Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a better way. As I've written before, you should sit down and actually test your read

I'll be radically honest here - I never really got the idea of "Test Driven Development". I'm much more of a "telnet into production and damn the consequences" kind of guy. Look, it's much more fun and my cardiologist recommends severe shocks every now and again. The essence of unit testing is pretty simple: Feed a function some data See how it responds Send it good data and if it returns "true" t

London's musical entertainment scene has something for everyone - from long-running blockbuster shows to no-name bands in dingy basements. Somewhere in the middle is monophonic plainchant versions of the Halo theme sung in a church. The acoustics at St Martin in the Field are echoey. That makes it rather hard to hear the amplified announcement to turn off our phones, but makes an a cappella chorus

I'm a theatrical cheapskate. I'm on all those last-minute seat-filler websites. I'll happily take a chance on an experimental play for a tenner a ticket or sit in an inexplicably unsold cheap seat at a major show. My philosophy is that the worst seat at the best show is preferable to the best seat at the worst show. But, once in a while, I'll splash out and pay full price. When the email landed in

I don't know why hardware manufacturers find it so hard to write decent documentation. As I've said before you need to actually test your readme . The Una Watch development instructions are scattered across a bunch of different files. So here's how to go from zero to your first "Hello, World!" Glance app with the minimum of fuss. This all assumes a fairly modern Debian / Ubuntu / Pop OS Linux. Pre

This content is exclusive to RSS and Atom subscribers. It is not on the web. Shhhhh! A few weeks ago I accidentally broke some of your feed readers . I was using <![CDATA[ … ]]> blocks in the feed. That allows me to put in raw HTML without the need for escaping. Unfortunately, some feed readers unescaped text which should have remained escaped. Confusing, innit? Anyway, if you've a mind to, I'd be

With the news that the BBC are tendering for a new series of Doctor Who , I thought I'd write down what I want from the show. This is, to be fair, pure fan-service wankery with zero chance of being made. I've based it on the oft-made observation that Hollywood is obsessed with remaking successful films rather than trying to remake unsuccessful ones. Do we really need another Spider-Man origin stor

I've never been a huge fan of smart watches. My £16 smartwatch is basically fine, but the OS is closed source and there's no way to add new functionality. Previously I had the eInk Watchy which was a pain to use and really poorly designed. Even back in 2014 I was bemoaning the design compromises in the MyKronoz ZeWatch Smart Watch . So why did I pick up the Una Watch? Firstly, the Una Watch is des

What do you use your smartwatch for? A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch . She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactl

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl , someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages. Bob's brain is uploaded to a computer post-mortem. Awoken in a dystopian future, he has to pilot a spacesh

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever. For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy for them to half-arse it and basically just play the CD. Instead we got a full band, guest singers, an

"The problem with defending the purity of the HyperText Markup Language is that HTML is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. The standard doesn't just borrow concepts from better languages; on occasion, HTML has pursued other programming languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new syntax 0 ." Englitch is an pretty goode langwidge. even you no grok all the pacif

One of the great things about modern HTML is that it tries to standardise stuff that developers are already doing. If there are a myriad ways of, for example, loading video onto a page - then browsers and other interested parties should work out how to make a standard <video> element. An interesting new proposal has been brought forth by Microsoft. There are a dozen ways to show a preview of an <i

Last year I ran an experiment to test the ability of modern LLMs to correctly answer a relatively straightforward question. Every single one of them got it wrong. Some missed information, some made up false statements, none were right. Of course the fanbois variously claimed that I was holding it wrong, my prompts were shit, I should have chosen better defaults, and - my favourite - that it would

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars . Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonis

The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to "Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom t

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier . This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of Contents Background Getting a DOI the easy way Let's Go Rogue! Automatic Submission of New Content Manual Submission of Old Content Getting the DOI Generating your own DOI Making the DOI

You're part of the Groovy Gang because you're a member of RSS Club ! These posts are only available on my RSS and Atom feed. This post is not available in the shops, on the web, via FTP, or anywhere else. So, yeah, sorry! My last post apparently broke some people's RSS readers. I had a code sample which said ＜marquee＞ - despite being properly escaped, some feed readers double-decoded it and turned

The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps. Back in the bad-old-days, there weren't many good opt

Do riders in autonomous vehicles think that they are in a private space? Here's a fascinating story from California where an robotaxi was redirected from its intended destination and, instead, delivered its misbehaving passengers to the police. The 15-year-old passengers were riding in a driverless autonomous car around San Mateo Monday afternoon. The teens drank alcohol inside the Waymo taxi and