Tag Archives: soap-box

Book Review: Racing the Beam – The Atari Video Computer System

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Richard Nichols

I just finished reading Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies) an interesting read about the Atari 2600 (or Atari VCS as it was orginally known). You might think that the Atari VCS was one of the … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Software Engineering | Tagged books, history, soap-box | Leave a comment

Looking back on 2010…

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Richard Nichols

Each year I try to look back over my year and take stock of what I’ve spent my time on, what I’d like to improve on, things I’d like to do more, or do less. This year was a very … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Software Engineering | Tagged off-topic, soap-box, visural-common, visural-wicket | Leave a comment

The JCP is a sham…

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Richard Nichols

Reading the minutes from the key JCP EC meeting on Oracle’s refusal to grant Apache a TCK licence, I think this dialog is very telling – Doug asked Oracle to acknowledge that it was asking the ECs to condone breaking … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Software Engineering | Tagged Java, open-source, soap-box | Leave a comment

Java String “substring” – an example of lazy error messages…

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Richard Nichols

What does this error mean? Exception in thread “main” java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1 That’s easy right? You’ve passed “-1″ as an argument to a Java String’s “substring” method. Wrong. Here’s some code that gives the same error … Continue reading →

Posted in Java, Software Engineering | Tagged Java, soap-box | 2 Comments