Software Development

TL;DR: Read on for full details.

Working from home is nothing new, especially for those of us in the technology business. Since the COVID pandemic, however, many companies were forced to jump into the deep end of remote work.

This tutorial shows you how to create a circular crosshair using a widget blueprint with a material.

I’d like to start by first talking about software engineering itself, and whether it can legitimately be called engineering.

Got a tired drive that just won’t stay awake? Then you may find my new (open source) utility, Drive Caffeine, useful.

jsFiddle is a great tool for quick JavaScript prototyping.

Like many programmers, I’ve come to love Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network. Its unique Wiki / Blog / Forum blend creates a fantastic platform for knowledge sharing.

I’m working my way through The C Programming Language at the moment, and so far I’m loving C’s purity and leanness.

Really! And, quite frankly, I’m sick and tired of programmers talking about them like this (not all programmers, some are worse than others, and all the usual disclaimery stuff applies).

Here’s a mockup of the main window for the upcoming Tubecaster 3. The release will include support for multiple downloads at once, playlist download support and built-in media conversion tools. Stay tuned!

I’ve used Django for a few small projects in the last year and have absolutely fallen in love with it.

Following on from the wildly successful Stack Overflow programming questions and answers website, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have launched Server Fault, a questions and answers site following the same format but now for “system administrators and IT professionals”.

The wonderful folks at Balsamiq have graciously donated a license for their Mockups user interface design software to the Tubecaster project to help with future improvements.

Yesterday I was looking for a Python source code line counter to give me a summary of some source files, but I couldn’t find a free one that would do the job as I wanted. So I created one.

I’m pleased to report that Tubecaster 2.0.1 for Windows is now available for download. Click here to go to the downloads page on the Tubecaster homepage.

In the latest version of Tubecaster I’ve come to the point of needing to give users the option of storing passwords on disk. Needless to say the very thought sent shivers down my spine.

I’ve been playing around with trying to pass HTTP connections through a proxy server requiring authentication from Python and after a few hours of hunting around I’ve managed to find enough bits of information to cobble together into a working example.

I’ve been doing some reading on artificial intelligence (AI) today as it’s the time of the year again when the Turing Test is performed on a handful of selected artificial intelligence systems.

If you’d like to try an early version of my port of Tubecaster to Linux, you can download it here. Please see the readme file within the archive for dependency details.

I’ve just created a Python script that will take a filename on the command line and convert all of its tabs into the given number of spaces (2nd argument). Click here to download.

I highly recommend anyone interested in programming as an art form read Donald Knuth‘s article entitled “Computer Programming as an Art” where Knuth explains the view excellently.