ACCU World of Code

In late April we exhibited at the ACCU Conference (#accuconf), which in many ways is our conference home. The first time we went was all the way back in 2007, and believe it or not we’ve not missed a single year since then. The conference is a great ev…

Update: my ideas have changed quite a bit since I recorded this, especially about the idea that “every crime requires a punishment”. If you’d like to explore more, try this sermon by my friend Jörg. As a Christian myself I thought it might be interest…

Series: Snake in Elm, Elm makes me happy, Elm Basics, Elm Unit Test, Elm JSON A lot of the documentation about the new language I am really excited about, Elm focusses on the Elm Architecture and the ideas of Functional Reactive Programming, and while …

If you have been handed a .phd file which is a dump of the heap of an IBM Java virtual machine, you can analyse it using the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (MAT), but you must install the IBM Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools first. Download MAT from eclip…

Updated version: Elm makes me happy (updated for Elm 0.19) Elm lets you write interactive web sites in a really clean and safe-feeling way, which is a contrast to the feeling I get when using JavaScript and HTML. It’s functional, but instead of that ma…

This is a pretty obvious post but perhaps writing it will stop me falling prey to this issue. When I’m debugging and I know that some code executed in a function is not to blame but is noisy in terms of what it causes to happen etc. I’ll often just pr…

This is a pretty obvious post but perhaps writing it will stop me falling prey to this issue. When I’m debugging and I know that some code executed in a function is not to blame but is noisy in terms of what it causes to happen etc. I’ll often just pr…

Java 8 makes some functional programming ideas available to the rest of us, using Lambda, function references and a streaming style (map, filter, replace etc.): Slides: What’s new in Java 8

We had a great day at the Egham Raspberry Pi Jam, and Rabbit Escape and our Photo Booth: seemed to go down well: But which photo was funniest? Here are some of the entries (I had to choose kids’ ones without faces to go on here, but there were some o…

For our latest Egham Raspberry Pi Jam, we worked on a photo booth program, using the Raspberry Pi camera. Here’s how we did it. Downloads: funniest-photo-game.odp, photo-booth.zip. Update 1: fixed a bug where it tried to create a directory that already…

Snake Series: Groovy, Ruby, BASIC, Dart, Elm, Python3+Qt5 Elm Series: Snake in Elm, Elm makes me happy, Elm Basics, Elm Unit Test, Elm JSON I’m writing the game Snake in lots of programming languages, for fun, and to try out new languages. Elm brings t…

Here is the comment I sent to the Government consultation on out-of-school education settings. Feel free to re-use, modify, distribute as you like. I am writing to express my opposition to the government’s plans to regulate the content of out-of-school…

Gimpel have just announced a beta of PC-lint Plus – a new product which will sit alongside PC-lint. To understand the (rather complex, I’m afraid) background and the background to why a beta of PC-lint Plus has been announced rather than one for the l…

Gimpel have just announced a beta of PC-lint Plus – a new product which will sit alongside PC-lint. To understand the (rather complex, I’m afraid) background and the background to why a beta of PC-lint Plus has been announced rather than one for the l…

Announcing a little open source project that I have built at work and been allowed to publish Freely. git-history-data analyses a Git source code repository and dumps out data in a form that is easy to analyse. I wrote an article demonstrating how to u…

Nothing is easy in Java, and nothing is more disproportionately non-easy than downloading something. If you add SSL to the equation, it becomes unfeasible for any human to navigate the twisted passages of the Java API, so here is a tiny fragment of map…

I got sick of not having Vim as my text editor for emails in Claws Mail but GVim makes my eyes bleed so I wanted proper Vim-in-a-terminal as my editor, which was not particularly straightforward. The proper incantation was to make a script in my PATH c…

Taking all the Git understanding we’ve developed through the series on Git and applying it to how to work on and contribute to projects on GitHub and similar systems like GitLab:

