February 2010
1 post
One Year Later
It’s been a year since I last posted here. To say a lot has happened would probably be too much of an understatement. Perhaps the easiest way is to go with the big events and work on the rest afterwards.
As you may have been aware, in March of 2008 my Mum was diagnosed with liver, bowel and lung cancer. After seeming to be fairly good during my two week holiday at the end of August, two...
Relying on third parties
As a computer geek I’ve always loved hosting everything myself. My website. My email. My blog. I’m a developer, so of course I like to tinker. The more I think about this the less it makes sense - all the time I spend mucking around keeping my basic things running could be time better spent building fun new things.
So, last year, when google made IMAP available, I moved my email...
October 2008
1 post
3 tags
Apartment Living
I thought I’d be homeless, or at least living under a bridge somewhere. How wrong was I?
Having spent the last 18 months living in London, in what can best be described as a small shoe box and with a commute of 45 minutes each way, and £150/month, I decided some changes were in order here.
First was to live by myself. I quite like having “me” space at the end of a day at...
September 2008
1 post
4 tags
Vancouver
Driving on the right side of the road? What craziness will be next?
As per the previous post I have returned to the crazy land of Vancouver. Where prices shown on labels bear little to no resemblance to the price you actually pay, where cars drive on the wrong side of the road, and everything seems extremely spacious.
In just two weeks I have managed to secure an apartment, and discover the...
August 2008
1 post
4 tags
All Change Please
In which, after a 4 month hiatus the author returns to say he’s moving.
After much waiting, and a fair amount of deciding, I’m heading back to the fabulous land of Canadia. Specifically back to Vancouver. Lower sales tax here I come! Of course I’ll miss the wonders of having taxes included in prices and a cellphone bill that was actually exactly what it was advertised to be,...
April 2008
2 posts
3 tags
History Meme
Everybody loves a pointless meme. Everybody I say.
Felicity:~ patrick$ history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|\
sort -rn|head
125 cd
80 ls
55 git
29 ssh
16 cvs
15 cat
14 rm
13 dev_appserver.py
12 telnet
11 ping
SVN is notably absent, but then I invoke that almost entirely from within TextMate or Xcode. dev_appserver.py is the Google App Engine SDK environment.
Not...
4 tags
Dublin in less than 48 hours.
In which I visit another country.
Aer Lingus managed to, over the course of a weekend, both frustrate and redeem itself. Most airlines take at least twice the time. This story is not, however, about Aer Lingus. (The cheque from the marketing department bounced.*)
The hotel, named The Parliament Hotel until the day before we arrived and then renamed The Arlington Hotel Temple Bar. Staff were...
March 2008
1 post
9 tags
Two months, already?
I’m not dead?
We are two months down in 2008, a fact I’m not entirely sure I’m comfortable with. So far this year I have managed to read more, but sleep less. These two things are connected - when you fail to fall asleep before 2am, no matter what time you go to bed, reading manages to fill that time rather well.
I would, however, not recommend eading both the biography of...
January 2008
2 posts
4 tags
Twitter Stats
I find twitter an intriguing service, but just how/when do I use it?
My first tweet was on January 15th, 2007, so nearly a year since I started. 1,422 tweets later, here are some stats generated using twitter stats.
By Day of Week
By Hour of Day
I’m not 100% sure of the timezone on this one, but considering my timezone at the end of the year is +8 that at the start of the...
3 tags
Returning "home"
Not so much insightful as random key presses.
Having managed to miss posting anything here on Soapbox during my entire two week visit to New Zealand, I’m back in London. London is cold. There has been talk of snow today, but while it has been just the right kind of freezing, I’ve not seen anything resembling snow yet.
I have learnt a few things about travelling between London,...
December 2007
1 post
4 tags
Singapore
One day you may find yourself in Singapore unexpectedly. I probably won’t be there then, but perhaps these thoughts may assist you.
I’ve found myself in Singapore.
Admittedly this is not entirely unexpected, as I did book the flights a few months ago, and was fully conscious for all but a couple of hours of the 12 hour flight in from London.
Initial observations:
ATMs like...
October 2007
1 post
3 tags
Amsterdam
Travelling to the home of the red light district. Or at least where it likes to call home now.
I can now add another country to my visited list, Netherlands. I’ve spent the last two days in Amsterdam for a work conference, though at least this time I made it out of the hotel to do a little bit of sightseeing.
