The blog posts have been getting pretty thin on the ground recently. I have been working a lot in my swanky new job: doing lots of MVC PHP but mixing it up with some C# which is a lot like Java.
I’ve been on to a stag weekend with karting, curry and drinking and the associated wedding. Both were enjoyable and very well organised.
A couple of months ago I got a super shiny 32″ Samsung HDTV from ebuyer. All was fine until last week when the image started ghosting and streaking horizontally across the screen. Not good. Now I’ve got to post the flipping thing back to ebuyer. Going to need a bigger box…
Update: So I’ve got a box, got it packaged up and arranged pickup from work. Just got to get the blasted thing to work in the morning.
The unstoppably awesome moo.com have launched yet another incredibly nicely priced product line: Moo Stickers.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Scottish Society for Computers & Law annual lecture by Professor Eben Moglen entitled “The Global Software Industry in Transformation”. It was a very interesting lecture, mainly about the version of the “GNU General Public License” or GPL as it’s commonly shortened to. Eben is a computer scientist turned lawyer is a fantastically gripping speaker. Valley Technology (my employer) I am proud to say was a major sponsor and publicist for the event. Some of the guys I work with worked very hard recording audio and video from the event which is now up on archive.org to watch/listen to. I also took a couple of pictures which are on flickr.
My logo design for the Open Street Map conference “State Of The Map” has been chosen as the favourite entry from the sea of other submissions (two). Apparently it’s going to be on tshirts and everything, how exciting! Unfortunately I can’t make the conference but I’ve recently been getting very enthused about Open Street Map. A couple of weeks ago I saw an Edlug talk by Chris Fleming and was inspired enough to go out and buy a GPS device. I got a Holux 236 pretty cheaply off ebay.com. It’s a tiny wee unit that has no display, but can communicate through usb or over bluetooth. So, I can run a java app on my mobile that connects to the Holux and receives the data stream automagically. It all Just Works, most of the time. Here is a random route that I’ve run through GPS Visualizer to get some KML that is then plotted on our old friend Google Maps.
Wahey! William Gibson is doing an event at the Book Festival in August. I’m booked myself a ticket already. Hopefully I can get a signed copy of Spook Country whilst I’m there.
Last week I attended the Friday Coffee Morning’s “end of term” drinks, hilariously dubbed “beer 2.0“. Whitespace had generously donated their boardroom as the venue in their very swish offices. Met up with a few of the regulars who I hadn’t seen for a while and caught up with Nico who is off to Iceland soon. Mike and Jamie had also generously sorted out free beer and food. Behold all of our ugly mugs on flickr.
It was my birthday yesterday, as the title suggests I’m now the ripe old age of 26. To celebrate we went out for an (always awesome) curry at Kushi’s with Ian and Neil. Good food and good company.
Shown below is my haul of presents from all the fantastic people I’m no longer working with at Scotweb. The frame at the back is an awesome Scotweb Instant Gift for a Kilt, for me! I’ve been in Scotland now for nearly eight years so I don’t think I’ll lynched for wearing one.
I worked at Scotweb for almost three years, and it has been great fun, I’ve met a lot of really great people and hopefully made some friendships that will survive us not working together. In my last thirty minutes of employment I quickly gathered some random stats from my time at Scotweb:
The best of luck to everyone at Scotweb, especially Doug who has taken over from me as Web & Database Developer.
New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I’d only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.
Man, I love Gibson’s style. Read the rest of the article over at Canada’s Globe & Mail.
In related news, I really want one of these:
The UK National Archives currently have a very nice online exhibition on the Art of War. It has quite a range of materials and includes decent sized quality images as well as ‘zoomable’ versions. All quite competently assembled! It also has a good range of the “comic” style art which would probably get called “pop art” these days. They remind me of Lichtenstein’s Whaam! which is hanging right over my desk as I type this.
Via Joe at the Forbidden Planet Blog.
Interesting essay from Mr Stross: Charlie’s Diary: Shaping the future
I had two days off last week to attend my Grandad’s funeral in Calverley, near Leeds. When I say funeral you’d expect a very staid and teary affair. But it was nothing like that. He was in no way a religious man (rather like myself) and had stipulated that he didn’t want a religious service. So, it was just his two sons; Peter (my Dad) and Tim speaking about their Dad to friends and family. Everything was very cheerful, we entered to In the Mood by Glenn Miller and exited to the Skye Boat Song. My Grandad was very respectful of his Scottish roots and loved holidaying in Scotland and doing proper Scottish country dancing. I’d like to think this rubbed off on me adds to why I feel so welcome in Edinburgh and Scotland in general.
This is a photo of him in the RAF (back row, 2nd from the left):
Blimey I look like him.
Afterwards we went back to my Grandma’s for tea and scones (or scoones if you’re from Yorkshire) to reminisce about times past. On the way back up north to Billingham we stopped at Thirsk for awesome fish and chips and watched two daft ducks sit in the middle of a road.
Danny Boyle’s latest film is hugely influenced by old skool sci-fi like 2001 and Alien. Lots of slow graceful special effects shots, very reminiscent of the ballet-like docking scenes of 2001. Mixed with the claustrophobia and utility of the internal shots of the spacecraft. It has a cast of relative unknowns apart from Cillian Murphy who interestingly isn’t initially portrayed as the lead. I’d recommend seeing it at a cinema as the “solar” special effects are awesome on the big screen.
