Robert Beal

Branching per feature

// August 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Linux, Programming

If you’re working in an Agile environment, chances are you’re working from a continuously integrated source control system, with a trunk, branches etc… If that’s the case many people will be familiar with “the build” being broken (typically the trunk) which can bring development (and sometimes testing) to a grinding halt. The larger the team(s) the more likely this is. I’ve recently been giving thought to branching per feature. The concept isn’t quite ready yet, but I thought I’d share my ideas and see if anyone can add to them (or shoot them down).

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Should We Depend On Mono?

// June 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Linux, Programming

Ok, firstly I’m going to say I’m a C# developer, so partially biased, although I do think my views are quite fair. I’m only a C# developer by profession (from Java). I only use Linux at home, C# is purely for web development.

Right with that out of the way now I can get to commenting on Richard Stallman’s opinions regarding Mono. We should systematically arrange to depend on the free C# implementations as little as possible. In other words, we should discourage people from writing programs in C#. Therefore, we should not include C# implementations in the default installation of GNU/Linux distributions, and we should distribute and recommend non-C# applications rather than comparable C# applications whenever possible.

For me there are many things wrong with this opinion. Ok, so the patents issue is a touchy one, but “encouraging” people not to use C# is just restricting the open source movement, innovation, and competitiveness. In terms of development, you couldn’t be putting a more negative signal out there.

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Garmin Edge 705 using Ubuntu

// April 28th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Fitness, Linux

I recently bought a Garmin Edge 705, but came across the age old problem of using a device with Linux. Thankfully, Garmin have done quite well for themselves. and I’ve managed to use the device as I want within Ubuntu. Here’s a review of the device, and how I’ve got to using it.

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Power Saving in Ubuntu for the Dell M1330

// February 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Linux

Recently I was feeling sort of green, but mainly annoyed from having to plug my laptop in all the time when its juice starts running low. So I thought I’d set about increasing the battery life. My previous experience was mainly to run powertop (a handy Linux app that will advise you on improvements to make). Here’s a little more on the subject and a few things I came across.

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Goodbye FreeNAS, Hello Ubuntu Server

// September 12th, 2008 // 13 Comments » // Linux

I’ve finally given up on FreeNAS. What was initially a great and simple system has turned out to be quite problematic. The two show stoppers for me where:

1. The hard drives, either went missing, wouldn’t mount, would sometimes mount, then later fail. It was completely random, and the error log would literally say “error mounting”, nothing more. This isn’t very helpful for diagnosing the problem.
2. It wouldn’t shut down properly. It was more of a reboot in that it would power up again! It worked initially but then would randomly stop working. I’ve no idea why.

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