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Monthly Archives February 2010

Tips for academics who develop software

Academics and practitioners, having rather different goals in life, tend to approach software development in quite different ways. No doubt there are many things each side of the fence can learn from the other, but I think academics in particular could often benefit quite a lot by adopting some of the practices used in industrial […]

Posted 23 February 2010 † johan § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Why Scala? The mixing of imperative and functional style

Scala is a little wonderland sprinkled with useful things you can mix and match as you like to improve your coding experience while staying on the Java platform. The Option classes, the structural case matching, the compact declarations, lazy evaluation… the list goes on. But at the heart of it is the decision to mix […]

Posted 11 February 2010 † johan § Software development ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Standard new Mac setup routine

I just got a new laptop, courtesy of the lab. Naturally, it’s of the fruity kind. One of the first steps: install essential software. I thought I’d make a list of software I consider absolutely essential on any new computer, and it became longer than I thought. General use: NetNewsWire for news reading DropBox for […]

Posted 10 February 2010 † johan § Life ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

Making playtime useful with color filling games

There’s a veritable torrent of little games constantly being released for the iPhone. One of the more likable ones is Flood-It, which I’ve been playing recently. The premise is extremely simple: you start off with a grid divided into squares of different, randomized colors. You are given a tool that works a bit like the […]

Posted 01 February 2010 † johan § Computer science ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , ,