Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

SSiS (Surprisingly Still In Shape)

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

After not running at all (discounting a couple of goes on the jogging in Wii Fit!) for 5 whole weeks, I finally stopped making excuses and made the most of our good weather for a 4.5 miler today and – surprisingly – I’m still in reasonable shape. I ran only slightly slower that I did in my half marathon – which I blame entirely on having to wait for the dog to catch me up every so often :) – with only a couple of stops and one brief walk. Not bad IMO.

Now to keep up the training and look for some races post-UDS.

The reason for my break in training – which resulted in me skipping my second planned race – was that I was waiting for my new tattoo to heal. I’ve only recently (i.e. the last year-and-a-bit) started getting tattooed (any comments about a mid-life crisis will be directed to /dev/null :) – but it’s true what they say: it’s extremely addictive. I’ve already got about 4 more planned!

Eye Of Ra Tattoo

Photo of my tattoo at about 1.5 weeks old - the bruising is still evident!

The tattoo I’ve had done is a stylised Eye Of Ra, also known as the Eye of Horus. The design comes from Tattoo Tribes, and the basic meaning is protection although there are lots of other interpretations and meanings. I also have a few personal reasons for using this particular symbol.

Wordpress 2.7

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.7. Completely painless upgrade process. EOM.

Design Decisions

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

A comment in my recent post about letting the air out of Air got me thinking about some of the design decisions Apple have made with their new laptop.

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Why pay more?

Monday, January 7th, 2008

A couple of years ago my mother bought us a dedicated photo printer – a Canon SELPHY DS810. It’s a nice enough printer, and it does exactly what it says on the tin (i.e. print photos). Being able to connect it directly to my camera or just use memory cards can be so convenient. I’ve even printed via IR from my phone before, which leads me to…

The other day I wanted to print a photo from my N95, which manages to support every function under the sun except IR printing. In all fairness it is a 5 Megapixel camera, so the image would be a bit large (and therefore slow) for IR, but still. The N95 does support Bluetooth printing, but Canon only supports their BU20 Bluetooth module which retails for upwards of £40, and I’ve never cared enough to get one. Fortunately the N95 also supports USB printing, so my immediate problem was solved.

When I ordered my N95 (and N800) I realised I’d misplaced my Bluetooth dongle so I promptly ordered another one off eBay for less than £4 delivered (and then just as promptly found my other one). It arrived this morning and on a whim I plugged it into the DS810 – lo and behold, it worked. I’m sure my other dongle never worked (although I just tried it, and it seemed to), but I had let myself be brainwashed by Canon into believing that only their (overpriced) offering would work and didn’t bother to research alternatives.

Lesson learned.

I can has caffeine

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

AKA the tea thief

I can has caffeine

I wouldn’t mind, but I hadn’t finished drinking it!

My name in print

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

…and this time I’ve got the cover all to myself!

I’ve alluded to this several times, but now it is time to forcibly eject the cat from the bag.

In short: my book – Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion will be available soon.

What everyone else says is true: writing a book is hard work, but it’s worth it.

Section feeds are back

Monday, January 8th, 2007

As promised section feeds have returned. If you select a section from the list on the right, then click the RSS icon in your browser it will give you specific feed for that section.

Too make life easier though, here are the feeds most people will be interested in:

If you can’t find what you’re looking for…

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

…please ask a member of staff.

Although much better, my switch to Mephisto was not without its casualties. This can mainly be seen in three areas:

  1. Design. I was using Scribbish before because I couldn’t be bothered migrating my old design to a newer version of Typo. I’m now using the default Mephisto theme, but this will be transformed into a new take of my old design “real soon now”. Honest.
  2. Sections (or categories or whatever). The migration script copied everything over but these. Not sure why… Anyway it was time for shakeup. I’ve recreated the important sections and filed recent (hah!) posts. Older posts are not filed. Maybe if I get bored one day… Per-section feeds (for various planets) will be re-instated when I update the design.
  3. Links. Links to old posts may or may not work (hopefully they will). If you can’t find what looking for, search!

Close, but no cigar

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

Want to hear a couple of respected .NET developers talk about Open Source? Go and listen to the episode of of Hanselminutes entitled Open Source Options. I found it both infuriating and enlightening at the same time.

How can it be both? Because it’s two commercially-oriented software developers discussing a concept they don’t seem to fully grasp or understand. I sure this is in part due to the format and constraints of the show – Scott Hanselman seems to be an intelligent guy, and I’m confident he knows more about Open Source than came across but it didn’t come across that way. It was interesting to see how Open Source is perceived by them, and their take on some of the problems we face.

Go listen and see what you think.

LugRadio Live 2006 Photos

Monday, July 24th, 2006

sebpayne setup a Flickr group for photos from LugRadio Live. He’s put loads in there, and I’ve uploaded some of mine as well, so go have a look.