My emails wouldn’t send when I was working from home, giving me this message in /var/log/mail.log: Nov 11 12:38:16 machinename postfix/smtp[20672]: CF5D6D41CE2: to=, relay=none, delay=14416, delays=14416/0.01/0.07/0, dsn=4.3.5, status=deferred (Host or…

I attended the first Swift Summit on 21st of March; there were two days but I only went to the first. Here are some of the facts I learned: Int is not a fundamental type as you would think of it in most languages.  Instead it’s a struct that der…

I attended the first Swift Summit on 21st of March; there were two days but I only went to the first. Here are some of the facts I learned: Int is not a fundamental type as you would think of it in most languages.  Instead it’s a struct that der…

You can use the GitHub API to find out how many times the files in your releases have been downloaded. For example, to find out how many downloads there have been of my Rabbit Escape project you can do: curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/andybalaam/r…

At the Software Architect 2015 conference in London I presented “What if? Supporting decisions with software dynamics simulations”. [1] This talk introduces the idea of performing numerical simulations of software development teams and the products they build. The value in such simulations is to inform policy decisions and guide deliberate …

At the Software Architect 2015 conference in London I presented “What if? Supporting decisions with software dynamics simulations”. [1] This talk introduces the idea of performing numerical simulations of software development teams and the products they build. The value in such simulations is to inform policy decisions and guide deliberate …

If you want to display a link or basic formatting in an AlertDialog on Android, you can do it by providing HTML. The key parts you need are Html.fromHtml and TextView.setMovementMethod. Make sure you pass the dialog’s context in to the constructor of t…

I wrote to my MP (via writetothem.com) about the British government assassinating people they suspected of planning terrorist attacks. He replied saying that the government believes the action was legal, proportional and necessary. Part of this justifi…

A video in which I try to explain what merging and rebasing really are, to help you understand what is going on when Git presents you with scary-looking conflict messages. I also explain why you shouldn’t panic because it’s hard to lose your work, and …

Finally, you can write your web sites in ZX Spectrum BASIC, using my new project, ZX Spectrum BASIC CGI server . How it works Here’s what happens when a request comes in: Apache HTTPD receives the request, and runs the CGI script that does the magic. …

Below is a copy of the letter I sent to my MP this morning (via writetothem.com). Feel free to re-use and adapt it if you want to send a similar letter. Update: follow-up letter. Dear Philip Hammond, I was extremely concerned to hear of the assassinati…

Watch the video: Buy the game on the Play Store.

Update: now documenting the better way, as described in issue 14513. Update 2: I think this way is even better (works in Ubuntu 16.04, Docker 1.12.2, Reference: dockerd command line):sudo -s -H echo ‘{“insecure-registries”:[“myreg.example.com:5000”]}’ …

I installed Docker on Ubuntu 15.04 using: wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh as described at Install Docker on Ubuntu. I added myself to the docker group: sudo usermod -aG docker balaaman Then I logged out and logged in again, and ran: docker run h…

I found that Audacity would crash whenever the Playback Device in the Devices section of Preferences was set to “pulse” or “default”. This can be fixed by launching Audacity like this: Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=100 audacity I fixed it “permanently” b…

My friend and I have launched a new podcast in which we discuss movies: The Good Robot Andys. Enjoy.

Further to Detecting whether an Android app is stopping (or starting), I implemented code to decide when you are leaving or entering my game Rabbit Escape. The relevant class is called Lifecycle2SoundEvents. (Yes, it’s a terrible name. Yes, I spent a l…

In which I argue that mocks are a code smell, and layers lead to increased coupling: Mocks are Bad, Layers are Bad (in ACCU’s Overload Journal issue 127) I also suggest some ways to avoid both mocks and layers, including Classical TDD, Selfish Object, …

Ten years ago I predicted that 30% of corporate desktops would be Linux or similar open source desktops. It’s very hard to find any accurate (or even confident) numbers, but it seems clear I was wrong. This month, NetMarketShare puts Linux usage at 1.2…

I am writing an Android app (called Rabbit Escape), and I want it to start playing music when the user enters the app, and stop when the user leaves. Not as easy as it sounds because Android largely doesn’t think in apps, but Activities. Update: real-l…

