jonnii.com

So my new computer has finally arrived and I’ve spent the last few days playing around with it and setting it all up to my liking, which explains the lack of updates, or maybe I’m doing what I do every year which is start blogging then give up a week or two in.

So yeah, it’s fast. Very very fast. And thanks to a co-worker and an msdn subscription I’m also dual booting vista (a topic for another blog post) and have a windows virtual machine all set up for doing windows development so I’m covering all possible bases. Needless to say I’m very happy.

In other news: Ex-Homecoming Queen Beats Sister With Fake Leg In Trailer

NORTH HUNTINGDON, Pa. - A former homecoming queen is facing a slew of charges Thursday, accused of attacking her sister with a prosthetic leg and then threatening to burn down a neighbor’s home.

Craziest news article ever? I think so.

Ha, so it seems apple reads my blog, because today they announced updates to both the iphone and ipod touch just to spite me. The updates are just to memory sizes, which sees the ipod touch increased to 32gb and the iphone to 16gb.

I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for the iphone update to be available in the UK, but i’m sure that a lot of consumers are going to be annoyed… especially since the iphone was only released here recently. I’m guessing they’ll probably delay it a few months to reduce the amount of people feeling robbed. Talking of robbing… if any iphone users want to loot the apple store, let me know so I can steal a macbook air.

As for me, i’m happy with my new nokia that cost me nothing and does a great job of making phone calls and sending texts… what else do you really need.

Loads of people, and by loads I mean a grand total of three, have asked me about this mac book air thing and whether or not it is any good, and whether or not they should buy one etc… I’m guessing my status as a rapid mac fan boy has been firmly cemented having dropped a wad on a new mac and my history of purchasing every silly mac gadget possible.

While the sheer thinness of the air makes me want to post my debit card and pin to apple in hopes of them mailing me back an air (in an envelope) I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m not in the target audience. For now my bank account is safe.

Yes it looks nice, and yes it’s shiny, but for *me* the machine isn’t really suitable. It’s almost entirely un-upgradeable and the solid state model, the only one I would consider getting, is far too expensive for my liking. I think the reason for me not immediately buying one is the same reason why I didn’t rush out to buy an iPhone the day it came out, like I did with the iPod Touch. Do I want it? Yes. But does it fit my daily needs, and will I eventually feel unfulfilled when the initial thrill of the shiny-ness and thin-itude have worn off?

This is the kind of consumer laptop that is ideal for someone like my dad, who spends a lot of his time going back and forth between work, holiday and home and doesn’t have very demanding needs from it other than the fact that it works and has a comfortable keyboard with big keys that he can see the letters on when he puts his glasses on.

So buy it. Or don’t. But if you do, let me know so I can play with it and convince myself I need one.

• Testicle Attack
• One expectation per test

Maybe I should start publishing these with delicious.

I’m trying to transfer two domains to godaddy from two seperate registrars, but it seems that doing that involves smashing my face repeated against my desk in frustration. The old registrars have incorrect administrative contacts, unreachable or incompetant support staff and websites that are borderline useless. I’m half regretting doing this, but the fact that my old registrar wanted to charge me £5 to change my nameservers (something that most let you change as many times as you want for free) was just outrageous.

Godaddy are… ok. They’re cheap enough, and their website is alright once you get into the admin panel and past all the obnoxious advertising. I’m not sure if I’d recommend them, but I didn’t know who else to use. Either way, this is hopefully a one time thing. At least it better be.

I recently finished reading Managing Humans by Michael Lopp, which is a collection of the best articles from his blog on, among other things, management techniques. I bought the book on the recommendation from one of Mike Stall blog posts, and must say that I think it’s one of the better software engineering related books that I’ve ever read. On top of that it’s pretty humorous in places, which is a rarity among books in this genre.

Personally, I think that as a programmer it’s almost inevitable that after enough time in the industry you’ll end managing other programmers, and before that day comes, if it ever comes, I thought it might be interesting to see what’s involved and, maybe, at the same time learn something to improve my day job, both in terms of process and the interactions that I have with *my* manager.

The chapter on the zone, which is also on his blog, is probably my favourite of all the chapters in the book because it was the one I felt that I could relate to most. Productivity is something that I think we all individually have a hard time with, not just during work hours but also in our personal time. There’s no easy solution to improving personal productivity but there are plenty of techniques, many of which he discusses, but also ones we have developed ourselves. I’ve already started working on a post discussing my own, which I hope to publish in the very near future.

So yeah, buy this book. It’s awesome.

The Mac Heist bundle gets you fourteen mac apps for $50 and 25% of your purchase price goes to charities. The offer runs in a couple of days, so make sure you get in there quickly before it runs out.

I’ve done it. I’ve finally ordered my new computer, an 8-core Mac Pro, to replace my aging Power Mac. The biggest problem with the power mac is that Apple have switched architechtures over the last two years which has meant installing things like Parallels hasn’t been possible, so I haven’t been able to play with .net 3.5 or wmii.

Because I decided to go for the Geforce 8800 I have to wait for 2-3 weeks for delivery, which sucks, but having waited this long it’s not going to be so bad, plus it’s a worthwhile upgrade. Feb 18th can’t come soon enough.

I discovered a cool little application via TUAW called Porticus which is a cocoa front end for darwin ports. This is especially useful for those of you who like me keep forgetting the port commands (why can’t it be the same as apt!) and want something more visual. It reminds me a lot of the synaptic package manager in ubuntu and it uses growl to notify you when things are done.

I can’t emphasize how much I love slicehost, which is the VPS that this site is hosted on. They have an absolutely fantastic knowledge base and really simple tools that make setting up your own VPS a snap. For example, creating a fresh environment takes about 30 seconds from start to finish, at which point you can login as root and start setting things up.

I finally settled on ubuntu 7.10 as the distro for my slice, but I noticed they’ve started offering archlinux, which as it’s what my home server runs made it a tempting choice, but the wealth of information out there for setting up an ubuntu or debian server is just too invaluable to pass up.

This blog is running mephisto on a thin cluster fronted by nginx, which means it should be pretty snappy. I might blog about how to set that all up at some point, but it’s already been done so many times before that it’s probably not worth it.

One thing I definitely want to be able to do is be able to post code snippets, which without syntax highlighting is quite tricky.

I’m using this technique, except that I managed to install the required dependency using apt-get instead of compiling the source myself. That seemed like the path of least resistance, and in total this took about 30 seconds to get working.

Here’s a ruby example with the blackboard theme

def hello_world
  puts 'hi'
end

And a C# example with the allhallowseve theme:

public static void Main(string[] args){
  Console.WriteLine("hello world");
}