The adventure didn’t start well: I got to heathrow early, only to...
September 2007
1 post
7 tags
dConstruct '07: Not an unconference
They say dConstruct is an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those designing and building the latest generation of web-based applications. Is it?
I’ll admit it, when I first heard about dConstruct I knew I wanted to attend. I’m not entirely sure why, except that I seem to spend a fair amount of time working on user interfaces, and I care about the user experience. Shocking,...
August 2007
3 posts
5 tags
London Flickr Meetups: Brighton
What happens when a bunch of photographers get together and invade Brighton? Your author goes not-quite-undercover to find out.
I’ve never gone to a flickr meetup before. Oh sure, it’s been on my todo list for the last 2 years, but it just never happened. Fortunately I’d bookmarked this event, found it the day before, and actually managed to get organised enough to meet people...
5 tags
CheetahWatch: Huawei E220 monitor for Mac OS X
Signal, connection status, and usage statistics.
It lacks a good name (internal code name “CheetahWatch”), but this little mac app provides you with signal strength, network mode (GRPS/WCDMA/HSDPA), and statistics about your current connection (current throughput, total data transferred, connection time).
I need to clean up the source, get a good name for it, and then find a...
5 tags
Thames Path
London Bridge, not falling down.
On Saturday I went for a walk. 4.2 miles of walking, in fact.
Of course by walk I mean I picked up the camera, caught a bus and a couple of tubes, and then walked along the River Thames, from Westminster to London Bridge and back. The southside was, for almost all the way, a far more interesting walk.
The first half of the walk saw street performers, and...
July 2007
2 posts
4 tags
A better Class.create
How can 7 lines of code generate a 38 line blog post?
I’ve been playing with Custom Events (really cheesy demo), but the problem with prototype’s way of declaring classes is it’s, well, messy.
Something = Class.create();
Object.extend(Something, {
initialize: function() { ... }
}
Which doesn’t seem so bad, but what if you want to “mixin”, or do...
4 tags
444 days later.
Has it really been this long?
I left New Zealand to go on a grand adventure 444 days ago today. In that time I’ve lived in Canada, and the UK, and visited the US, Greece, and France. I think it’s going reasonably well so far, which is probably a good thing as I couldn’t afford to go home just now.
I can’t help but draw comparisons between London and Vancouver. In a way...
June 2007
3 posts
6 tags
Following on
15 minutes of internet fame, without the fame.
Gearshift seems to have been noticed by a few people:
Ajaxian
ZDNet Japan (translation)
Google Gears API Blog
I’m keen to improve on it, work it in to some kind of ORM layer perhaps. For now it doesn’t wrap any of the hard things about sqlite (like the fairly limited set of supported alter commands), which would probably be...
5 tags
Introducing Gearshift
Not quite as exciting as a bowl of a really good dip.
Google announced Gears. Which has nifty features such as providing a local server for asset files, a workerpool for shoving things out of the main “thread” (background those db syncs, for example), and accessible-by-javascript sqlite databases. SQL based local data store? Sign me up! Awesome.
Except for one thing. I hate the...
5 tags
iTunes Plus
All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I pretty much just use iTunes (and just on one machine now) and 3 iPods (yeah, that’s excessive), but I’ve ponied up the cash to upgrade what I can from my library.
Why? It’s not that I hate DRM, but it’s a technical solution to a social “problem” (if you agree it is a problem), and it will never ever work. The sooner...
May 2007
2 posts
4 tags
Visiting Αθήνα
Watch out for the Škoda taxi.
I’ve spent a chunk of this week in Athens, working. It’s conference time.
General comments on Greece:
It’s hot. Dry though.
People smoke. A lot. Inside.
People here can’t drive. Or they can, but they insist on doing it in the most crazy way possible.
Fish is loved here. I don’t love fish. I suspect this would make living...
5 tags
One week on from one week on
Who’s going to be in Athens next week? Me.
The weather is still good, and I’ve managed to survive another week of work. This has been made easier by adopting a t-mobile web’n’walk hsdpa modem. 2mbps! On the train! It’s fantastic.
I’m spending three days next week in Athens, primarily to film the conference work is running there. Spent today finding suitable...
April 2007
6 posts
8 tags
One week into living in London
Read it all, for good things come to those who do.
