Author Archives: Patrick

Spinning Wheels of Fire

This gallery contains 9 photos.

As promised, some photos of the fun at the Supercross:   And for your viewing pleasure, a moving picture, starting 10 seconds before the final race.  Here you can see the insane fireballs and what-not.

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Pretending to Git Good

Git tries its darndest to be as hard as possible to use.  More than anything, it suffers from too-many-options-itis and correspondingly confusing options, often a warning flag for a programming language or tool.  But git’s core is good, and it … Continue reading

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I’m on a Mac: Hardware Wrap-up

As mentioned in my post, I’m using a MacBook now, every day, as my work computer.  And, well, I’ve not died nor been struck by lightning or anything.  But am I a convert?  Read my of my experiences with the … Continue reading

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I’m on a Mac: Keyboard

As mentioned in my post, I’m using a MacBook now, every day, as my work computer.  And, well, I’ve not died nor been struck by lightning or anything.  But am I a convert?  Read of my experiences with the platform.  … Continue reading

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Revising MuddyHorse

I’m moving to wordpress to administer my whole site, ultimately.  So this is a bit in progress.  I’ll restore all the bits in a bit.  You can still find content on to the old blog if you want to, though … Continue reading

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Third Day

So, here I am, sitting in a San Francisco apartment, overlooking a trendy restaurant scene. With a macbook on my lap. I feel like I just need to tweet something.  Oh, it all makes sense now!

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I Love Apple

I love apple.  You?  Apple very Square, yet not square!  Tasty, and not tasty. And so on.  Here are some very quick impressions from almost two days.

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Pat's Favorite FireFox Extensions, Oct 2010

Here’s an update to a .  Extensions have come and gone, and Firefox is much updated now, at 3.6.x, with 4.0 on the near horizon.

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Quick Maven Primer for Java Development

I wrote this up for the NetRexx mailing list, but it’s a good basics article for anyone wanting to get a quick glance at Maven‘s operations.  I’m not , I’m just giving a quick description.

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Fun Readings

Swing, James Bond, interface design, Dresden, an Elizibethan England children’s novel, and more — it’s all good.

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The Clumsy Pattern: Passing Data Around

In the long-awaited part 2 of , I discuss how we pass around data and objects around — remote server communication.

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Android Development Quick-start

I’m trying to pick up a bit of Android development experience. Here’s some tips for getting started from scratch.  I have a lot to learn…

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The Definition of Good Software

In my mind, the definition of well-made software is this:  The absolute minimum required to get the job done. There’s a little agile in there, relating to software design minimalism.  That’s not what I’m getting at.  Whether you are developing … Continue reading

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JavaFX: Getting the Frame of a Stage

The JavaFX Stage class, version 1.2 has some simple methods for dealing with focus, toBack() and toFront().  What it is lacking is a way of setting the “always on top” property, to force the window to the front. A quick … Continue reading

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Not fixing the Xbox 360?

I broke down and bought a new Xbox 360 Arcade unit to replace my variously failing boxes.  If you , I tried a couple of strategies to fix my machine.  They all worked — for a time.  The time the … Continue reading

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A Small Token of Our Appreciation

The Company was pleased with our performance last year.  So they went against everything we’ve been teaching our kids, and gave us candy pills. That’s Jelly beans on the left, mints on the right.  Or so I hope.

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A good and bad thing about Buzz.

One cool thing about Buzz: I get more replies than before on my posts. One bad thing about Buzz: Those replies are on the Buzz server, not here.

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The Clumsy Pattern: Software Development

I haven’t formulated exactly what I’m going to say, but I wanted to start a series on the Clumsy pattern in software development.  Don’t get excited, I’m neither adopting patterns as a beloved thing (that sentence needs its own post), … Continue reading

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Well, they're now on the list, anyway…

Alternate titles for this post: How Gamestop ruined my Valentine’s Day Gamestop Made Me Do It I’m an Idiot

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Design Work…

I just picked up three books on Design, based largely on the recommendations in the JavaPosse Roundup 09 sessions on the topic.  I haven’t read them yet, but just perusing them makes them look to be a lot of fun. 

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