Its The RulesBen Hoskins Blog

http://buyme.itstherules.co.uk/

Nice bike, but it has to go…

I’ve gone a bit quiet as I’ve been writing a few new small projects.

If anyone’s interested, they are:

StoryBoard: an opensource (MIT) Agile planning, StoryBoarding, and Acceptance Test writing tool.  I want to eventually build it WordPress style to include the ability to plug in your favourite views.  Its based on a framework I’ve extracted out of a number of my other projects

YAWF: YAWF is Another Web Framework.
This is a Java based MVC framework evolved out of a number of other projects I’ve done, based on a simple powerful templating technology (Freemarker) with POJO persistence, validation and querystring binding (using DB4O, OVal, and a hand rolled binding framework)
It bugs me that people are touting new uses of languages by bashing Java (by the way, I written in Protoype and dynamic languages longer that I have in typed ones) when it has a number of things going for it.
1) When using Rails, I’d spend more time battling scaffolded files, rewriting stuff and finding suitable libraries I have in another language.  Don’t get me wrong rails is okay, its just that too much of my time is not spent writing code
1.b) By the way, I won’t for the forseeable future, be using jRuby and Java for Rails.  That is a bastardisation of both languages and denies both (Ruby and Java) their strength

2) Groovy and grails, hmm yeah, whatever. Groovy, maybe, if it was used to write build scripts using GANT, but thats it.

3) JSF, Struts, Spring Web Stuff? Sorry, whereas its nice, I’d like to be in control of my framework, not it control me.

4) .NET? Goto 3

5) asp, php from scratch: really good enough: I genuinely believe that these are great to get started with, but too bothersome when your site gets bigger

Universal RemoteControl

I read a really cool (read geeky) article here where this dude made a universal remote control for $1 from a set of headphones and 3 IR LED’s.
The basic premise of the idea is that you can plug an IR LED into your mic slot and record a remote control, and then play back by plugging in 2 IR LED’s into the headphone slot.
My thoughts? What would it take to make that useful? And hacked together a swing app to build a remote, record the button, and play it back.  Now this one WAS hacked, so I’m kinda not so keen to release it…

I love talking to cabbies.

In a recent visit to Companies House, doing some stuff around Agile, I jumped into a cab back to the hotel.

I got talking to the driver and he asked one of the 3 questions.
What do you do as a job?

We got onto the subject of common sense and he told me a rather nice little anecdote.

Cabbie:

“My other job is in Security as well as driving a cab.
I turn up at the place I’m meant to work for the first day and get through the first door by bleeping myself through.
The next door is automatic and I can get through that no problem.

I get to the third door, and stop.  No swipe, and it doesn’t open. I call my boss on the mobile, and he simply says ‘you’ve gotta push it’.  It turns out that common sense isn’t always as common as you think.  I expected everything to be automatic…”

I think that the reason that made me smile is that could’ve easily have been me.