Setup Git in WSL

August 7, 2018 By Pete O'Shea

The purpose of this post is to detail how to setup Git within the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Git is the source control tool of choice nowadays. It’s distributed style makes it great for working with a remote team but also allows you to work completely offline, which wasn’t an option for previous tools like Subversion or CVS.

This post focuses on setting up Git for command line access and scripting on Windows. There are other options like Git BASH, which I have used in the past, but why settle for a “BASH emulation” when you can use the real thing?

Programming

Getting started with WSL on Windows 10

July 22, 2018 By Pete O'Shea

I recently bought myself a new laptop and found that the process for setting up the Windows Subsystem for Linux (abbreviated to WSL) has changed a lot since I last set it up when it was still in beta. Anyway as my original notes were now out of date and as WSL has now been officially released I thought the process was worth documenting.

Programming

Ski Pad iPhone App Version 2

September 21, 2012 By Pete O'Shea

A while ago now I created an iPhone app to complement the Ski Pad website. The website has just received an update and I have been hard at work tweaking the app to work with the new site as well as adding some extra features along the way…

In reality I suppose this is just a shameless plug for the app but I thought it would be a good idea to take this opportunity to explain the new features. Anyway surely there is nothing wrong with a bit of self promotion every now and again. 😉

So before you read on, if you have an iPhone, now might be a good time to get the Ski Pad App from the app store…

Go on you know you want to…

Programming

Embarcadero’s Rad Studio XE2 World Tour

September 30, 2011 By Pete O'Shea

I recently attended the Rad Studio XE2 World Tour designed to show off the virtues of the latest version of Delphi. Having used various versions of Delphi over the last 10 years I thought it would be interesting to go along and see how things have moved on.

I’m currently using Delphi 2010 for the vast majority of my development work and this currently restricts me to 32-bit Windows development. A new component added to the XE2, named FireMonkey, changes this restriction. You can now build executables from Delphi for 32-bit & 64-bit Windows along with Mac OS X and even iOS!

This post is a quick review of the main new features I learnt about at the workshop and how they may be of use.

Programming

Application Version Numbering

September 16, 2011 By Pete O'Shea

Every program or app has some kind of version number. With Mac OS X, the X is a Roman numeral for version 10. OS X Lion relates to version 10.7 and the latest release, at the time of writing, is 10.7.1.

OK so what exactly do all these numbers mean and what is the best way to use these numbers when creating your own applications?

I am kicking off a new ‘Programming’ category today. As this is a big part of what I do for a living I thought I should use this opportunity to impart some my knowledge and/or views. To start here is an explanation of how I view version numbers and my recommendation of how to decide which numbers to use.

Programming

Creating Functional Specifications

August 13, 2010 By Pete O'Shea

Flapping Coot I have recently had to start writing a Functional Specification for a development project I hope to start working on soon. OK so what exactly is a Functional Specification?

Even though I have been a developer for many years now I haven’t had a great deal of experience with complete specifications. This meant that I had to go and do some background reading to find out a bit more about what exactly was involved. So I thought I would write a post to summarise my findings.

The idea of a Functional Specification is that you define the scope of the problem, design the program and describe exactly how things are supposed to work, in detail. This is meant to cover the program purely from the potential users point of view.

If you want to get into technical details of how the project is to be written then that sort of information would be provided in a second document called a Technical Specification.