I noticed some variation between devices so I tested various user actions on various devices and recorded the Android Activity lifecycle methods (e.g. onResume, onPause, onCreate, onStop) that got called. My results are below. [Why? I want to detect wh…

Series: Groovy, Ruby, BASIC, Dart, Elm, Python3+Qt5 I’m writing the game Snake in lots of programming languages, for fun, and to try out new languages. This time, Dart, which is for people who love Java and wish they didn’t have to do JavaScript. Sli…

I am enjoying using Kupfer but I don’t like the way it switches to an existing window of an application, instead of launching a new instance. I should write a patch for a config option or similar, but for now, here are my notes on how I disabled the be…

I am trying out MATE desktop and really liking it. I like to use a (GNOME-Do style) keyboard-driven application launcher, and have found Kupfer really good. Kupfer as packaged for Ubuntu MATE does not support MATE desktop, so the file manager (“Caja”) …

Picking apart some cool code to draw pretty pictures with code that fits into 3 tweets: This comes from a codegolf question here: Tweetable Mathematical Art. Slides: Tweetable Art Code.

I’ve just release the latest version of Rabbit Escape, which makes things look a lot nicer because you can zoom in, getting you much closer to your rabbits: There are still 60 levels of Lemmings and Pingus -like gameplay, all downloadable for free art…

I got hit again last night by a bug in my Makefile that meant I effectively ran rm -rf /*, which was not fun. Today I have been looking for how to make Make stop if a variable is undefined. Here’s my solution. This Makefile contains a bug (“SRCS” inste…

I am trying out Xfce and liking it. However, I’ve never found a window manager better than Metacity, so I’d like to use it. Here’s how I switched: # Install it sudo apt-get install metacity metacity-themes # Tell it how many workspaces I want gsetting…

I am writing an Open Source/Free Software Java desktop game (Rabbit Escape) and am experimenting with allowing you to zoom in so that the images being rendered are fairly big, and I’m seeing some slow-down. [Note: Rabbit Escape is also available on And…

Series: Groovy, Ruby, BASIC, Dart, Elm, Python3+Qt5 I’m writing the game Snake in lots of programming languages, for fun, and to try out new languages. This time, the first language I ever learned: Slides: Snake in ZX Spectrum BASIC If you want to, y…

Update: I don’t think this fixed the problem I was getting this every time I ran fetchmail. fetchmail: Server certificate verification error: unable to get local issuer certificate fetchmail: Broken certification chain at: /C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Scottsdale…

I recently dealt with some code that I felt was not properly encapsulated, but in a sense that I’ve not seen articulated in this way before. Please enlighten me if I missed it. Here’s a snippet: OutputThing manipulate( InputThing input ) { Processi…

Series: Groovy, Ruby, BASIC, Dart, Elm, Python3+Qt5 I’m writing the game Snake in lots of programming languages, for fun, and to try out new languages. Slides: Snake in Ruby If you want to, you can Support me on Patreon.

My mp3 player is very quiet, so I wanted to make all my podcasts as loud as possible. First I ran this to get the programs I needed: sudo apt-get install libav-tools normalize-audio To convert each file I made a script that makes a “loud” directory, a…

Why I wanted to make Rabbit Escape Free Software, even though I also plan to sell it. Because I want to share it.

I’ve been trying to work out what I think would be a good company to work for. Here’s what I’ve got so far. Please comment pointing out what I got wrong and missed out. Be coo We believe a company should be a good place to work. We sum that up in one r…

Although we added support for Visual Studio 2013 some time ago, PC-lint has lagged behind somewhat and even now (well over a year after it was released) has difficulty analysing any projects for it which use the Standard Template Library (STL) to any s…

Although we added support for Visual Studio 2013 some time ago, PC-lint has lagged behind somewhat and even now (well over a year after it was released) has difficulty analysing any projects for it which use the Standard Template Library (STL) to any s…