A good ergonomic chair is a wise investment if you’re going to spend a lot of time at your computer. One of the better known ergonomic models is the Herman Miller Aeron Task Chair . What Other People Say About the Aeron Jeff Atwood (from Coding Horror) says: In fact, after browsing chairs for the last few years of my career, I’ve come to one conclusion: you can’t expect to get a decent chair for less than $500. If you are spending less than that on seating – unless you are getting the deal of the century on dot-bomb bankruptcy auctions – you’re probably making a mistake. ...

2015 Update: The “Device Hive” project has now been changed to be called ‘Hive CI’ and it is being maintained by a team of developers at the BBC, which I am no longer a part of. It is in the process of being opensourced, see: http://bbc.github.io/hive-ci/ This year has been quite a busy and eventful one for me. Connected Red Button At the start of the year, I was working on the Connected Red Button team within the BBC. Connected Red Button is a major ongoing project in the Television and Mobile Platforms department at BBC North. Its aim is to replace the classic Red Button text service (which itself is the successor to Ceefax) with a new updated all-singing all-dancing interactive portal to internet content, available on Smart TVs and modern set top boxes. Currently Connected Red Button is live and accessible by pressing the Red Button on the new Virgin Media TiVo boxes. You can access the latest version of iPlayer, and the BBC News and BBC Sport smart TV apps from within one easy portal. ...

I’ve been working on a project at the BBC where we are using the Android command-line tools from the Android Developer Tools , to spin up and terminate series of emulators. I noticed a big problem under OSX where ‘adb devices’ was failing to register emulators occasionally when we started them up, without any error message, even though they were loaded and quite clearly running in a window on OSX. This was a real problem for our project because we needed absolute parity between emulator process being launched and subsequently being detected by adb. ...

I found this awesome cut-up poetry generator , which takes the text of famous poets and builds structured poetry out of it. The guy that made it even developed the underlying algorithm as a research project. I have put a version of a free Amazon EC2 instance, wrote a little twitter bot in node.js, and wired the poetry generator with the twitter bot, and now I have this: https://twitter.com/haikumachine - a twitter bot that posts a haiku every five minutes, derived from Dylan Thomas’s poetry. ...

To get 256 colors working within terminator in Crunchbang Waldorf, I had to do the following: Add to ~/.bashrc export TERM=xterm-256color Install a 256 color VIM colorcheme, see desert256 for example . Add the following to ~/.vimrc: set t_Co=256 set t_AB=^[[48;5;%dm set t_AF=^[[38;5;%dm ’t_Co’ specifies exactly how many colours VIM can use. The other two lines seem to be Debian-specific color code escape sequences. If you want 256 color VIM for your root user when you sudo edit, then edit /usr/share/vim/vimrc and copy across your settings from your local ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim to this global environment. ...

I use the excellent http://www.smartsvn.com/ client from WANdisco. WANdisco have been releasing new open-source versions of SVN to the public with new improved reliability, and the client uses one of these versions, 1.7, to offer better performance. Unfortunately if you choose to upgrade your entire repository to 1.7, this breaks compatibility with the default commandline SVN client on Waldorf which I like to use as well as Smart SVN, for quick ‘svn up’s and other commandline magic. ...

iTerm is much better than the standard OSX terminal client, not least because it has compatiablity with xterm256-color terminal emulation. xterm256-color emulation will give your terminal access to 256 colours instead of the usual 16. Much better, not just for looking pretty, but for distinguishing between different types of data in an editor like VIM or even in Cucumber output (see picture above). It’s also free. ...

A quick tip this, but a useful one. You can tail a log file in the background while running a script in the foreground. So for example, I frequently execute the following commands: 1. tail -f /var/log/httpd.log & /etc/init.d/apache restart 2. (The log file will spool onto the terminal as Apache is restarted.) 3. Once you are finished viewing the log file, foreground the log file process and kill it: fg Then terminate the foregrounded log tail with a control-c. ...

I am currently on holiday in Tenerife, and although I really like it here, one thing I do not like is the internet connection we have in our resort. Sometimes networked applications will just hang with no warning and there will be minutes where it’s not clear what is going on. Here are some ways you can find a little bit more about what is happening when an application is slow or seems to hang when you have a poor internet connection. Execute the following commands each in a separate terminal window. ...

Recently, myself and two colleagues from the BBC, ran a session on Test Driven Development at the Manchester University ‘Ultimate Programming’ society. The society is a gathering where students discuss cool things they have done with programming, and occasionally have guest speakers from industry. I found the society online and thought it would be great to get the BBC more involved in the local university happenings. It is the first outreach project that I have undertaken, and it required a lot of preparation. Our initial idea was to get students to implement the A* search algorithm in a practical session, using TDD. However after we had all implemented our own copy of the algorithm, and realised it had taken several hours each, we realised we’d not have enough time in the 2 hour slot that we had. ...