The Dangers of Benchmarks

• Benchmarks are not a true reflection of application performance.
• Some benchmarks are closer to real world performance than others. Other benchmarks can generate very artificial workloads and which may lead you to incorrect conclusions.
• Use benchmarks as one data point for performance comparisons between systems or troubleshooting performance issues.
• As always, the more data points you have, the more evidence you have to support a particular conclusion.

We’re far from …

We’re far from “done” but I believe we’re already significantly ahead of most other date/time APIs I’ve seen in terms of providing a clean API which reduces incidental complexity while highlighting the inherent complexity of the domain.

http://noda-time.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/noda-time-v10-released.html

Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Monads

Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Monads

Finished Eric Lippert’s 13 part series on Monads.  I’m finding this really head-stretching stuff.

The Marvels of Monads

The Marvels of Monads

“Composition is the key to controlling complexity in software.”

“Why can’t we get a nail gun?”

A wonderful and well written blog entry:

Picture Hanging

Adding dates from a spreadsheet to google calendar

My wife has lots of “on calls” and night shifts in her job.  No idea why they don’t make the rota available in a calendar-ready format such as iCal but they don’t – it’s an Excel spreadsheet.

Normally my wife goes through manually adding all her shifts to our shared google calendar, but I thought I’d help out (if I’d thought about it I would have done this sooner).  Using the very helpful googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) command line interface to google services I wrote this script to take dates as they appear in the spreadsheet and enter them into the calendar:

#!/bin/bash
# Add a set of dates copy and pasted from a spreadsheet to google calendar

username="yournamehere@gmail.com"
event_name="First on call"

dates=" 07-May
08-May
09-May
10-May
22-Jun
23-Jun
24-Jun
13-Aug
14-Aug
15-Aug
16-Aug
28-Sep
29-Sep
30-Sep
"

for date in $dates
do
    # Remove the dash from the above dates to get "24 Apr" so that Google cal
    # recognises it.  Bit of hack but seems to work
    date_formatted=${date/-/ }
    cal_entry="$date_formatted $event_name"
    google --user="$username" calendar add "$cal_entry"
done