Weather
Wednesday through Sunday were fantastically sunny. Well kind of. Sunday was a little grey at times. Monday was very grey, and today had some spots of rain. The header image of this site now (for the most part) changes to reflect the current weather in London. (I need to get through my real shots to replace the terrible cartoony ones...
4 tags
In the UK
Arrival. In one piece.
Flying concluded. Now to meet my aunt, and then find somewhere to sleep for a couple of days.
4 tags
To the UK
Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again.
I’ve done this before. That’s what I keep telling myself.
In case you’ve missed it, I’m moving to the UK. Today. In fact, my flight should be leaving is less than an hour, boarding in about 30 minutes. All going to plan I’ll even be on board. I have my passports, I have a boarding pass. My...
4 tags
Nokia 6126 and iSync, revisited
In which the internet makes buying the wrong phone right again.
About 6 months ago I acquired a Nokia 6126, and wrote a blog entry about how to make it work with iSync. Today I’m back to update that for 10.4.9, with some hints provided by Tony Copping, here’s what to do:
Pair your phone. I opted for starting from the Mac side. The 6126 nicely lets you say “never bug with...
4 tags
iTunes, EMI, DRM
Simply: the entire EMI catalog, no DRM, 256kbps, $1.29/song. Upgrade for $0.30/track owned. DRM/128kbps versions still $0.99. About time.
6 tags
Soapbox v6.2, and moving to London
Time for a site upgrade, just in time for a country upgrade.
Firstly, a new release of Soapbox (or The Great Web App Partially Based on SimpleLog) today, bringing it up to version 6.2. New in this version:
[NEW] Header that changes with the weather. For now (other than day/clear) they’re all poorly made cartoony things, but I’m working on building up a collection of photos to...
March 2007
4 posts
2 tags
Way Way Over The Edge
Headline shamelessly copied from tbray.org.
Stop, right now, and read Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations).
If you are not as disgusted as I am, I think you need to read it again.
I think the saddest thing of all is that it doesn’t surprise me at all that there are people like that out there. Really sad.
5 tags
Comments, and OpenID
OpenID authentication now required for all comments.
OpenID seems to be finally catching on outside LiveJournal, with the announcement that AOL are providing OpenIDs for all AOL/AIM users, and with waffle going OpenID for comments, I decided I’d implement OpenID for Soapbox comments. The idea being that if I ever open any of the little side things I’ve been mucking around with...
5 tags
The next step
The future is friendly, or at least surprisingly devoid of cougars. If it goes to plan, at least.
A couple of weeks ago the rapidly approaching date of my visa expiration spurred a discussion at work. There may also have been discussion between the voices inside my head, but face it: when one of them is arguing that we should just pack it in and move to the country and drink beer, it’s...
5 tags
A couple of things
Have a stiff drink, then read.
The experiment of writing in the second person will now come to an end. It’s been 5 months and while it was kind of fun, it was also rather tiring. It also gets hard to keep straight, because lets face it, your brain forgets who is who. Of course given a quarter of a chance it forgets what country it’s in, this shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I...
February 2007
6 posts
1 tag
Oddities
DNS issues cause widespread mayhem in the mind of a small squirrel.
You might notice that the blog is looking a bit… well, wrong. You are aware of this, and suffice to say it has to do with DNS, ZoneEdit, secondary zones, and things like that. Suffice to say this may cause disruptions with regards to accessing things around here, and potentially email. You could try emailing make-contact...
6 tags
Google Apps
Google Apps offers paid access to Google applications.
Surprising absolutely nobody Google has renamed Google Apps for Domains into just plain Google Apps.
Interesting points:
* There’s a paid option ($50/user/year) that removes advertising and bumps gmail storage to 10GB
* When you pay you get 99.9% uptime guarantee for gmail. You also get phone support.
* The non-paid version only...
6 tags
S3 Backup for iTunes
Free stuff makes you do crazy things.
bandwagon: A rather cool looking way of backing up your iTunes library.
Disclaimer: Posting this should result in getting me free stuff, but I’m sure you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t post advertising if I didn’t think it was a cool idea, and because there are no sharks or lasers involved… Flickr page for the logo.
6 tags
Red Light Neon
You were woken up at some ungodly hour (around 10am or so) by a friend reminding you that today was the day: the walking tour of the History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade. No, there’s no mistake there. You’re talking about prostitution and brothels and where it was and who tried to clean it up. (The answer to those two questions are it varied through time, and mostly politicians...
