It’s already April! How did that happen? Busy busy busy. I neglected to do an update for February but hopefully I can kind of remember what happened. February isn’t a real month anyway. Need at least 30 days to be a real month I think. Pretty sure. Update on the wedding plans: we’ve booked the […]
Author archives: Mike Cartmell
January review
Hello blog! So one of my resolutions this year was to plan better, and one of the ways I thought of doing this was to review each month as they go by. First month down, eleven to go. So let’s look back at January. Wedding-wise, we’ve been making progress. We have a draft guestlist, venue […]
2015 in review
2015 was my second full year in Singapore, and again a year of many changes, but somewhat slower changes compared with recent years. I changed jobs and moved house for the third time in as many years, but now I’m very happy with / proud of both: I can see myself in this job for […]
Thoughts on Go
Traditionally I’m a pretty late adopter of new trends, and Go has been out for something like 6 years now, so I figured it would be a good time to try it. I’ve been learning it for about 2 months; I’ve done dozens of Codility exercises, written a WebSocket server and a statusbar daemon, so […]
Docker: first impressions
I’ve been wanting to try Docker ever since I saw a talk about it at Red Dot Ruby Conf. The idea of being able to build a container in development and ship it to staging, then production without any changes is extremely enticing, although I admit to being a little sceptical. Now I’ve implemented a […]
Automated Rails testing with Capybara and PhantomJS
Capybara is one of those tools that sounds great but is often frustrating. The claims of ‘no setup’ and ‘intuitive API’ make it sound like automating your browser testing is going to be a simple task. Unfortunately, the nature of these full-stack tests mean they’re often very tricky to get working reliably, and this has […]
Making a game with Phaser
Today I felt like making a game, so I learnt about Phaser and set myself the task/challenge of recreating a simple game from my childhood. Phaser is incredibly fun and easy to get started, I’d recommend giving it a go! The game I chose was Tanx. I started with the excellent Phaser tutorial and converted […]
Variable scope in Ruby
One big difference between Perl and Ruby is that Ruby has no lexical variables. This confuses me when programming Ruby, because I’m used to thinking ifwill create a new scope. It doesn’t. Variables defined inside if will be available outside, because they belong to the method scope. For example, in Ruby you can do this: […]
The Heartbleed bug
On reading about the Heartbleed bug bug, my first thoughts were: This sounds quite simple, is it really easy to spot? Why wasn’t this noticed during review? The bug is in the Heartbeat Extension for TLS, as described in this draft. Interestingly, this document does actually highlight the importance of checking the payload length: If […]
10 Singlish phrases I would actually use in the UK
Possibly not everyone knows that English is an official language of Singapore (one of 4.) What’s more, there is an unofficial (and sometimes frowned upon) mini-language called Singlish, derived from bits of Hokkien, Teochew, Malay, English and Tamil. Most of these words exist either to express something that does not have an English equivalent, or […]