I have a laptop! A venerable IBM T23 with 512MB RAM clocked at a mighty 1133Mhz. I got it off ebay, something which lots of people have since said is usually a really, really bad idea. Apart from a crack on the back it does the job and is built like a tank. It came with an apparently legal install of Windows XP but I’ve installed ubuntu linux alongside it. So far I haven’t needed to boot into Windows for anything, all my hardware is supported in ubuntu. The install process was also incredibly smooth. You boot from a live CD and then the installer runs from inside the live CD version of linux. You can then muck around with the gnome default games (blackjack etc) whilst the installer is completing! I did have some strange issue with lilo not installing the first time, but I ran it again and it worked fine.
The PCMCIA wi-fi card that came with my laptop was pretty crappy and didn’t seem to be supported in linux. I shelled out a whole £10 for a new one that I knew was supported and it has been working fine. I also had to replace the battery as the charge only held for 20 mins, the seller freely admitted the battery wasn’t tested (ebay speak for broken) so it was to be expected. Ubuntu is the most user friendly linux distribution I’ve every installed. They obviously have actual people thinking about usability and being friendly to less experienced users. I’ve since ubuntu-orised my server box at home as well. It makes sense to just run one distribution.
OK, I admit it. I haven’t actually read any Vonnegut but he was on my todo list of books to read. On the way home from work last night I picked up Slaughter House 5 from our friendly local Oxfam bookshop where the emo-tastic girl who worked there greeted my purchase with “omg did you hear he just died!?”. Yes, yes I did.
I’m not getting into this JCG book as much as Pashazade. The plot is a little all over the place for my liking, the characters are still very good and the locations are great. Now I’m past half-way and stuff has ‘happened’ I’m getting into it more. We’ll see how it goes towards the end…
Google have just released a really useful (geeky) addition to the already excellent Google Maps. My Maps allows you to easily create custom maps with your own markers, points, polygons and notes placed wherever you want them. All of this was possible in the past but either required hacking about with Javascript or use of some third party tool. Here is a map I quickly knocked up to show my current and new work-places in relation to home. More help on creating your own maps is available in the Maps help section.
Well, the Highland Fling is over!
It was a great day with very interesting speakers covering a great range subjects but centred around Web Standards and “Progressive Enhancement”. Progressive Enhancement (as I understood it) is the opposite to “Graceful Degradation”. If you plan your project with the bling included and then go back and undo the bling to provide functionality to less advantaged users (Graceful Degradation) then 9 times out of 10 you won’t get the time/money to actually undo the bling. If, on the other hand you plan your project so that you get the core functionality working across the board and then add the bling, you’re much more likely to finish with a system accessible to all. This was the message I got from Norm from Yahoo’s talk. It’s a shame he had such a bad throat, he could barely talk!
Some other good speakers were:
The intro by Jeremy Keith – an excellent speaker and drew lots of parallels with literature such as Pattern Recogniton and Neuromancer. Props!
Andy Budd’s talk on the future of CSS was exciting but about the only thing widely supported in CSS3 currently seems to be the opacity elememt. Other interesting elements that will be supported eventually are border-radius for rounded corners and box-shadow for drop shadows. The Advanced Layout module looks like it will blow the current css layout methods out of the water with it’s grid system for layout and re-ordering of the content. Slightly dis-heartening was Andy’s complaints about the workings of the CSS Working Group: the snail-like pace it operates and the possible influence of Big Business on it’s decisions.
Drew McLellan’s talk on Microformats was a bit dry but still good to see them getting pimped.
James Edwards came across as the Grumpy Man of Web Standards with a talk about when to use Ajax (never, if he had his way). He had a point though, and hopefully people will take notice and not just do Ajax for the sake of it.
Andy Clarke ended the day with a nice chatty presentation about what exactly “Progressive” enhancement is, relating it to progressive in the music world. Some interesting anecdotes from the world of freelance designers including a snippet from this standard contract that explicitly lists the browsers a site will be compatible. Also very nicely designed slides, as you’d expect really. Andy also sits on the CSS Working Group as some kind of invited member, he talked of his frustrations with the slow process but also made good points that the working group has to consider not just CSS used for screen rendering and the can of worms that internationalisation is.
There are people I’ve missed and lots of stuff I’ve forgotten already but there are lots of others writing about the Fling. Where do I sign up for next year?
So I’m just about to write a post about how gravatar.com was down for ages and now seems to be back. But, their site is current giving me a 503 error. Super. Gravatar was great for a bit but then became incredibly slow, obviously because of the increased popularity, then just stopped working completely for a while. Looks like they aren’t out of the woods yet. They should go talk to Matt and co. over at Automattic.
After two years and nine months at Scotweb as a Web Developer I have handed in my notice. I have been offered a job at Valley Technology as a PHP Application Developer. It’s a step up professionally and would lead to more exposure to a wider variety of clients and development processes. They’re currently based in Leith but by the time I start (my notice period is two months) they will have moved to shiny new offices in the centre of town. This will be an exciting opportunity and I can’t wait to get started at Valley Tech.