5 tags
S3 Backups
About a month ago you realised your server wasn’t being backed up in any way, shape or form. You don’t know about your readers, but this frightened you. How many drive failures will it take to learn?1
So, what is the solution to this? The criteria:
Could be automated
Had to be the most cost effective
performed
It came down to two options: store the backups yourself, or use a...
4 tags
Soapbox v6.1
Here we are, a new release of Soapbox, now powered by SimpleLog 2. It took a night of merging in (decade, movies and bits of m.ac.nz are all part of one big rails app that started off as SimpleLog 1.2.1).
Features you might care about:
Much nicer archives
Comments - such as on this post. Please try them out.
That’s about it really. The Some Rights Reserved and Colophon pages are...
January 2007
4 posts
6 tags
So Vista is ready
You’ve been watching the press and blogs and what not as the release comes for Vista. Oh sure, you’re a Mac kind of guy, and you don’t pretend otherwise. The idea of running Windows on a daily basis is about as appealing as spending an hour or so in a microwave. A microwave that is on.
Of course the part of you that loves computers has wanted to want Vista. You’ve tried...
1 tag
Darfur
Read the wikipedia entry Darfur conflict
Read other info by way of a google query
Go to the darfur wall (or any of the other options) and donate.
5 tags
macfuse and UnionFs
So Google rocks, we all know that. One of those reasons is the 20% thing, and of course the cool stuff that comes out of that. One such thing is macfuse. Don’t know what fuse is? Basically it’s a way of doing file systems is userspace (ie. without having to write a kernel module, or have super powers to mount file systems, etc.). It’s cool.
The macfuse wiki has details on how...
4 tags
iPhone (and other new Apple stuff)
Well, they’ve done it, secretly the product I really didn’t believe they would announce. Of course this was a pretty good signal that they would, and again my keynote-sense was right (in the way it was wrong, if you get what I mean).
Engadget had text/photo coverage of the keynote, and Apple have updated their site with a new tab (woh, it gets it’s own tab!),...
3 tags
Another Year Over
… and what have you done?
You’ve had a busy year, though it really doesn’t seem like you did that much.
You:
started the year off with a rant against copy protected cds
March
* finished up your first “real job”, and upon leaving Wellington actually had people show up for a thank god he’s leaving party
April
* saw The Rolling Stones in concert
*...
December 2006
7 posts
2 tags
Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus
You’d just like to take a moment to thank the most important person in this whole writing for the internet thing: your readers. May their Christmas be merry, the Fetivus happy, and any other holiday they might wish to celebrate at this time of year.
You won’t be doing much this year: you have a small tree with some presents, a couple of seasons of Black Adder, Pulse, a handful of...
2 tags
Time Away
You’ve been back for a day or so now from a trip to San Francisco, where you spent 5 days with your parents and stayed in your own hotel room for the first time in a good number of years. (You usually opt for hostels or motels, mostly because you’d rather spend your money on things that matter. Like food, and alcohol. The important things.)
You flew Alaska Air, which you’d...
5 tags
PlayStation 3, first impressions
You’re not going to go in depth yet - you want to really get to know the system first, and you’d also like to get some component cables so you can really gauge the graphics.
You have the 20GB model, because let’s face it: you take what you can get. The smaller hard drive and lack of card readers doesn’t worry you, as you have a shiny 2GB USB stick anyway. The lack of wifi...
3 tags
Apple finally loves NZ?
You just saw the PR on Apple’s site, and were absolutely delighted to see that Apple have finally made Apple NZ look like a real Apple site (as in, actually on apple.com, not Renaissance servers) and launched iTunes NZ and a real online Apple Store that is cheaper than MagnumMac.
There’s also a “Hello, New Zealand” promo going on where you can win stuff, except your...
4 tags
IPv6 connected, again
Some time ago now, you forget just how long, you managed to persuade Donald to help you setup IPv6 on your debian based firewall. You did this and was pleased, while it worked. Thanks to static routing on the cable network you were then able to use this to talk between networks. Then one day the router rebooted and you never made the IPv6 tunnel work again. So you gave up and thought “one...
3 tags
Parallels beta 3036
So yesterday the nice people at Parallels released a new beta build for Mac - build 3036. They’ve seen fit to drop some really nice new features, but you’re only going to touch on two of them.
Coherence
Hides the windows desktop so it looks like things are mingling in with your Mac apps. It’s great for when you’re using just one app (ie. IE).
Parallels Transporter
...