11011111010101011110101010100000

looking sexy

This is what I do for a living: I’m a software engineer. Well, maybe not an engineer… someone - I can’t remember who it was - said that if an architect constructed buildings with the same care that a software “engineer” takes to write computer programs, then civilization would have been wiped out by the first woodpecker that came across Uruk.

I have to agree, so I’ll qualify what I said: I’m a software designer. We’re not there yet, but we’re trying our best. In the spirit of this self improvement I’ve written some essays on the problems I’ve come across and how they can be solved.

If I were honest I’d admit that this has less to do with giving good software to the world and more to do with my not having to work with code that gives me ulcers: good, clean code means daniel doesn’t have to work so hard, and a restful idleness is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of human achievement.

I’m new to this whole essay-writing thing, so I’d be delighted to receive any comments, additions or clarifications you have on any of this. I live at daniel@braindelay.com


2007-01-05 20:21:10   bringing out baby (new and improved)

I’ve been playing with PHP (fun) and google maps (more fun) and my daughter (most fun of all). The results, can be found here: http://www.braindelay.com/baby/outside/. Enjoy, and please feel free to contribute: the more places we get the better it becomes.
If you like this: the source is available here, feel free to play with it […]


2006-10-24 12:06:08   randolinkerama

There’s an awful lot of shite on the interwebnet, and you can now search it randomly, with this nifty randolinkerama.
It works by picking two words at random (or at least as random as javascript can be) and then creates a google “I feel lucky” request out of them.


I got a broadband a while back, and it came with a wireless router, which was just enough to tip my natural anxiety over into full-blown paranoia.
So, I spent a bit of time investigating how safe I could make my router and I came up with the following piece over on danielbray.com.


2006-07-14 21:58:20   Struts: avoiding some common problems

A lot of what I do is web-applications, and the framework for serving up these web-applications that I’ve chosen to work with has been tomcat and struts: tomcat serves up the pages; struts organizes and controls the flow of the web-app. This essay is about struts, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that […]


Object-oriented languages are well known, and are part of every college CS syllabus: object-oriented programming is, however, as rare as the penny black. This is a short(-ish) essay on the subtleties of the paradigm that tend to be overlooked in the speedy twelve-week OO programming course that gets thrown at college students.
Object-oriented programming: rarer […]