms will no longer be valid.
The iPad is usually described as a content consumption device, rather than a content creation device. That’s
not quite true, as I could quite happily type this blog post using an iPad. However, as a webdeveloper in both
a professional and a hobbyist capacity it is impossible to imagine using the iPad to create anything that
complicated.
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