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It's that time of year again. Here is the updated Excel Spreadsheet for helping you choose a great Fantasy Football team that obeys all the team, position and budgetary constraints: Fantasy Football Team Selector 2013-14
Education is changing in a big way. Whether you're still in the education system or someday going to have children who will, it's of prime importance you learn just how it's going to change. Pass rates are going up in the most important school exams, namely, the ones that determine whether a student qualifies for university or not. It's at this point where education stops being in a sense "free" and has to be evaluated as a value proposition - does the benefit of going to university outweigh the financial cost? Despite this being a Scottish blog, I'm going to...
"My Name is Karl, Ich Bin Expert" I don't quote Karl Hungus lightly. When I began this blog back in the summer of 2011 it was because I thought I'd let my programming skills go rusty. I wasn't starting projects and I hadn't learned any significantly different technology or tools for a few years. Life Beyond Fife existed as a dumping ground for random ideas, quick trials and elaborate "Hello world!" examples. But I'm not a twenty-three year old entrepreneur living in The Bay trying to get a startup off the ground. However cool it is to launch a micro...
"Where is that drip coming from?" Recently while in the staff kitchen, waiting a few minutes for my mug of tea to properly infuse - yes, I am that British - my absent minded thoughts were distracted by a repeating sound. \drip\ ...pause... \drip\ ...pause... I looked over at the sink. \drip\ Nothing fell from the tap faucet (Ok, I'm British but most of my readers are American). So where is it coming from, I thought? I turned around and moved within the space of the kitchen trying to get a more localised area of where the source sound originated....
So often when faced with a programming task, you never truly solve the required problem from scratch. To be completely pedantic you're not writing processor instructions or even assembler but rather high level programming commands that are compiled or interpreted depending on your language choice. But with more and more tools available today to make the job easier, a lot of the necessary knowledge and skills aren't so much about how to programmatically break down and solve problems - it's just as much about knowing how to use all the tools out there. I love it when I've developed with...
Recently at work I was confronted by a problem requiring data persistance outside of a database - in this case, a saved parameter project file. Though I'm a convert to the purity and ease of use of JSON, in the land of Enterprise coding, XML is still very much king. Visual Studio provides many tools for not just dealing with XML files but also XSD files: a schema for describing a valid XML source file. Both while at work in creating configuration files, and at home in parsing Amazon's RESTful API results returned in XML data, I've written code to...