www.francisfish.com

Click Bookshop to see my novels. Buddhist, father of 2, Ruby on Rails programmer for money, and fiction writer.

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    Heroic Failure on the 13th of November

    Had you down for Heroic Failure on the 13th of November Could you oblige? RSVP to me We'll have tiffin on the lawn, eat small tiger for tea Measure nose to tail Will be slightly longer than the other one you see? Tasty tiger don't eat me no m

    Comments (0) . Monday, 23 November 2009

    Ok, I'm not perfect and I still get angry - but still try to deal with it

    I suffered the misfortune of sitting next to an extremely inconsiderate man on the train on Sunday. I was subjected to 2 hours of having my leg felt and the paper snapped and wafted in my face by the most irritating elbow wielding person I've eve

    Comments (0) . Tuesday, 17 November 2009

    Tumbleweed Interview Candidates

    In my present role helping a team become more agile I was asked to help with some interviews. We must have talked to about ten people. The profile is relatively unusual: Object-oriented PHP with MVC and some Oracle PL/SQL. Unusual but a lot of people

    Comments (0) . Sunday, 8 November 2009

    TDD is effective if you look at the right things

    http://theruntime.com/blogs/jacob/archive/2008/01/22/tdd-proven-effective-or-is-it.aspxIt's nothing to do with the initial development. All about the long-term viability of the code. You can't refactor or maintain something if you can't p

    Comments (0) . Monday, 2 November 2009

    Ballmer not the darling of the stock market

    Comment left here. MS is a statistical outlier. A lot of its success was accidental and also built on allowing piracy in markets it couldn't control in the early days. Ballmer/Gates so what?You get one of these companies every generation or so a

    Comments (0) . Friday, 9 October 2009

    For and Against Test-Driven Development

    Comment left here. I've been training people on TDD and the *first* thing I said is you need to start from the functional spec and then (maybe) create a technical spec that is used to drive the tests. Understand the problem first - and then the

    Comments (0) . Wednesday, 16 September 2009

    Next life

    These old teethWhen groundWill be dust againAnd how happy I will beTo shuck of this old form and its aches and painsThings done wrong and always wrong now 

    Comments (0) . Saturday, 22 August 2009

    Rails authlogic: can't use OAuth and OpenID plugins together

    I'm trying to use both openid *and* oauth with authlogic. Looks like I can't.The plugins both override the active record save method and call the block you associate with it in the controller (this is done so that it can go to the external we

    Comments (0) . Wednesday, 22 July 2009

    Free!!

    I've finally been made redundant, which means I can apply for the dole and get my mortgage protection up and running. Had a lot of fun trying to get a machine that was running Microsoft stuff so I could use the on-line forms to set up a tribunal

    Comments (0) . Friday, 10 July 2009

    Busy getting things ready for biz - happy!

    I am renting a host slice at slicehost.com. I decided to use these guys instead of one of the millions of places like hostgator or site5 because I end up with a web host that's entirely under my control and I can use Apache's multi-site thing

    Comments (0) . Sunday, 28 June 2009