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essays•12 October 2011

Environmentalism and Amdahl's Law for the Masses

Though Life Beyond Fife is primarily a technology blog this article is for everyone. Absolutely all. I want every single person in the world who is the least bit concerned with environmental matters to know about and understand a concept from the world of computer science known as Amdahl's Law. With this one bit of knowledge it will make you much more effective at looking after the planet for tomorrow's new generation. Right you're still reading, excellent. I can now confess to you that I don't care about the environment myself. That's not to say I doubt how drastically the...

11 min readRead more →

follies•6 October 2011

D-Lighted: The lightweight, multi-platform database tool

D-Lighted is a free, open-source Windows database tool that allows users to connect to multiple different database platforms all from within the same small executable. The simple, uncluttered user interface is perfect for DBAs or developers who need to get into a database quickly, open up a table and check the data, add or delete a row, or edit some values. D-Lighted currently supports connections to Microsoft SQL, MySQL (thanks to MySQL's .Net Connector), SQLite (thanks to System.Data.SQLite), Oracle and PostgreSQL (thanks to pgFoundary's .Net Data Adapter for PostgreSQL) but visitors to this blog are free to request more in...

3 min readRead more →

essays•16 September 2011

Carpenters make tables and chairs, not hammers and saws

Ok, yes, I know it's actually furniture makers who make tables and chairs but the title is long enough as it is. Just consider the point for a second though. Imagine the carpenter who has a problem with a broken saw or possibly a hammer that could have a better design for the type of nails they're using. Do you think they crack open the welding torch or start on a new hammer mould? Of course not, they are carpenters - skilled at creating objects with wood. That is their business, what they have trained long and hard to be...

10 min readRead more →

essays•12 August 2011

Addenda for Adopting Agile Development

Software Development is a strange profession. Coders are often promoted out of development in their thirties at the same time as new recruits are coming in who know different languages, tools and practices from those who graduated five years earlier. As a consequence, every aspect of the development environment is constantly up for reappraisal. Moving from one refactoring plug-in to another, say, is a pretty harmless change. Migrating source code versioning systems might be a little troublesome but will eventually quieten down. Changing the processes and methods of how software projects are planned, managed and developed though - that's scary....

10 min readRead more →

follies•27 July 2011

Fantasy Football Team Selector

The start of the new football season in England is upon us and for some this means careful deliberation over their Fantasy Football League team for the opening week. It's a complicated task. There have been big money moves over the summer, recovery from injury for some, other players saw a strong end to the previous season carried into summer friendlies and, as always, there are the new boys up from the Championship. Help is here though with the Fantasy Football Team Selector available from the download section. Simply open up the Excel spreadsheet, enable macros and click on the...

8 min readRead more →

follies•25 July 2011

OLE Automation Date Converter

Have you ever had problems with numbers somewhere around 40,000 claiming to be dates? It could well be that you need a tool to help you quickly convert dates from the OLE Automation Date - aka OADate - format into something a bit more human readable. If so you're in luck, simply go to the Life Beyond Fife GitHub repository to get hold of the sourcecode, or download the executable. Or read on if you want a bit more background. OLE Automation Dates, or more simply OA dates is a Microsoft standard for specifiying a date and time in a...

3 min readRead more →