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Category Archives: Software Engineering

RSS Feeds Moving!

I am going to be moving this sites RSS feeds away from FeedBurner this weekend.  Mostly because I want per topic feeds and I have not yet found a FeedBurner plug-in for WordPress that supports that.
Consider yourself warned if you are using an RSS reader!

Myth of the Genius Programmer

From the Google I/O 2009 conference:
“A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and [...]

Setting mac desktop wallpaper with Python

I have been playing with Python recently.
Here is a little script to change a mac’s desktop wallpaper to the file specified as the first argument of the script:

import subprocess,sys,os

# Raw apple script
Script = """/usr/bin/osascript<<END
tell application "Finder"
set desktop picture to POSIX file "%s"
end tell
END"""

# get the file name which is the first argument passed to this [...]

Fail to succeed!

The more experienced I become the more aware I become of what I don’t know and the more I come to terms with the fact that I make mistakes.
The awareness of what I don’t know helps keep me humble, humility makes working as part of a team easier:  as there is no pressure to have [...]

Challenged to grow

I have come to the realisation that the most experienced person in a group is not usually the person getting the most benefit in terms of skills or experience gained when working on a collaborative project.  In fact the more experienced the individual the less benefit they stand to gain, the inverse is true of [...]